Becoming Lost

by Ophelia Sikes

  He held my gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded.

  He slipped from the room.

  I could hear him pull the front door open.

  There were sounds as he put bags or boxes or whatever on the floor.

  There was a murmur of conversation.

  Laryssa’s delighted shriek filled the house. Undoubtedly she was pulling him into a warm, heartfelt hug.

  At last the door closed again.

  He came back into the bedroom balancing two large cardboard boxes and a bag of other supplies.

  He laid them down. “She got one of each. Custom made. She pulled some strings – people wait over an hour in the lobby just to get into these places. Plus a nice bottle of Chianti, some glasses, some plates –

  I didn’t care. I was ravenous. I popped open both lids and stared in raw hunger.

  They smelled amazing. There were many who said Pepe’s, in 1925, was the inventor of pizza in America. He used a coal-fired oven which is still in operation today. The competitor, Sally’s, had been formed in 1938 when his sister broke off to create her own shop.

  The two masters of apizza had been neck and neck ever since.

  I took up a plate, put a piece from each box on it, and began eating.

  Delicious. Absolutely delicious. If one was better than the other, I certainly couldn’t tell.

  Alex poured me some wine, and I drank it down.

  I held up my glass in a toast. “All right, I think both Pepe’s and Sally’s make the best pizza I’ve tasted. This darkened crust adds an amazing texture.”

  He chuckled. “You pronounce that ah-beets,” he corrected me. “Pepe was from Naples. You got to learn the accent.”

  I smiled. “Ah-beets it is. And this one here has … has clams on it?”

  His grin grew. “Always fresh clams, and you don’t put cheese on that one. Another tradition. It traces back to when the Boccamiellos –”

  I laughed out loud. Every city had its history. Its twists and turns. And here, in New Haven, the rivalries and interactions of the ah-beets dynasties were right up there alongside Harvard-vs-Yale. But more accessible. More tangible.

  His eyes glowed, and he took my hand. His voice was hoarse. “Thank you. Thank you for not giving up. For finding me.”

  I shone.

  Everything felt right. Perfectly, delightfully, absolutely right.

  Soon I was full of pizza … full of wine … and my heart was overflowing with emotion.

  Alex tenderly ran a hand along my cheek. “There’s the smile. There’s the smile which could last me a lifetime.”

  Bling.

  He glanced at his phone. “Laryssa says, if you’re up for it, that they’re going to have a little get-together over at the Ukrainian club later on. Low key.”

  I knew how those low key parties could be, but I nodded. “I’m barely feeling any of the aches now. I think some of your … therapeutic massage … seems to be helping.”

  His eyes lifted in amusement. “Oh? I’m so glad to hear that my ministrations have been useful.”

  I pushed my glass away to a safe distance. “Oh, yes, quite useful,” I murmured. “In fact, doctor, I think I’m ready for another session.”

  His gaze went smoky. “Nadiya, you are absolutely amazing.”

  I smiled. “Tell me that again.”

  His lips came down to nibble at my neck. “Amazing.”

  I groaned and arched against him. “Again, again, again –”

  We were lost.

  * * *

  Alex pulled the car up to the front of the Ukrainian club. It could have been last Friday. It could have been the evening after a long stake-out and he was kindly offering to drop me off, to spare me having to go back for my own car.

  And, on a whim, I had invited him in. Just for a few minutes. Just to get some food into him.

  I shook my head in amazement. Just one little thing. Just one minor decision, and it had set into motion a life-changing sequence of events.

  I looked over at him.

  His eyes shone. I knew he was thinking the same thing.

  He nudged his head. “Come on. They’re waiting for you.”

  I smiled. “They’re waiting for us.”

  We climbed out of the car and headed to the door.

  He pushed it open.

  The room burst into calls and applause, into cheers and shouts. It seemed as if every person I’d ever known had arrived from all corners of the planet to hug me, to meet Alex, and to toast, to toast, to toast. Laryssa was there, and Sasha, and a hundred other men and women who had been there at some part of the journey.

  Mark, Sarah, and Anthony waved from the crowd. Over by the bar were Marcia and Kale. I’m sure the law officers saw a few faces in the crowd which might have normally elicited some attention, but tonight was off limits. It was a neutral zone to celebrate the taking down of a monster.

  And celebrate we did. Cases of Khortitsa. Plates of pierogies. Kielbasa. Countless other delights which warmed my soul and filled my stomach. And then there was the music. Drums. Voices. Banduras. Alex and I spun and whirled, clapped and stomped.

  It could go on all week.

  Alex was off laughing with Mark and Anthony and Sasha, talking about who knew what, when I found a quieter corner with Laryssa. I put my head close to hers and held her gaze.

  “Thank you. Thank you for everything. You made it all possible.”

  She smiled that smile of hers. “You and Alex did all the work. I just gathered up a few friends to help out.”

  “Still, you found me in time. We know how good Mikhaylo is at hiding his trail. He could have had me for days before you got to me. Weeks. And in that time …” I shook my head. “I would have endured it, gladly, to bring an end to him. But I am also grateful I did not have to.”

  “You were able to get the dongle into the computer,” she pointed out. “That gave us a string to pull on. A starting point. If you hadn’t been able to do that? It could have been weeks, as we went building to building, trying to track you down.”

  Her gaze took on some shadow. “And we know how mercurial Mikhaylo is. There’s no guarantee that, in those weeks, he didn’t have a dark moment. One which left you seriously injured. Or worse.”

  I nodded.

  Something niggled at me.

  Her brow came together. “What is it?”

  I glanced over to where Alex was laughing with his friends, absorbed in the party. “All these long months, I’ve been looking for Alex. Working my way down the list of candidates. But it’s not as if I’d abandoned my search for Mikhaylo. I kept an eye out for him as well. We both have.”

  She nodded.

  I pursed my lips. “It makes sense that we eventually found Alex. We’ve done God’s own quantity of research and we examined each potential candidate, in order, in a methodical way. It took us quite a while, but we tracked him down.”

  Laryssa glanced over at him, warmth coming to her gaze.

  I tapped my finger on my thigh. “So, after all this time, we finally find Alex. And then only days later, Mikhaylo happens to come to the very place we are? He decides to fly right into New Haven?”

  Her brow furrowed. “Do you think Mikhaylo knew who you were? That he was aware you’d been one of the women caught up in his net back in Ukraine?”

  I shook my head. “I never had the slightest sense of that. You have been going through his files. Do you see anything like that in his emails? His texts?”

  “No, not at all. He was coming here purely for a business venture. He’d been alerted about the vacuum left when we shut down Boris and the others. He thought it was a prime opportunity to expand his operations, and he wanted to lay his claim.”

  A word stood out to me. “Alerted?”

  She nodded. “You’re thinking someone brought him here on purpose? But why? So you could catch him? I know it wasn’t anyone in our group.”

  “Can you look through the files to track down who gave him that heads up? Figure
out why he was drawn here, of all places on our planet, to poke around?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll make it our top priority.”

  I drew her into a hug. “Thank you, Laryssa. Thank you for everything.”

  Alex was at my shoulder. His gaze went attentively between us. “Is everything all right?”

  He was too good. Far too good at what he did. I drew on a smile and twined my fingers into his. “Just shaking loose some details from the data. But you’re right – we shouldn’t be talking shop tonight. Not when we’re all here to celebrate.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely. Come on. Let’s show them what real dancing is all about.”

  I pressed my lips to his, and the world shimmered into mist.

  Chapter 17

  I sat in a chair in the hospital waiting room, studying my phone. Alex was in getting his shoulder x-rayed, to ensure the bones were healing properly. My own check-up had been quick and simple, and I’d been pronounced in fine heath.

  Laryssa had sent me hundreds of pages of reading material.

  The connections were convoluted and faint. Mikhaylo and his crew rarely spoke in open, clear terms. There were pseudonyms and coded references. Abbreviations and shorthand. But Laryssa and her team were experts at what they did. They had lived in this world their entire lives. They knew what they were looking for.

  And the ghost of a thread was there.

  Mikhaylo had originally been making plans for exploring new options in Abu Dhabi. Something involving a luxury hotel and high-end clients. But he had been turned. Redirected. For some reason he had backed off on the whirlpool tubs and the Carrera marble and he had taken his private plane to the gritty streets of New Haven. To our waterfronts and warehouses.

  Why?

  It almost seemed random. It was almost as if a whim had come to him and he’d simply turned his head.

  But Mikhaylo wasn’t like that. He didn’t just move left rather than right. He was methodical, careful, and alert. He had flown west for a reason.

  I just couldn’t see it.

  I scrolled … scrolled …

  A text message. From someone named V. The IP address had him in Honduras.

  Enjoy NH. Try P’s clam abeetz.

  And the response.

  Works out, you get a marker.

  My finger tapped.

  A man like Mikhaylo didn’t throw markers around. The offers to help were given when he felt he achieved something substantial, something of worth. And setting up an entire new operation in New Haven would certainly qualify.

  This V person, despite being in Central America, seemed to know the New Haven pizza scene well. And Laryssa could not find any connections at all between V and Ukraine. Between V and Mikhaylo, before this set of exchanges. If anything, V seemed to be more involved in the Central American drug trade. I couldn’t see any points of intersection between his world and ours.

  There was a motion above me, and I clicked off my phone.

  Alex stood there, rotating his shoulder. “Doc says it’s healing up fine. Should be good as new in no time.”

  I stood and smiled. “That’s good to hear.”

  His gaze held mine. “Anything interesting, in what you’re reading?”

  I tucked my phone in my purse. “Just some minor cleanup from Mikhaylo’s files. Now, c’mon. I hear Sasha has been working all day on a German meal which will make your heart melt.”

  He smiled, but I saw it in his eyes. The awareness that I was not sharing everything. That he was willing to wait. To let me tell him in my own time.

  I drew him into a hug. “Thank you, Alex.”

  He ran a hand down my hair. There was no need for words.

  * * *

  We were at the precinct. Alex and the others were working on paperwork. It seemed as if the paperwork faerie had set loose the most widespread flood of forms and documents that I had ever seen. True, the Mikhaylo network was layered with almost Biblical intricacy. There were calls coming in from the FBI, the CIA, and foreign governments. Still, there only seemed so many different ways in which a single operation could be recorded.

  I had not been spared.

  They had treated me respectfully, and Alex had been by my side through most of the interviews. They had not pressed me on details of what I had endured during my years with him. But still, it was a challenge even speaking his name to strangers, to investigators who now saw him as merely an entry for a clinical document.

  At last they let me go.

  Alex looked with a sigh at his computer. “I have at least another four hours of work, just to keep up with the current forms. But I think you should get out of here. Is Laryssa free? Or Sasha? I don’t want you to be alone. But I don’t think it’s good for you to be here, surrounded by all of this.”

  I held up my phone. “Laryssa’s been offering to keep me company until you’re done. She can meet me out front.”

  He smiled in relief. “Great. I’ll walk you down.”

  Another few minutes, and her car pulled up by the steps. She gave a wave to Alex. “I’ll take good care of her.”

  He kissed me. “I’ll call you the moment I can get free. You two go do something fun. Relax. Talk.”

  I nodded and climbed into the car.

  We were off.

  Evening was tracing purples and violets into the sky, and she headed up, up, up the gentle hills into East Rock Park. It was impressive to find such a retreat of trees and hiking trails immediately above the sprawling city.

  She smiled at me. “I thought you could do with some quiet and nature, after a full day of grilling.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” I assured her. “They were respectful of my experiences, and Alex being in there with me helped as well. In a way, I’m glad to go through it. Because it means that Mikhaylo really is gone. It’s proof of it. A cleansing process. The way we seal and bury him.”

  She parked, and we climbed out. Dusk was falling now, and as we walked, stars began twinkling high overhead. It was chilly, but I relished the fresh air. The sense that our world was cleansed and new.

  She looked over. “We’ve been poring through Mikhaylo’s files. It could take us years to examine every line. But I still don’t see it. We can’t find any reason for a connection between Mikhaylo and New Haven. We can’t find any sign that Mikhaylo knew you were here, or even who you were.”

  She shrugged. “Remember that documentary we watched, about the triplets who were separated at birth? How two of them ended up going to the exact same college and realized they were related? Funky stuff happens in life. And it’s not as if you’re in different lines of work. You were taking down a prostitution ring. Mikhaylo was setting up a prostitution ring. Maybe it was inevitable your paths would cross again.”

  “I suppose.”

  Laryssa was right. Bizarre coincidences were all around us. People ran into long-forgotten friends at vacation resorts. A favorite song played at just the right time.

  We came up to the edge of the hill. New Haven was spread out beneath us, glistening like a jewel-scattered cloth in the night air. It really did look gorgeous. And in that city of students and fishermen, of taxi drivers and police officers and shopkeepers, each one was going about their daily routine, barely knowing the lives of the many other threads which crossed their paths.

  How many other coincidences happened every single day, and we just weren’t aware enough to see them?

  I asked, “Did you ever get a name for the V guy? The one in Honduras?”

  She pulled out her phone. “Nothing we could trace. But I do seem to recall … let me look … yes, here. In this one transaction, on the dark web. He was looking for contacts for what might have been a drug transaction, down in Honduras. Yeah. He used a first name there.”

  She held it up to me. “He went by Vengar.”

  I blinked.

  I said, “In Spanish, that means to avenge. To achieve vengeance.”

  She looked doubtful. “Lots of peo
ple on the dark web use strange names. It’s almost a rule.”

  I stared down at the city, with the cars zipping along the highways, all racing, racing, racing off to who knew where. “What if we’ve been looking at this all wrong? We were thinking that Mikhaylo was lured here to interact with me. Maybe by someone who had been hurt by Mikhaylo, either directly or indirectly, and who wanted him brought to an end. We assumed they figured I’d be the one to make it happen.”

  I turned to her. “But what if it was never about me bringing an end to Mikhaylo? What happened, when Mikhaylo arrived at Tweed? When we realized he was here?”

  Her brow creased. “Well, you of course decided you wanted to take him on. To go in and face him.”

  I nodded. “Anyone who had done even the slightest research into me would have made that guess. And they would also have known of Mikhaylo’s power. His near-Biblical reputation. Most people would have assumed I’d lose. That I’d be caught up in Mikhaylo’s web and lost forever into that world. That I’d be brutalized and raped for years.”

  Her gaze was serious. “Sasha and I would never have let that happen. None of us would.”

  “You and I know that, and we know we have the skills to follow through on that. But an outside observer? They would see me as an ex-whore with a pipe dream of taking down her boss. They wouldn’t give me the remotest odds of success.”

  Laryssa was slowly nodding. “I imagine you’re right. A lone woman up against Mikhaylo? It would seem doomed to failure. But why would someone want to throw you into the lion’s den? To subject you to years of torture? Could it be related to one of the Johns you’ve exposed over the years? Maybe a brother to Boris? That sort of thing?”

  I shook my head. “We’ve been pursuing that line already. We couldn’t find anyone from our own circles. And someone who knew me that well? From our own world? They’d know I had a solid chance against Mikhaylo.”

  My gaze drifted out over the landscape. “I’m beginning to think this situation was caused by someone who thought I didn’t have a chance. Who thought this encounter would lead to years of punishment for me. Years of torture.”