"Hey, what's up?"
"This fucking phone has been ringing off the hook for almost an hour straight. Literally," he said, holding out my burner I used to call K. Panic gripped my chest, making my air feel caught in my throat as my heart started to slam underneath my ribcage. He didn't call. K never called. That was my job. I did the calling. He knew that calling was something that could blow my cover. And no one else had that number. "I know I shouldn't have, but I tried to pick up. I was worried maybe something was up with your family or some shit. But there was nothing on the other end. And then they just kept calling."
I reached for the phone, making a point of trying to seem casual. "That's weird. I'll have to call them..."
"Give it ten seconds, they'll call back again," he said, shrugging then moving off to rejoin the party.
I wasn't going to wait the ten seconds. If K was calling, something serious was going on. But even as I moved to swipe into my contacts, the phone started ringing again. "Hello?" I said somewhat tentatively into the phone as I moved further away from the dock that was pounding out rock music, the guitar rift raking over my already sensitive nerves.
"Fucking hell Maisy," K's voice called, sounding worried. "I've been calling for an hour straight."
"The BBQ was today. I wasn't by my phone," I hedged, leaving out the fact that I was busy because I was getting finger-fucked by my boss in a broken down car, not because of actual club business. "What's going on?"
"They're gone, Maisy."
In that moment, the entire world fell away. The music muted to my ears, the smell of food and booze disappeared, everything became colorful blurbs to my eyes.
"Gone?" I repeated, my voice hollow as I leaned back against the fence protecting the property, not trusting my legs.
"I keep tabs. Did a drive-by earlier and saw no cars. It was weird so I parked up the block and took a walk. Maisy, the doors are bolted, the windows boarded from the inside. I went around the back and jimmied off one of the boards facing the alley, everything inside is gone. Desks, lights, filing cabinets. Everything. It's all gone."
"What does this mean?" I asked, needing to hear it from K. If I was left to let my mind wander, I was pretty sure I'd be checking the buildings across the street for gunmen. I had a tendency to run toward paranoia. Not that anyone could blame me.
"I don't fucking know," he admitted, the frustration evident in his tone. K wasn't the kind of man who settled for not knowing. He knew everything. He knew all the good guys, the bad guys, what the bad guys have done, where the bodies were buried, who the weakest links were, how to exploit their Achilles' heels. For a man as powerful, as all-knowing as K to be in the dark, well... it wasn't good. "This doesn't fit their M.O. They've been in the city for a decade."
"Maybe because of..."
"The cops don't have shit anymore. They were paid to bury it. You know that. I know that. It's something else, but fuck if I know what that is. And the not-knowing, that's not fucking good."
"Did you go to their places?"
"'Course I did. Empty too. Cars cleaned out of the garages. Went to their favorite dinner spot and pretended to be an old friend and asked around about them. They haven't been in in a week."
"A week?" I squeaked, the panic in my system turning to outright hysteria. They could have made it anywhere in a week. They could be in New Jersey. They could be in Navesink Bank...
"Maisy, breathe. We don't know anything for sure. Right now, there is no reason to believe they know where you are. We've been careful."
"But," I prompted, knowing there was one coming.
"But we can't be sure they haven't sniffed out a lead either."
"What do you need me to do?"
"I need you to stay inside those gates. Whenever possible, try to take a shift with another probate. Try to avoid the overnight and early morning ones alone. Be alert. If anything feels fucked, chances are, it's fucked. And if it's fucked..." he prompted me.
"If it's fucked, I need to make sure I have a safe way out. Then I need to get to the train station and head to Pennsylvania. I need to get my bug-out bag, power up the burner, and call you."
"Then I will point you in a new direction," he said, sounding calmer.
There was an unexpected, nauseating swirling sensation in my stomach at the idea of leaving. I didn't even need to consider it to know that it was Repo that put that feeling there. Shit again. The last thing I was supposed to do was get attached. K had been specific about that. He told me that, chances were, I would have to find more than one cover. He said most of the women he 'disappeared' had to move at least once every two years. And while it was in my best interest to stay with The Henchmen, to integrate into the lifestyle, chances were it wasn't going to be somewhere I could stay indefinitely.
"Maisy..."
"Okay, K," I said, taking a deep breath as I scanned the trees, the darkness not letting me see anything.
"Stay vigilant, but don't get paranoid. I want to hear from you verbally every two days and I want a text with the word 'pineapple' every single day by noon. If I don't see that by noon, I am in my car. You with me?"
"I'm with you," I agreed.
"Stay safe and kick ass, Maisy."
The line went dead and I curled the phone into my hand so hard it hurt my palm.
I closed my eyes as I took a deep breath, wondering how the hell my life had come to this. Everything had been so normal, so tame, so certifiably boring until...
Ten
Maze
Moving back to the city after my grandmother's death and the volcanic explosion known as my relationship with Thato had been a culture shock. Granted, I had been born and raised there for the first ten years of my life, but that had been under the shelter of my mother. She was there to bring me to the right subways and lead me down the right streets, to slam into the people who were too busy with their lives to notice they almost trampled me.
And then I had been in Vermont where I could walk just about any sidewalk and never run into another soul or drive without seeing more than a handful of cars on the road.
So the crowded sidewalks, the constant squeal of taxi brakes, the honks of horns, the shake of the subway beneath your feet at all times, the never-ending brightness... it had been off-putting.
But that being said, I thought it was what I needed. I needed to disappear. I needed to not be that naive, gullible girl who had lived above a chop shop for months and never realized it, despite the fact that I had seen the men taking doors off of random cars or removing the stereos and that the supposed car owners never seemed to come by to pick up their vehicles.
I was happy to be a nameless, faceless person in the crowd, to be just another cog in the wheel that was the city that never sleeps.
I took some of my grandmother's money and I got myself an apartment that was so small that I couldn't walk more than ten feet in any direction without hitting a wall. But it was in a not-so-sketchy area and it was all I felt I could afford. I took my unfinished degree and finished it online while working the counter at a pharmacy. Then, Kinkos-printed degree in hand, I started applying for jobs that would allow me to have a little extra change in my pockets after rent and utilities were paid.
That was how I came across Kozlov Inc.
It was like any of the other offices I had interviewed at. There were desks and chairs and office equipment. The decor was a fair bit nicer than the other offices however, sleek, modern, maybe expensive though I had no eye for things like that.
Viktor Kozlov himself had been in the office to interview me. He was exactly what one might expect from a man named Viktor Kozlov. He was tall and brawny with a strong, low brow ridge over his brown eyes, a prominent but not unpleasant nose, and a square jawline. He was attractive and somewhere in his thirties with a booming voice that, even when speaking softly, seemed to reverberate through your entire system. In all the time that I knew Viktor, I had never seen him in anything other than a perfe
ctly tailored suit.
Viktor had a brother, Ruslan, who was similar looks-wise and that was about it. Where Viktor favored nice suits, expensive watches, and Cuban cigars, Ruslan preferred jeans, heavy-knit sweaters in winter and simple tees in the summer, cheap vodka to the point of excess on Fridays during work hours, and his old beat-up pick-up truck. Where Viktor commanded the room, Ruslan owned it with his easy laid-back charm. Both had the lilt of their motherland and I always enjoyed when they would come into the office and I could listen to it. Though the rough Russian accent was wholly unlike the smooth, polished sound Thato had, I always just loved to listen, to occasionally close my eyes and let the sounds wash over me.
Needless to say, I got the job.
And I actually liked the job.
It was mostly solitary work, just keeping the books, occasionally answering a rogue phone call about one of their businesses. The Kozlov brothers owned a restaurant, a pawn shop, and a small gastro pub.
Some days, Ruslan would drop in and hang out at his brother's desk, propping his dirty shoes up on the polished wood like he had absolutely not a care in the world that his brother was anal about things like tidiness and appearances. He'd sip the vodka he kept on the drink bar and bullshit with me about any topic from the latest homicide to stories about the winters in his homeland.
"Girl like you, blondie, you'd have had men falling to their knees to claim you, keep you warm through the winter," he'd tell me, forever flattering my vanity in a way that I often wondered if it was just his flirtatious nature or if he actually meant it. Either way, it was nice to hear and I maybe developed the tiniest of crushes on him. "Know how they'd keep you warm?" he asked, dark brow quirked up, lips twitching.
"I can imagine," I'd said, blushing slightly as I shuffled papers on my desk.
"Ever had a Russian lover, kotyonok?" he asked, his voice low, seductive.
Later, I would ask Viktor what 'kotyonok' meant. He had given me a scrunched-up face, then a head shake and told me it meant 'kitten'.
"No."
"No?" he asked, rounding my desk, tilting his head to the side to watch me in such an intense way that I had to fight the urge to squirm in my chair. "You won't regret," he said, giving me a smile and going toward the door. It hadn't exactly escaped me that he hadn't said "you wouldn't regret", but "you won't regret", as if doing so for me was an eventuality. Like, maybe, he wanted to be that first Russian lover.
So maybe a part of me blamed my cluelessness on my girlish crush on one of my bosses.
But, truly, it likely wasn't even my fault.
It was all so well hidden.
If maybe I was less of a perfectionist about work, I might have missed it.
Later, I would figure the reason Viktor hired me was because I 'just' had an online degree, that maybe I wasn't as educated or as observant of details as someone who went to a university.
He was obviously wrong.
And one snowy, miserable January morning alone in the office that I couldn't seem to get warm enough, I first started noticing the inconsistencies. It was just small things at first that I had always just written off as unknown income, cash register miscalculations or unaccounted for business expenses. That was until I started to see that each month, each of those amounts was exactly the same. And, granted, I knew enough about finances to know that, hey, freak similarities happened on occasion. But not every single month for a year.
So then, trapped in the office during what turned out to be a blizzard, I started digging.
It didn't take long until I felt a pit get planted in my belly, heavy, foreign, uncomfortable.
Most of the inconsistencies were wholly unexplainable.
It wasn't the registers.
It wasn't pay back for money owed.
It wasn't anything but cash deposits of unknown origins.
I loaded up the coffee machine and went looking through the filing cabinets, praying to find something that pointed to something other than some sort of illegal transactions.
That's when I found them: the files that changed my whole life.
With shaking hands, I reached for my cell, opening an incognito window so there would be no history of my search, and I looked up the Kozlov brothers. And, let's just say, it didn't take me long to figure out that the people I was working for weren't just some successful Russian businessmen. Sure, they truly did own legitimate businesses like their restaurant and pub and pawn shop. But they owned those to launder the dirty money that they got through other means, namely bringing in poor, hopeless women from their homeland and auctioning them off to the highest bidders. It wasn't, in the traditional sense, human trafficking. Granted, the women were promised things they generally didn't get, namely rich husbands who could help them support their families back home, but the women weren't exactly unwilling. They just had no other options. But still, in the law's eyes, it was the sale of human beings and completely illegal. Apparently, law enforcement had been trying to nab them for years. But they never screwed up.
That was, until they hired me I guess.
See, there was a lot of things I could still claim to be: a little unobservant, too trusting, not much of a two-step thinker, but I was not, and promised myself I would never be, gullible or naive ever again.
And I damn sure wasn't going to be involved with even more criminals.
Hell, I had kind-of, in a way, been helping them conduct their money laundering while I worked for them.
I was not, was abso-fucking-lutely not, going to get myself wrapped up in another sweep when the cops eventually did have something to come after them with.
So with a sweat breaking out over my whole body, I made two sets of copies of all the information I had. I placed each set in separate manila envelopes and sealed them. I tucked one into my purse and held one against my chest under my jacket as I made my way out of the office on shaky legs and trudged through eight inches of snow all the way to the closest police station.
I was met by a one Detective Conroy Asher who was tall and fit and way to freaking good looking for a cop. He took me into a room and took the folder from me, looking over the contents with a furrowed brow. When he looked up at me, though, instead of seeing the glee I expected for finally giving them a piece of information they needed to finally nab the Kozlov brothers, I saw concern.
By this point, I was smart enough to know things had just taken a turn for the worse.
"Tell me," I demanded, sitting up straighter, my spine suddenly feeling like it was made of steel.
"Christ, kid, you just signed your death certificate," he said, shaking his head as he tucked the information away.
For a second, I sat there, stunned silent as I tried to sort my racing thoughts so I could grab hold of one of them. "My... death certificate?"
"The reason the Kozlovs haven't been incarcerated has nothing to do with a lack of incriminating evidence, and everything to do with some friends in some high places. This," he said, lifting the folder, "is going to disappear. And then, say, twenty minutes later after it does, so will you."
"But... but how will they..."
"Come on, kid. Don't be stupid," he said, shaking his head at me. "I have no choice but to sign this into evidence. Someone between here and the evidence locker will find it, flag it, call the Kozlovs, and then it's all missing evidence and missing persons reports."
"I thought I was doing the right..." I started, feeling stupid, useless tears sting the backs of my eyes.
"Unfortunately, you are doing the right thing. But the Kozlovs run a tight ship and they will trace this back to you in a matter of minutes and then you will either be dead or wishing you were. It was the right move, Miss. Mckenzie, but it wasn't the smart one." He moved to stand and I jumped up too. "I hope I don't have to read about you in the paper anytime soon, or see your body in the morgue."
"But... no. Fucking no!" I shouted, slamming my hand down on the metal table. "Don't talk to me like I'm a
walking target," I demanded, angrier than I had ever been in my life. He was a cop. His job was to serve and protect. In this case, his job was to serve and protect me. He couldn't just walk around issuing condolences for my seemingly inevitable bloody murder. No fucking way.
"Kid, there's nothing I can do. This evidence will go missing and then I have no cause to offer you protective custody."
"What if I had... copies?"
His face got serious. "Then I suggest you hide them in a good place until you find a cop you know you can trust in a force that has no connections to the Russians or any of their allies."
"How am I supposed to do that if I am apparently going to end up with a bullet in my brain in some alley somewhere?"
"Garroted," he corrected automatically.
"Excuse me?"
"Garroted. The Kozlovs, they aren't much for guns, though I'm sure they have them. They like the close contact kill, feeling you take your last breath at their hands."
"Great," I said, my hand raising to stroke over my throat as I thought of Viktor's and Ruslan's strong, capable hands holding a piece of wire between them and around my neck as I struggled for breath.
"Hey, look," he said, coming closer, lowering his voice. "I can't offer you protection, but I can offer you a lifeline," he said, his serious brown eyes on mine.
"And that is?"
"K."
"K?" I repeated.
"He's... well, I don't know what exactly he is. But word is, he helps women like you, women who have nowhere else to turn. He disappears them."
"He... disappears them?"
"Yeah. I know it doesn't sound great, but what other option do you have?"
Well, I figured I had better options than having some random whackjob 'disappearing' me that was for damn sure.
"K.C.E Boxing Emporium," he said, his words a little firm. "When you get your head out of your ass and see it's your only option, haul it over there."
"Right. Well, um... I know I should say thanks, but..."
Repo (The Henchmen MC Book 4) Page 10
