“Are you going to be all right there, dove?” Davie asked as Mariya stripped off her apron and finished wiping down the bar top.
“I live right down the street.” Something he already knew. “I’ll be fine.”
He was eyeing Christophe as he left. Gypsies, he’d said once, you can’t trust them. Maybe he was Romanian, after all.
“You still have that thing I gave you?”
By ‘thing,’ he meant the can of pepper spray he’d given all the girls who worked for him. “Yes, I have it.”
“Go on, then. I’ll close up here.”
It was a balmy night despite the hour; warm enough that she didn’t need the jacket she’d brought along with her. Just as she’d told Davie, it took her no time at all to reach her building as the rest of the street was mostly vacant.
Digging around in her bag, she hunted for her keys … at least until a shadow fell into her line of sight.
Jumping back with a silent scream, she darted her gaze to the shadow’s owner before she could think to pull the only weapon she had.
“Shit, sorry,” he said, holding his hands up in a non-threatening gesture, though it didn’t help much. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
Despite the apology, he didn’t sound as though he actually meant it. He spoke as though he knew those were the right words to say, rather than what he wanted to say.
Christophe.
He was drunk, or at least he should have been drunk by the sheer amount of alcohol he’d consumed, but he seemed remarkably steady on his feet as he brought a cigarette to his lips.
The smart thing to do would have been to walk on past him, leave him to his cigarette and mind her own business, but months of curiosity had her speaking to him. “Are you going to be okay?”
Christophe blinked, seeming surprised she had spoken to him at all. Besides the occasional hello and serving him tonight, she hadn’t really engaged him much at all despite them living so close.
But his answer was not what she expected.
“Probably not.”
Most people tended to lie, even when the truth was obvious. “Are you at least going to be able to make it up the stairs on your own?”
The last thing she wanted to see when she left her apartment in the morning was him passed out in a pool of his own vomit.
“You offering to walk me up?” he asked with a smile, as though amused by her question.
“No,” she responded, holding her head up a fraction. She wasn’t stupid. “But I’m sure Thomas is awake, and he’d be glad to.”
Thomas being the lifelong US Army Ranger who lived across the hall from Mariya and did his best to minimize the crime in their building.
Flicking ash off the end of his cigarette, Christophe shook his head. “I think I have it under control.”
Seeing no point in arguing further, she left it at that. “Have a good night.”
She’d only managed to take a step before he asked, “Your name?”
“Sorry?”
“What’s your name?”
Funny that she had passed him so often yet never bothered to learn his name until tonight, or him learning hers.
But perhaps that was a good thing. It only meant she hadn’t been drawing attention to herself.
Undoubtedly, it would be smart to stick to that. After four months without so much as a peep from Feliks, maybe she was doing something right.
“What’s yours?” she asked instead, even though she already knew.
“Fang.” His response came a moment later.
“Fang?” she asked, genuinely surprised.
A corner of his mouth tipped up wider, revealing a set of pearly white teeth, and under the glow of the street lamp, she thought she saw a glint of silver in his mouth.
“People actually call you that?”
“If they’re smart.”
“And if they’re not? What do they call you then?”
Bloodshot eyes fell on her, his expression … sad. “Christophe.”
It was obvious he didn’t like being called that. “Nice to meet you then, Fang.” Officially, at least. “I’m Mariya.”
That was all she would give him.
Leaving him to his cigarette, and more than ready to get off her feet, she started up the stairs again until his voice stopped her. “Careful walking alone. It’s not safe.”
It was the same warning Davie had given, but she didn’t feel a chill when he’d said it. “I’ve survived this long.”
Shaking his head, he tossed his cigarette down, grounding it out with the toe of his boot. “Yeah? So did she, but it didn’t mean shit in the end.”
She?
If there wasn’t so much emotion in his voice, she might have taken offense to that, but she didn’t think that was what he was doing.
His words were a warning.
The fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Who the hell was he? “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, though this time, she didn’t stick around to listen to him say anything else.
Chapter Two
“Despite the continued investigation into the death of businessman, Temuri Kuznetsov, and the recent shooting at the Kilmor Hotel in Manhattan, authorities have not been able to find any new information. At this time, police officials are urging anyone with information about the events to come forward …”
Yeah, like that would be easy.
Mariya had told herself before she ever left Chicago that she wouldn’t look into any of the articles about the night that would ultimately change her life. That she wouldn’t actively seek out any information regarding it because it would only make her feel worse.
She had tried very hard to ignore any reports on it, or even any mention of the murder or her father—a task made a bit easier since she was in Brooklyn, New York, and the city had its own share of crimes to report, but she couldn’t help seeking it out, needing to know what new information there might have been.
Worse, the second she clicked on one, she felt like she had to find more until she was swimming in vaguely-worded articles that told her no one was any closer to the truth about what really happened.
The way the news anchor in the pretty red dress made it sound, her father had been a saint. As though he had been some innocent man on his way home from work and he’d been murdered for something as trivial as his wallet.
Sometimes, she wondered if that would have been easier—if things would have turned out differently had it been some stranger who stole his life.
But sadly, she would never know the answer to that.
How easy they made it seem, though, asking the public to provide information about a murder or a shooting as though the very people connected to both weren’t Bratva.
Even if someone did have information—and Mariya didn’t think any would—the moment they stepped forward, a target would be on their backs, and long before any of their information could be verified, they would be dead.
That was the life.
So whichever way the evening news wanted to spin it, those who knew the truth would never open their mouths.
Mariya included.
She’d lived under his name and had seen the weight of it in public when someone greeted her father. His name—her name—was spoken with reverence and fear, and no one believed for a second that any of his business practices were close to legitimate.
But it wasn’t what you knew, he’d taught her, it was what you could prove.
And despite law enforcement’s best efforts, they had yet to prove anything.
Not that they could.
Only a few people knew what happened that day, and while Mariya was one of them, she wouldn’t be opening her mouth when the truth could very well get her killed.
It wasn’t just because her father had died, but her grandfather, Alexey Kuznetsov—who’d been the pakhan, or boss, of the Kuznetsov Bratva—was in a medically induced coma.
His stay in the hospital had shaken up the very fabric of the organization
. There’d been a need for a leader in his place, but the men hadn’t known they were electing a two-headed dog.
But they would soon.
Alexey had made it clear before the night of her wedding that he intended to give Feliks more power, and with Temuri gone, Feliks had his territories as well.
That had given him all the prestige he needed within the Bratva and his new status as acting pakhan had given him something far more than power.
His word meant everything now, and it wouldn’t matter whose daughter or granddaughter Mariya was.
The Bratva didn’t work that way—they were their own family.
It wouldn’t matter what she knew about Temuri’s death—it only mattered what Feliks had made them believe. And the two people that might have been willing to listen to her, he’d made sure there was no way they could.
She still remembered that day like it was seared into the back of her mind.
Before then, it wasn’t often she felt fear.
Not the mundane sort where she freaked out when a spider crawled across her hand, or when her driver had to slam on brakes to avoid hitting a car that swerved out in front of them.
That night, nothing compared to the all-consuming fear she’d felt when the gunshots rang out all around her.
She had seen plenty of guns before that day, but she had never heard one fired. It was nothing like it sounded on television. There was no quiet but audible pop—rather, a loud boom that made her ears ache and her heart skip a beat.
Minutes had passed, though it had felt like hours, and she’d felt like it would never end. But as the dust settled and the squeal of tires could be heard, fear—the likes of which she had never felt before—consumed her.
Fear had become a tangible thing, to the point that it felt like the emotion was wrapping itself around her so tightly she couldn’t breathe.
The bodies she’d seen that day …
“No, fuck you! Get your shit and get out!”
Snapped back to the present, Mariya glanced up at the ceiling, as if she would catch a glimpse of the fight going on in the apartment above her.
If ever there were a couple in the world who didn’t need to be together, it was the one upstairs. She could excuse the constant banging and random noises in the middle of the night and into the morning—she could even accept the wall-slapping sex that accompanied one of their many blowouts, but she didn’t know anyone who could argue quite like them.
Only once in the four months since she’d been in this apartment with its thin walls and leaking faucets had they ever gone more than a week without having an epic screaming match that bled out into the hallway for everyone to hear. After their last, very public, breakup, they had promised never to fight again.
That lasted for as long as it took for the guy to fuck one of his girlfriend’s best friends.
Deciding she couldn’t concentrate on the article she was reading, she swiped it aside and opened up the pictures on her phone.
Staring down at the glowing screen, the only thing she wanted to do was call her sister, Klara, and see how she and Akim, Klara’s husband, were doing, as well as their one-year-old, Ana. While she’d been there, she hadn’t gotten to see much of them, not with Feliks regulating her whereabouts.
Klara might have been her sister, but Feliks had despised her, and the feeling was mutual, but he hadn’t been able to eradicate her from Mariya’s life entirely, not while Alexey was still alive.
But all that had changed four months ago.
Everything had changed.
Mariya had hoped now that she wasn’t under Feliks’ thumb, she would be able to talk to Klara more often, but it wasn’t safe—not when Feliks would do anything to find her, and she had no way of knowing if he could get his hands on Klara’s phone.
Only in cases of emergency, they’d agreed, would they call.
And loneliness didn’t equate to an emergency.
One day, though, this would all be over and nothing more than a bad memory.
Glancing down at her watch, she had a few hours left before the start of her shift at the bar, but in the meantime, she was in desperate need of a clean uniform. Davie’s Tavern might not have been all that nice to look at, but Davie ran a clean shop and made sure the girls looked the part.
The apartment building didn’t have a washer or dryer, but she frequently used a laundromat a couple of blocks down the street.
It was also one of the few places Davie had warned her about since he knew who she was. In this part of the city, Russians weren’t usually welcome—a long history of rivalry existed between the Irish and the Bratva, though she wasn’t privy to the details.
At first, she hadn’t understood why he’d told her to be wary when she went to the laundromat, especially since she rarely saw anyone unsavory inside, but after her third visit, she saw them for the first time—the men carrying duffel bags into a back office.
Once the door would close, a light above it would turn on.
It took a bit of pondering on her part before she finally understood what Davie hadn’t told her about the place.
Whoever was in control of it was moving their money through it.
Growing up, she had never understood what money laundering meant. When she’d heard her father’s men whisper about cleaning dirty money, she had taken that quite literally, thinking they meant stuffing hundreds of bills into a vat of water to clean.
That sounded completely silly now, but at the time, it had made sense.
Today, however, that light was off.
As she stepped past the open glass doors, her gaze immediately sought out the office, only blowing out a relieved sigh once she saw the room was unoccupied.
She was careful never to bring too much attention to herself, but when she came here, she doubled her efforts.
Hoisting her basket up into one of the carts by the entrance, she wheeled it across the checkered floor to an unoccupied corner where she was mostly out of sight.
By the time she was finished tossing in her first load, a family of three walked in, and a little girl carrying a stuffed giraffe sat up by the windows to watch the cars drive by.
She couldn’t be more than three years old, and Mariya felt an invisible punch to her ribs at the sight of her.
Ana had only come screaming into the world a year ago, yet her niece was the most adorable baby she had ever seen.
The first night at the hospital, Mariya had cried the first time she got to hold her. She had been perfect, with a head full of curly brown hair that reminded her so much of her sister.
So much could change in a year. So much had changed in that span of time.
Before her thoughts could spiral too far into that black hole, Mariya picked her phone back up.
Another twenty minutes passed before the doors were opening again, a warm breeze blowing through as it did.
It had become second nature to look up whenever someone came into a room she was in, just as the jolt of fear at who it could be sliced through her.
But it wasn’t Feliks or any of his men who walked through that door—it was Christophe.
He looked paler than before, and his disheveled hair was in disarray, but he didn’t look like he was nursing a massive hangover as she thought he would. Apparently, the man could hold his liquor.
He spared her the briefest of glances, as if he didn’t even recognize her, before looking away and tossing his—was that a trash bag?—onto a table and opened up a washer well away from her own.
Maybe it was for the best that he didn’t notice her, no matter how interesting she found him.
He looked like the kind of trouble she didn’t need.
One hour ago …
A piercing alarm had Christophe rubbing his dry eyes as he rolled over, glaring at the clock on the nightstand next to his head that seemed to be mocking him with its glowing numbers and annoying ringing. Barely resisting the urge to rip the fucking thing out of the wall and toss it across the room, he checke
d the impulse and slammed his hand down on top of it until the noise stopped.
Breathing out a sigh of relief, he relaxed back and covered his face with a flattened pillow. Ambient noises filtered in—a glass bottle shattering outside his window, car alarms going off in the distance, and even the couple outside his apartment arguing again.
It was because of the constant noise that Christophe had even chosen this place after coming home from the job in California and after burying Aidra.
He still had his room in the converted loft he shared with his brothers—they made enough noise to wake the block up on any given day—but after Aidra … he couldn’t bring himself to go back there just yet.
It was still home, probably always would be, but too much of her saturated every part of it that it felt like her home too.
It had been.
Her scent would still be in his bed, her clothes and shoes mingled in with his, though hopefully, someone had thrown out that god-awful almond milk she loved to drink.
There was no part of his life she hadn’t touched.
He both loved and hated that now.
Hated because it felt like he would never escape her memory.
That her death would haunt him until he’d go mad from it.
He felt dangerously close to that edge.
Tossing the pillow away, he sat up, stretching his arms above his head, feeling the bones crack, and finally easing the tension inside him. As he got to his feet, the alcohol from the night before threw his balance off, and he stumbled face first into the wall.
This tiny apartment was a closet compared to his loft, but he hadn’t cared the first time he saw it. It looked like a reflection of the way he felt.
It also didn’t help that everything he had brought along with him—a few weeks’ worth of clothes and other random shit—littered his floor. There was nowhere to step without stumbling over something.
Relieving himself once he was inside the bathroom, he stood with his eyes shut, trying to piece together the night before and ignore the headache building behind his right eye.
Most of the night before was a blur of too much vodka and too little food. Had he even eaten yesterday? Or was that two days before when he hadn’t eaten?
Shadows & Silence: A Wild Bunch Novel Page 23
