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?—ont
o 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 checked 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?
The days were starting to blend into each other.
Just another reason time was meaningless.
Jumping in the shower, he washed away the smell of stale vodka and cigarette smoke. Ten minutes later, he was back out again and getting dressed, hunting for anything remotely clean on the floor.
Too many drunken nights and not enough days sober had left a pile of dirty clothes that reeked of spirits.
Fuck, he needed to do laundry.
His day was already falling to shit.
Shoving as many of the clothes as he could into a garbage bag, he dropped it next to the door. Though he might have picked up the majority of it, enough empty bottles and trash existed to make it seem like he had done nothing at all, but he barely spared it another glance.
Not his problem.
In the never-ending sea of time he spent in this place, he had only made it this long without driving himself crazy with compartmentalization.
He focused on one task at a time and left the rest until he was ready to deal with it.
He might have lived like a slob, and a knife was on the floor he was pretty sure might give him tetanus if he stepped on it, but it didn’t matter.
He didn’t care.
All he was doing now was existing.
And Aidra … she would have hated to see him like this.
“Is that truly living?” she would have asked, shaking her head in that disappointed way. “You’re more than this. You deserve better than this.”
“Yeah?” he answered back now. “What do you expect? You’re not here to help me keep my shit together.”
It didn’t matter that he was speaking to an empty room, raking his fingers through his hair in annoyance—hair in desperate need of a cut.
He wanted an answer.
He wanted to hear her lay into him for having his shit everywhere as she would have done at the loft.
But no one answered.
Not the God Invictus—the youngest of his brothers—believed in and not his Aidra.
Only silence, his old friend.
Before he could venture too far down that black hole, Christophe grabbed his phone and finally turned it on for the first time in three days, preparing himself for the number of messages he knew were coming in.
The first was from his handler, a man he hadn’t spoken to in months.
NIX: CALL ME.
He’d last seen him the morning of the funeral—the day he’d walked away from everything. More banks and high-security facilities were left to hit, and he or his brothers would rarely turn down a job if the price was right, but that day, as he’d watched the woman he loved get buried, the idea of working had nauseated him.
Only that first day did anyone try to stop him, but once they saw he wasn’t turning back, they left him be until they felt the need to check in.
Nix’s message came every two weeks like clockwork, but despite his never answering, Nix’s words never changed.
It was clear and to the point.
Nix wouldn’t interfere until he was sure it was necessary and not a moment before.
Until he had a reason to step in, he would let Christophe stay away until he was ready.
At the rate he was going now, who the fuck knew when that would happen.
The next message was from Calavera—Nix’s wife.
CALAVERA: IF YOU EVER WANT TO TALK, I’M ALWAYS AROUND.
What happened to Aidra wasn’t her fault—he knew that—but he still couldn’t bring himself to respond to any of her messages. Before, he wouldn’t have hesitated to call her. He used to whenever he’d been in the doghouse with Aidra and needed to find a way out.
But Calavera was a reminder of what he was trying to escape.
The night Aidra died, Calavera had been taken too, and it was only by sheer luck she had managed to escape her capture unscathed, yet he only saw it as his failure to get to Aidra.
Besides, even if he were to reach out to them, what the hell would he say? What was left?
Nix would only accept whatever he said before investigating the truth for himself, and Calavera, who felt guilt of her own, would want to know how he was coping—if he was coping.
How exactly did one cope with the death of the woman they planned to spend the rest of their life with?
How exactly was he supposed to move one like he hadn’t watched her die right in front of him?
Too much.
Shoving that question into his box of shit not to think about, he scrolled through the rest of his messages—these from his brothers.
One from Thanatos and Invictus, two opposite sides of the same coin. For as long as he could remember, it was the pair of them or neither at all.
Their message was the standard one they’d been sending him daily since he’d left.
THAN AND VIC: DON’T DRINK YOURSELF TO DEATH.
They, in particular, knew grief better than anyone he knew, and despite them wanting him to come back, they didn’t push either.
As long as they were flush with cash, they didn’t mind taking time off.
Christophe took the time to read the last message instead of skimming. And it was the only one he planned to answer.
If he didn’t, th
e man on the other end would hunt him down without question and force an answer out of him.
Tăcut, despite being the quietest of their lot, or rather because of it, was the most protective. For as long as he could remember, Tăcut had been saving him from himself.
TĂCUT: FLOWERS WERE DELIVERED LIKE YOU ASKED. AND THE ANGEL WAS DELIVERED LIKE YOU ASKED. LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU’RE BACK.
A picture was attached—visual confirmation—one of the marble statues Christophe had spent over three grand to have made.
Invictus had suggested it in place of a regular headstone, though Christophe hadn’t understood the significance at the time.
Aidra was dead—she wouldn’t give a shit whether it was an angel or a rock.
But the small sentimental part of him inside his jaded heart thought of it as her guardian angel, watching over her where he couldn’t.
Besides the angel, Tăcut made sure fresh flowers were there for her, another gesture Christophe appreciated more than he said. That day at the gravesite, just seeing her name inscribed on the marker and knowing she was six feet in the ground, had him nearly drinking himself into a coma that night, and he hadn’t been able to force himself back since.
Tăcut didn’t ask if he needed him to go in his place; he just did it.
Brothers did that. Even though they weren’t brothers in blood, they might as well have been.
They had survived the harshest winters and the worst abuse in Constanța; no bond was stronger than that.
Another message came in as Christophe was lost in his thoughts, this one a little more pointed.
TĂCUT: CHANGE YOUR MIND YET?
Change his mind about coming back to The Wild Bunch—the name he and his brothers called themselves—he meant.
Despite the loyalty they all had for Nix—and they owed the man far more than they could ever repay—they gave each other the highest priority. So because Christophe had walked away, they hadn’t taken any new jobs.
In their work, it was all of them or none. They each had their own set of skills, skills that made them deadly, but they were only strong as a unit—it worked for them.
Christophe didn’t acknowledge the second message at all when he texted back.
Crooks & Kings: A Wild Bunch Novel Page 3
