Infernal: Bite The Bullet

by Black, Paula

  “It wasn’t.” Konstantyn gruffed and my heart skipped over on a thud.

  “Please,” I said, on the verge of begging. I pushed the photo of my brother across the table towards him. “Tell me what you know.”

  “I have seen these tattoos,” he said, tapping a finger on the photograph between us. Daniel had a very distinctive half-sleeve tribal design over his left shoulder.

  “Where?” I pounced on the recognition and watched his brow knit. It was a look people got when they were deciding whether to tell you the truth or wing a lie. Dammit. He couldn’t clam up on me now.

  “In a video,” he replied tightly, just when I’d been about to prod him.

  My heart sank a little. “Daniel was on MTV. That’s common knowledge.”

  “Not music. Different video,” he said, his accent thick, and his dark eyes bored into me, willing me to understand something I didn’t want to hear, but had to.

  Oh God.

  I choked on tears I was fighting to hold back, the insinuation something so vile I didn’t know how my heart was taking it without stopping. My kid brother...

  “I want to see,” I said finally, swallowing the bile that burned the back of my throat.

  “No,” he rumbled. “You don’t.” He poured more shots of vodka and threw his back.

  In that moment, I wished for the whole bottle.

  “But there is something I can show you,” he said.

  He slipped a key out of his pocket and pushed himself up from the couch to unlock a drawer beneath his black desk.

  A cell phone buzzed in his pocket, and Konstantyn paused, drawing it out and cursing at the display as he answered.

  I could just make out the accented male voice coming through the phone.

  “Lazarus,” it said.

  “Yes,” Konstantyn admitted grimly. “Took you long enough to find me. Where is she?”

  His dark eyes flashed to me and I offered him a curious raise of my brows.

  “You are not alone?” the disembodied voice asked.

  “No,” he replied, moving away from me until I could no longer hear the other half of the conversation. “Just some dancer... Yes she is... No... I’m listening.” His eyes flicked back onto me. “I need to take this, in private,” he said, striding to the sliding balcony door. “Don’t move.”

  He stepped out onto the balcony and the glass shut behind him. It only did so much to stifle the sound of him barking into the phone in guttural Ukrainian, pacing as the conversation grew increasingly heated.

  Don’t move. Right.

  I leaned forward and inched the drawer open, checking over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t watching me peek inside. It was neat, but full. Papers lay in organised bundles and as I rifled through them, my fingers curled around a passport. Gingerly, I picked it up, almost dropping the thing when the motion shifted sheaves, uncovering the handgun underneath. My hand whipped back from the lethal piece, wide eyes flashing over my shoulder to see him still pacing, his face fixed in an angry snarl as he talked.

  He had weapons, and I was an idiot. Straight up. Tentatively nudging the gun to the side, I picked up the passport I’d dropped and flicked through to the identity page, keeping one eye on the Ukrainian. The picture showed his face, but not his name. Ivan Zelenko, it read.

  Who was this man? Clearly not just a dance instructor. And what the hell was I getting myself into?

  I lifted the front of a thick manila folder with one finger. Inside it were blurry pictures of men and women, bound, naked, in every sexual position imaginable. My gorge rose, but my fingers were compelled to keep flicking through them. I was skimming the images so fast, I nearly missed the one I was terrified of finding.

  Daniel. Naked.

  Oh God.

  I thought it’d been bad seeing the aftermath of his broken body in the morgue, but this was a whole other level of degradation and abuse. I struggled to breathe through the disgust cloying in my stomach. My mind spun.

  I had to go to the police.

  But first I had to get out of here.

  How had I thought for one moment that this man could help me?

  His back was to me, his hand braced on the balcony as he argued with whoever was on the other end of the phone. An accomplice? More than likely. No one did this on their own, to this scale.

  I’d found my brother’s murderer, for all the good it would do me dead. I’d walked into his trap.

  I leapt for the front door. Mercifully, it was still wide open, as I’d left it. I took my close call, snatched up my shoes and bolted for my life down the stairwell.

  I couldn’t risk the glass-box elevator. The ride would feel like eternity, and what if he was waiting for me at the bottom? I’d be a fish in a barrel.

  I broke through a fire-exit, expecting to set off the building’s alarm, but nothing happened, and I emerged in a service alley lined with giant wheeled dumpsters.

  Pausing to catch my breath, I whipped out my phone, scrolling to Detective Dalton’s Number. It rang and rang, then abruptly cut off and went to voicemail. I pictured him, rolling his eyes at my caller ID as he sat down to a very middle-class dinner with his prissy wife and kids.

  Fucking great. I was the girl who cried wolf. When I really needed him, he was cutting me off.

  I rattled off a breathless message, giving Konstantyn’s name and pseudonym, and my suspicions that he was responsible for Daniel’s abduction and torture.

  If I could just get to civilisation I should be okay. Safer in plain sight.

  North looked promising, and if I stuck to the riverbank I figured I couldn’t get too lost.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When I heard the footfalls pounding the street, my legs struck into a full-out run. That was no stranger running up behind me, no jogger. Konstantyn was chasing me, like he was hell bent on steam rolling right over me. I was in danger, and I wasn’t going to be able to outrun him. As a dancer, I had stamina, but not for the long haul, adrenaline-pumping, speed-racing my desperate terror was pushing my body into. I’d crash and then I’d be screwed.

  Frantic, my head whipped around as I sought an escape route, but there was none, just an unending stretch along the River Thames, and if the sound of his curses were as close as they seemed, I wasn’t covering it fast enough,

  He caught up and I yelped, raising my arms as I spun to face him.

  Konstantyn stopped about twenty feet away, his palms outstretched and his chest heaving.

  “You stay the hell away from me,” I warned, trying to inject some threat into my breathless words, when my heart felt like it was going to explode.

  “Do not run,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Yeah, right. Ted Bundy probably said the same to all of his victims. Who the hell are you?”

  “That’s complicated,” he said with unnerving calmness. “But I am not the one who killed your brother.”

  “I saw the photographs of Daniel in your apartment. And all those others. I saw the gun.” I scanned his body for any sign he’d brought it with him, but he was still in his dance clothes from earlier, and those left little to the imagination, and even less room for concealment. “Ivan Zelenko. That’s your real name?”

  He didn’t answer me, yet he didn’t make a move to step closer. That was the only thing that stopped me from screaming ‘til my lungs bled in the hope somebody in the dark-windowed offices overhead might take notice.

  “If you didn’t kill him, then where did you get those photographs? What is your part in all this?” I was desperate. I sounded desperate, and I hated myself, even as I praised myself for not falling apart. He could kill me in a heartbeat, but here we were, engaged in a civilised, terrifying chat.

  “I am with Ukrainian Secret Service. I investigate missing Ukrainian nationals in London.”

  He was some kind of Eastern European double-o-seven? Right, like I was going to buy that.

  “So you’re working with the police?” I said, taking a wary step backw
ards. He didn’t try to gain the upper hand, didn’t move, except to lower his arms and widen his stance.

  He shook his head. “Illegal aliens from my country will not cooperate with your police.”

  “But you think there’s a connection between my brother’s murder and these missing persons?” Let’s just say I was humouring him. I wasn’t going to trust him so easily, not after the photos. God, those photos ...

  “I didn’t know he was your brother before tonight, but now, I think yes.”

  I met his eyes and folded my arms across my chest, trying to look confident, when he made me feel so small, and fear still had me gripped and shaking. “Why?”

  “The studio. The club, Infernal. You think it is coincidence we both turn up looking in the same places? I think maybe you can help me.”

  “So, what, you’re working undercover at the studio and the club?”

  He inclined his head.

  “But you… I mean, in that club. You were…” He’d been prostituting himself. What government worker would go to such lengths for a bunch of missing illegal immigrants who probably didn’t even want to be found?

  “I was gathering intelligence.”

  I couldn’t help my eyeroll. “Is that what you call it?"

  He fixed me in a glare that sparked with those stupid-pretty, angry green flecks. “I danced. What? You think I fucked the clients? I asked for your help, not your judgement.”

  “Why would I help you?”

  “Your brother is dead, Neva. For Mariya, there may still be a chance.”

  “Mariya?” I didn’t know anyone called Mariya.

  “My sister.”

  Realisation dawned and with it, a sick shame at how I’d judged him. This was as personal for him as it was for me. An apology hovered on my lips, but was promptly drowned out by the shrieking approach of sirens.

  “You called the police?”

  Man, he sounded angry, and I held up my hands, warding him off.

  “No, I-” Shit. My hands dropped and my shoulders curled in. I couldn’t look at him as I admitted it. “I left a message on Detective Dalton’s voicemail.”

  “Oliver Dalton?” His expression turned murderous.

  “Yes, he’s the detective on Daniel’s murder case.”

  Disgust growled in his throat. “You told this man you were with me?” His fists clenched and unclenched, his strong jaw tight and twitching.

  “No, I just gave him your name as a suspect. What is the problem here? If you are who you say you are, you have no need to hide from the authorities.”

  He scrubbed a palm over his tight-cropped skull. “Dalton is, how you say? A dirty cop. In the pocket of Gilles.”

  “Who the hell is Gilles?"

  “There is no time now,” he said brusquely. The sirens were getting closer and it added a powerful edge to his movements. Footsteps pounded down the pavement in the distance.

  “Are you going to run?” I asked, straining to see how many were coming.

  He shook his head. “It is you who must run, Neva. You have uncovered too much. They will kill you.”

  I blinked. “Me? What about you?”

  “I will let them take me in, eventually. It will buy you time. Give me your phone, quickly.”

  His tone commanded complete obedience, and I handed it over numbly. He worked the SIM out and destroyed the phone beneath his boot, tossing the shattered components into the Thames.

  Shock put me a few seconds behind, like a program on time-lapse. When I caught up with what he’d done, I gaped. “Why did you do that?”

  “Because they are tracking your movements. How do you think he found you so quickly?”

  “Oh no. No. No. This is all too paranoid. You’re some psycho escaped from an asylum, aren’t you? Forget to take your meds today?” I was losing it.

  He crowded in close. “Listen to me,” he said, his expression grave as he gripped my upper arms. “Your life, my sister’s life may depend on this.”

  He pressed a set of keys into my hand and folded my fingers around them. His skin was warm and I could feel the pulse in his thumb as it brushed over my knuckles. It was hammering.

  “You cannot be found here with me. I will keep them occupied. Go back to my apartment. Remove the evidence you found, the laptop too. When they come to search, there must be nothing to link you to any of this. If they believe I told you anything, the moment they think you’re a threat to Gilles, they won’t hesitate to cut you down.”

  “But I called him. I gave him your name –”

  “Go. Now!”

  I obeyed. God help me, but I believed what he was saying.

  I was out of sight but not earshot when I heard the shouts of the police officers demanding he come forward with his hands visible. It sounded more like an invitation to fight than to surrender, and when the first sickening thud impacted against flesh, I fled.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  With my body running on the fumes of adrenaline, I backtracked shakily to Konstantyn’s apartment. Having taken a roundabout route to avoid the police, I couldn’t even be sure I had the right building; they all looked the same to my panic-hazed mind. Only that the security guard was familiar, I’d have walked right past. Once I spotted him sitting behind his desk, I ducked out of sight and rounded the corner to find the fire exit still open. Remembering the CCTV in the elevator, I took the back stairs just in case. Counting floors as I went, I couldn’t believe I was doing this. For all I knew, I was making myself an accessory to a serial killer. Huffing the hair from my eyes and shoving the mass of it back up from where it had fallen out of its ponytail, I found the front door to his apartment and unlocked it.

  The Ukrainian military sure paid their spies well. Assuming he was who he said he was. The inside was just as I’d left it, though the door to the balcony was ajar, just the hint of a river-scented breeze drifting in to chill my skin. I shut it and grabbed up a pillow from the large bed, shucking off the case and carrying my makeshift bag to the drawer.

  I stared at it for a few seconds.

  Knowing what was inside, the photographs, the passport, the gun, I was reluctant to see it all again. But I had to, just in case he was telling the truth. Even if he wasn’t, I’d have this as evidence against him.

  Bracing myself, I yanked the drawer open and shoved the entire contents into the pillow-case. My fingerprints would already be all over them. Leaving them would be stupid at this point.

  My hand hovered over the handgun I’d left at the bottom of the drawer. I’d never handled one. Gingerly, I plucked it up between my fingertips, dropping it hastily, but carefully in with everything else. The last thing I needed was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. I snatched up his laptop and added that too.

  Hastening back out the way I’d come in, I turned off the main street and wandered in the direction of home, clutching my bag of stolen evidence and trying not to look guilty of anything.

  Were the police already looking for me? Did they think I was involved? I’d called the detective, after all, and he knew where I lived.

  That gave me pause, and I slumped against a wall halfway to my place, torn.

  What had Konstantyn said? A dirty cop.

  I tried to imagine the mild-mannered Oliver Dalton being a criminal. The brown-suit wearing guy with the frumpy wife and buck-toothed kids was more like the victim on Midsummer Murders than the culprit.

  It all seemed ridiculous.

  But it would explain so much: the dead-end leads, the mute witnesses, the police’s seeming disinterest in pursuing Daniel’s killers. Had my suspicions been right all along?

  Konstantyn seemed so sure. He said if they got a whiff of my knowing anything, they’d kill me. But where could I go?

  I had no place to go but the one I rented. My life was in that apartment, and in my job at the gym. We were estranged from my mother’s family, and I didn’t even know who my father was. Nobody I wanted to know, if what my mother said about running to protect me from him was true.
Even if I had family, I wouldn’t want them tangled up in this. Without Konstantyn, I was completely alone in this. He was the secret agent guy. I didn’t know the first thing about changing my identity and going into hiding.

  Besides, I’d done nothing wrong.

  Running would only draw more suspicion. With that in mind, I set myself back on the route to my apartment, passing into the low rent section of town I was currently inhabiting. Here, my pillow-case bag wouldn’t be so strange.

  If ignorance made me safe, I could play up the naivety. I’d do what Konstantyn said and hide the evidence.

  Konstantyn. Ivan. Lazarus. Whatever his name was. Sighing, I pushed into my apartment with my stolen goods, and wondered what the police were doing to him now.

  Being out in the open, even in the relative safety of my apartment, proved too much for my frazzled nerves. I locked myself in my bedroom and climbed up onto the bed with the pillow-case. First, I removed the gun, and set it aside, far aside. Then I reached for something that didn’t have the potential to blast my head off: his passport. Well, Ivan Zelenko’s passport. I flipped to the photo page and stared at his face. Fiercely handsome, angled, those full lips retained an edge of savagery even in his photo. His hair was slightly longer, not so cropped, and fairer, but there was no mistaking him.

  I skimmed the name again, the date of birth, nothing that told me the truth of who he was. If he had one false identity, he could have countless others.

  “Who are you?” I murmured, looking down at the sadness I had to be imagining in the picture’s face. Photographs could lie, but the desperation in his eyes when he’d spoken about his sister was something you couldn’t fake, not with someone who knew.

  I recalled what he’d said to me: Your brother is dead. For Mariya, there may still be a chance. Harsh words, but true. Nothing I did was going to bring Daniel back. Closure was as much as I could hope for. Was I insane, risking my own life, chasing justice for my brother’s ghost? Then again, if Konstantyn spoke true, if there were others?

  There were others.

  I had evidence, and it lay in the pillowcase I upended on my duvet. I squeezed my eyes shut as the photos spilled out, and steeled myself to look at them again. Opening one eye, and then the other, I took up the image closest to me.