The Marriage (Darkest Lies Trilogy Book 3)

by Bethany-Kris

  We’re going to end this, Karine ... we have to end this.

  Cherie came with her, riding in the backseat together to the estate he had successfully bid on and purchased the month before, according to the woman who supplied his steady stream of pussy.

  Was it possible that the only reason Maxim’s plan might work was because of Dima’s predictability?

  It’s not that easy, she knew.

  Karine still had to finish it.

  Neither woman spoke much on the drive. Karine was lost, toeing the cruel edge of her thoughts just enough to hear what she wanted, but reject the pressing urge of her fear to take control.

  What happened tonight if this did work? Would Karine really be free, like her father promised—what did that even mean now?

  “Are you going to be able to handle this?”

  Cherie’s voice interrupted Karine’s peace, mere minutes before they entered the gates to the suburban estate just outside city limits.

  Maybe the woman had sensed Karine’s fragility—she bet that was exactly why Cherie was as revered as she was feared by her girls. She knew right where it hurt, and the quickest way to find it.

  The thing was ... Karine already hurt everywhere. She was getting really tired of that pain being poked.

  She smiled, reaching for the hat that sat between them on the car’s backseat, and fixed it on her head. The floppy brim covered half her face. For too long, she’d used a mask to hide away from things she didn’t want to face. For the first time, Karine was exactly where she wanted to be, doing just what she needed to do.

  Even if it terrified her.

  “Of course, I can handle this,” Karine replied just as fast. “The question is—can you?”

  *

  The men who led them into the house said very little, while Karine didn’t even bother looking around. She had no interest in assessing the lay of the land when her task there was the only thing she was interested in.

  To be left completely alone with Dima.

  She couldn’t help but notice how Cherie and the men at the large estate moved around one another like they had done this dance before. From how they opened the limo door, to the curt nod each man passed the madame when they had walked through the front doors. The place did need some work, as the gate was broken, and the driveway had cracks in the asphalt.

  The inside was about the same.

  Old.

  Tired.

  He won’t think twice about it, Cherie had told Karine on the way over about her coming along. It’s the only way I can get a girl back in a livable piece as it is with the asshole.

  Karine didn’t ask for more details.

  She didn’t really need to, though.

  Cherie remained downstairs while one of the men gestured for Karine to follow. She gave the madame one last look as she was led up a winding, metal staircase to the second floor of the quiet mansion.

  She could still hear the woman’s warnings from earlier in the car.

  Don’t meet his gaze.

  Do what he says, he won’t suspect a thing.

  He usually starts with a belt ...

  Karine had counted every step. Across the entry, up the stairs, and even down a long corridor until they stood outside a door to a room where she could hear some muffled sound. Every fourth step, she’d taken a breath.

  She needed to remind herself to do it.

  And why she was here ...

  For Roman.

  For her sister.

  God ... for herself.

  She didn’t bother to peer beyond the brim of the floppy hat to see the face of the man who directed her where to stand. She was too busy remembering the way her sister had begged that night, and how much Dima enjoyed it.

  The man knocked hard on the door. Dima’s voice came through. Commanding. Grotesque.

  Dull.

  She didn’t expect him to sound so flat.

  Like he was bored.

  Goosebumps bloomed on her arms, and like she was floating in a dream, with no control over her own legs, she strolled into the room when the man opened the door. He shut it noiselessly behind her.

  The bedroom was big, but not well-decorated with Dima standing at the end of the bed. A glass of vodka in his hand, and the big screen TV with a rugby game playing that he put on mute explained the muffled noise. His eyes remained glued to the screen even while she stood there, trembling at the sight of him.

  She was too close to him.

  Her heart didn’t just race, it screamed.

  Karine had spent every waking and sleeping moment these past months—hoping she would never have to see him again.

  And there he was.

  Dima held the glass up to his lips, without glancing at her once. “Take off your clothes and open the drawer next to the bed.”

  He usually starts with a belt ...

  “You’ll find what I want in there. Bring it to me on your knees.”

  Karine breathed in deeply—just once so she could feel all that air fill up her lungs, as dusty as it tasted on her tongue, it still settled her. She said nothing as she slipped out of the dress, but she did feel Dima’s gaze following her as her back was turned. Maybe the long blonde hair did it, but as the dress dropped to the floor, he didn’t seem to recognize the body he’d used and abused for years.

  In fact, the TV came off mute, and when she chanced a glance over her shoulder, under the brim of the hat, she found him watching the game again.

  Karine didn’t bother losing the hat.

  Or her bra and panties.

  Not even the heels.

  She did open the drawer, and there, she found the belt. As she picked it up, she found the other thing Cherie promised the girls reported that Dima kept in the drawer.

  A knife.

  He truly did enjoy scaring them.

  He got off on the fear.

  Karine picked the blade up, too.

  Then, she turned for him, getting close enough to make him turn to her. His brows furrowed while his face darkened with irritation.

  “Didn’t you fucking hear what I just said? Get that stupid fucking hat off your head, and the rest, too,” he snarled.

  Karine held out the belt instead, keeping the knife hidden behind her other hand at her side. Angrily, Dima reached for it, angry his scene wasn’t playing out the way he’d scripted it.

  He didn’t see the knife coming, and every stab she made into his throat left her with a slice of her own to pay for what she had to do.

  She didn’t even feel it, though.

  All she saw was the blood.

  *

  “It’s very personal,” Cherie had told Karine earlier. “Stabbing someone, I mean. You’ll have to make it fast, hard, right in his throat, and then don’t stop until he’s not moving. I don’t think you realize—”

  “What other choice do I have? Can I walk in there with a gun?”

  Would she have even been able to shoot it?

  She understood what Cherie really wanted to ask—do you know how to kill a man? The sad thing was, she did. Cruelly, Dima showed her once exactly how to get the job done.

  Nonetheless, the madame had been right. Karine didn’t realize just how much work it would take, how close she would be when Dima took his last breath, or even the way his dark pupils would blow so wide as he mumbled his final gurgled words ...

  And she couldn’t forget it.

  It sounded so much better than the memories of Katina’s death.

  If there were ever a time for Karine to disassociate, tonight would have been it. Yet, she maintained control. Whether or not that was a sign things were changing for her, she didn’t know.

  But she dared to hope.

  Karine kept a tight hold on the bloody knife that she’d used to kill Dima as she headed back downstairs. It left a trail of tiny drops the whole way.

  Cherie hadn’t left the entry of the large home. Karine hadn’t been able to take a gun up with her, but she knew the madame had brought along t
wo that she kept hidden inside her fur coat.

  “It’s done?” she asked when Karine reached the bottom steps.

  “His stable is yours.”

  The woman smiled and looked in the direction of the room at the far end of the entry, down the hall beyond the winding staircase. “That’s his office—if Dima’s distracted, his boys think it’s time to play. I always bring them a little something, too.”

  Karine raised a brow at that.

  Cherie only shrugged. “I do what I’ve got to do. I laced the coke with fentanyl. You’re a mess.”

  She didn’t know what to make of this woman.

  Or was that entirely the point?

  “Do you know who I really am?” Karine asked the madame, ignoring the way her hands stung and ached from the many cuts that crisscrossed her palms and fingers.

  Cherie was already heading for the office, pulling the guns from beneath her coat. “Of course I do—a long time ago, Maxim paid well, too.”

  Just like Cherie said, the three men in the room were already high.

  And starting to nod off.

  For the first time in her life—Karine wasn’t afraid of walking in through a door without knowing what she would find on the other side. The men who should have been watching Dima’s back barely reacted to the women slipping inside the room, and one even started to lift his head up where he’d slumped in a chair.

  That was the man Cherie shot first.

  Right between the eyes.

  Only then did the other two move.

  “Holy fuck—”

  Karine ignored the brain matter spattered up the wall as she took the high-back chair behind the large, old desk and sat down, declaring as she did, “Chicago is being taken over by the Avdonins.”

  She kept her back straight in that chair and spoke in the same manner she had witnessed her father use all her life. Back when all she could do was observe him from afar because she wasn’t a part of his circle.

  Now she was in the center of it.

  In fact, she might have always been.

  “And we’ll be staying right here until they arrive,” she continued.

  The men had nothing to say, barely able to keep their heads up or their eyes open. How many lines had it taken before they realized it wasn’t just coke Cherie snuck them—or did they just not care because high was high?

  What did it matter?

  Karine had to make a phone call.

  TWENTY

  “Are you going to tell her?”

  Across from where his father sat on the private jet, Roman’s gaze drifted away from the porthole window and the flickering lights of a city he’d hoped to never see again.

  “Tell her what?” Roman asked.

  Demyan shrugged as he murmured, “That it was me who killed him.”

  Frankly, Roman’s mind had been running a million miles a minute from the moment he’d gotten word from the bull driving his car that Maxim Yazov was at his parents’ home.

  Blatantly.

  Once upon a time, Roman might have believed he was a bold motherfucker, but compared to Karine’s father, that just wasn’t the case.

  The last thing he’d had time to think about over the past handful of days was whether or not he would tell his wife, a woman he was only partly certain might still want him at all, that his father killed hers. He was still trying to piece together how a supposedly dead man had managed to make so many moves behind the scenes that he’d orchestrated an entire game no one but him really knew they were playing.

  He had a lot to think about.

  Demyan’s bloody hands were only one of them.

  “I don’t know,” he settled on telling his father.

  And this certainly wasn’t a conversation he wanted to be having on a chartered jet to Chicago because a call had come through—Karine had essentially taken over the small estate property where Dima had, for all intents and purposes, declared his headquarters to the Chicago bratva.

  Demyan let out a hard grunt before reaching for the glass of vodka in the gold cup holder. He slammed the remaining alcohol back, waving the cup high for the flight attendant to see, before saying to his son, “Yeah, I don’t know very much, either. I guess you don’t always get to be the hero, though. Sometimes you’re the villain no matter what you do—you’re just a catalyst in someone else’s story. You don’t get to write it.”

  “Philosophical.”

  Demyan shot him a look.

  Roman only shook his head, and smirked. With his gaze back on the porthole, he muttered low, “It’s not always so bad being a villain. I hear they get the best women.”

  That earned him a laugh from his father, but Roman didn’t bother to say more. The attendant refused to refill Demyan’s glass if only because they were putting the bottles away to begin the descent. Here he was, a couple of hours from reuniting with Karine, and he still hadn’t figured out how it all happened.

  Oh, he knew the details.

  He’d been sleeping off a drunk on his father’s office couch when she made the phone call, because, after days of scrubbing away the evidence of her father’s murder, they still couldn’t find her.

  And he didn’t trust the last words of a dead man to be true.

  So when he heard that trembling voice of hers on loudspeaker—her quaking I killed him, Demyan; Chicago is yours—Roman learned what it meant to go on autopilot.

  “He wanted his body to be found publicly. He’s going to be discovered on a park bench tomorrow,” Demyan said suddenly. “It’ll look like a very suspicious suicide.”

  Roman’s brows furrowed at that. He’d only known that the body had been quickly removed from the house along with Claire’s sixty-thousand-dollar rug under the table.

  “He could have just done that,” Roman replied. “Why’d we have to do the business.”

  “You know why—we’re sitting here, Roman, that’s why. And I think he hoped to give Karine a chance to say goodbye in the end, even if he didn’t want to die alone.”

  “I don’t think he ever gave a shit about Karine, let’s be real.”

  “He did. Because he loved her. He loved her more than he could show or tell. I know what that’s like, Roman, to love someone so much and have it taken away. I felt like I couldn’t be loved—but for other people, for him, it felt like love was poison. He wanted her to know he loved her, still.”

  Roman emptied the remaining dregs of his own vodka down his throat, but as he’d opted for a plastic cup instead of glass, the attendant had left him with his drink. Crunching the cup into broken pieces, he tossed it into the cup holder, and told his father, “I don’t give a fuck anymore. I just want to see Karine.”

  *

  This time, unlike their meeting with Dima at the battered farmhouse—the Avdonins were prepared. They arrived at the Chicago estate ready for a battle if they had to face one. Or start it.

  Dima’s men had been scattered and very few in number, to begin with after the old Yazov mansion burned down. He had tried to portray strength when the truth was he had already been deserted by most of the old Yazov crew who had clearly started noticing his ineptitude. He couldn’t even stay in his own city for any length of time to handle mafia business because he’d been too busy raising hell in New York for a woman.

  “What are we going to find inside?” Roman murmured as their car drove in through a broken gate that had needed to be pushed open by a heavily-tattooed man. The upturned spider on his hand told Roman the guy was probably with the Yazov crew.

  What other calls did Karine make?

  Had word traveled that fast that she’d taken over the estate to the men of her father’s organization who would find that information beneficial?

  “I have no idea,” Demyan murmured, “other than there are bodies that need burned, and a woman who would like to be relieved from her position while she holds it for us.”

  Right.

  The other bit he couldn’t quite wrap his head around.

  Roman could
n’t help but wonder if this was all a trick. If Maxim hadn’t spoken to Demyan, and given him the whole story ... well, most of it—then they wouldn’t even have been here.

  Now they had no choice.

  The responsibility of ruined Chicago bratva was on them.

  “Whatever we decide to do here tonight,” his father told him as their car parked in front of a three-level home that had seen better days despite its grandeur, “we’ll have to do it fast.”

  Roman didn’t care. At this point, he just wanted it to be over.

  As the Avdonin crew walked into the house, the men who stood watching the front door did so with their weapons hidden from view. There was going to be no war tonight. They even nodded at the New York boss as he passed, though he didn’t make eye contact.

  It was over.

  Roman was growing more anxious by the minute, his questions about what had happened in this house going unanswered as a woman with a black fur coat draped over her shoulders directed them to an office. The door was already open, and Roman could see who waited within.

  “The famous Cherie?” he heard his father ask as Roman met his wife’s gaze inside the room.

  “One in the same. I took good care of her, made sure she had everything she needed. No one touched her, of course.”

  “Things are starting to make a bit more sense,” Demyan noted.

  Roman didn’t hear what they said then because he’d stepped inside the room. A bloody, white dress sat draped over a chair in the corner, and on top of the ruined fabric rested a knife. The dried, brownish stains on the blade and smeared on the dress made Roman hesitate in his step.

  He heard Karine’s breath hitch when he stopped. He wondered if it was Cherie that had supplied Karine with the clean, black bodycon dress that showed off her curves and made her seem older—sexy, confident—where she sat waiting at the desk.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  It would have been a violent death, and he bet the bandages on her hands and fingers told the tale of just how much. Karine fidgeted with her hands before hiding them under the desk.

  She didn’t hesitate to answer him. “Everything I needed to.”