The house was dark, no lights on inside, no lights on the porch. He pulled the gun from his waistband and rang the doorbell impatiently, imagining Stan would open the door and…pop. The pharmacist would be dead, and his latest set of problems would be solved.
Stan made him wait. As he stood on the front porch, he felt a prickle on his neck. Someone was watching him.
Blyad! He hadn’t given a moment’s thought to how this all might look—a man in leather pants taking a nighttime jog through a residential neighborhood and then pulling a gun.
He held the gun against his thigh. Maybe whoever was watching wouldn’t see. Maybe they’d turn away.
The streetlights lit up the street, but Aleksei stood in the shadows of the house. Maybe whoever was watching couldn’t really see him.
What if he got caught?
He hadn’t thought this through, hadn’t thought any of it through. Stan needed to be silenced. That was certain. But if Aleksei botched the hit, there would be a ripple of consequences.
The cops might come after him anyway, this time for murder. Inevitably, once they discovered his motive, they’d link him back to the murder at Troika, despite Mikhail’s “foolproof” planning.
He’d watched his share of detective shows on TV, knew how they collected forensic evidence and DNA samples. Sure, Mikhail had procured an unmarked gun for him, but was that enough insurance that the authorities wouldn’t be able to trace a bullet back to him?
The detectives on the shows were smart, almost always smarter than the criminals, certainly smarter than Aleksei.
But that was TV. A good bribe, he reminded himself, could make even the smartest man change sides and suddenly turn stupid or accidentally lose damning evidence or even a witness.
He didn’t have to do this perfectly. He just needed to shell out enough money to cover his tracks.
He would have paid Stan if he’d had a prayer of collecting a million dollars by the ridiculous deadline and if he actually believed Stan wouldn’t plague him for more.
What was taking Stan so long to answer? Aleksei rang the doorbell again. Didn’t the asshole want his money?
If Stan was peeping at him through the window, he would see that Aleksei didn’t have a briefcase or anything that might possibly hold the cash he’d demanded. And he hadn’t pulled up in a car; so there wasn’t even the possibility it was in the trunk.
Aleksei grabbed the handle of the door, not sure what he would do, but prepared to force his way in. He was surprised when it opened easily.
He stepped into the house, where he would be shielded from any watchful eyes on the block. The wood in the hallway creaked under his steps. He tried to walk on tiptoe, but his pointy-toe shoes weren’t designed for stealth.
He stayed alert, trying to see everything all at once, looking this way and that, prepared for a sneak attack.
With all the aplomb of a drunken teenager sneaking home after curfew, he bumped his hip on the hall table and sent a vase crashing to the floor.
He froze and gripped his gun with both hands. The living room and dining room were both dark, but he could see light spilling from the doorway farther down the hall, presumably to the kitchen.
Stop pretending to be a big man. Stop pretending. Stop pretending.
His palms grew sweaty inside his gloves. He told himself that when the time came, he would pull the trigger. At close enough range, he couldn’t possibly miss.
He would stop Stan’s taunting voice forever.
He crossed the threshold into the kitchen and froze. The linoleum floor was covered with blood, and the scent was thick in the air.
Dizziness overtook him. He felt his body sway. Bozhe moy! He had seen dead bodies before, but few like this one—nearly decapitated, soaked in a bath of its own blood. He reached for the table to steady himself.
He recognized the handiwork by reputation. The carving and bloodletting were Dato’s signature.
Stan wouldn’t have a chance to go to the police now, but what had he told the Georgians? Would they be coming for Aleksei next?
KATYA
KATYA’S PHONE STARTED ringing. Feeling too low to talk to anyone, she ignored it. The ringing stopped and then started again. Katya glanced at the caller i.d. and finally picked up.
Jack, her sister’s husband, was trying to reach her. Urgently.
“What’s wrong?”
“You need to turn on the news.” Usually calm and collected, Jack sounded shaken.
With a sense of dread, Katya picked up the remote from the large glass and chrome coffee table and turned to the local news station.
The announcer stood outside a broken picture window at a restaurant. The brick front of the establishment was charred, the remaining glass of the window in sharp, jagged points. Blue and red lights flashed on the announcer’s face, and the camera panned to ambulances and police cars on a familiar stretch of Brighton Beach Avenue.
The black awning hung in shreds from the front door of her husband’s nightclub. The stenciled horses on the doors were gone, the glass shattered.
“Bozhe moy!” Katya gasped and shuddered. Reflexively, she placed a hand protectively over her belly, over the baby growing inside.
“Eyewitnesses say the assailants were throwing Molotov cocktails,” the announcer said. “Three people are dead and many more injured.”
“I’m fine. So’s Becca. Shaken. But fine,” he said.
“Aleksei,” Katya whimpered.
“I don’t know where he is. I saw him with Mikhail not long before the fire.”
Jack’s tone was brusque, and she felt a surge of unease.
“The police want to talk to him. He’s not answering his phone. I don’t know where the hell he is. Do you?” Jack was angry at Aleksei. Why?
“He hasn’t called me. I don’t know where he is,” she said, fighting panic. Had the culprits grabbed him and taken him somewhere else? Someone capable of throwing Molotov cocktails in a nightclub had no scruples, could do anything to anyone.
Aleksei could be in real trouble. He could be hurt. Her heart thumped heavily in her chest. She loved him, worried for him, even if he wasn’t the man she thought she had married.
This couldn’t be a coincidence. A murder a few nights ago. A blackmail threat last night. A fire tonight. No, not a fire, an attack, and all too close to home.
“The police are looking for him.” The statement sounded like a rebuke. Did Jack blame Aleksei for the attack?
Katya herself suspected Aleksei’s involvement in a world she didn’t want to know, in activities she couldn’t condone, ones completely at odds with her values and her profession as a lawyer.
But she couldn’t turn her heart on and off like a tap. Love still flowed, whether or not he deserved it. And he would always be the father of her baby.
“Did they say why?” Katya asked. She was still willing to hear the evidence, still hoping that she could somehow try her husband and find him not guilty, still hoping that the things she had heard the other night were all a misunderstanding.
From the living room, she noticed the shiny black SUVs idling in front of her house. With dark tinted windows and gold rims, they didn’t look anything like cop cars.
A man in a trench coat with a bottle in one hand and a brick in the other strode up her front walk. Molotov cocktails.
“Ohmigod. Jack, call 9-1-1 and send them to my house.” She raced for the kitchen and the back door. She could run through the yard and make an escape.
“What? Why?”
“Just do it! Someone’s here.” She hung up the phone. She took a precious moment to disable the alarm—better not to have it go off and announce her escape.
She grabbed the knob to the back door, but something in the window caught her eye. A shadowy figure moved toward her from the side of the house. She backed away from the door. She couldn’t get out, not without whoever was out there seeing her.
Where could she hide if they entered the house? Where would she be safe
if they threw a firebomb?
She threw open the basement door. Hoping the man out back didn’t glimpse her through the kitchen window, she closed the door behind her and fled down the steps. She hurried down the darkened staircase and across the finished part of the basement. With only the dimmest light shining through the high rectangular windows, she found the storage room door at the back.
Once she slipped through the door and closed it behind her, she was surrounded by thick darkness. She fumbled around, feeling her way to the back wall. She didn’t dare turn on a light that would give any seekers a clue to where she might have gone.
Finally, she found the crawl space. The rough cinder blocks scratched her skin as she hoisted herself up into the unfinished space that she used as a deep shelf.
There was nothing in here, only some old suitcases. She crawled behind the largest one. It might hide her if someone thought to peer back here. With no light, the space around her felt desolate and a little spooky.
She pulled her knees to her chest. She placed a hand over her belly and promised her baby she would do everything she could to keep them both safe.
MAYA
MAYA PRESSED HER fingers to the glass of the car window. She watched in horror as Dato’s henchman marched up Aleksei’s driveway and shattered the leaded glass framing the grand double door of Aleksei’s house.
Maya expected he would next let himself in. Maybe loot the place or search for Aleksei and Katya. Instead, he hurled a brick through the front picture window, leaving a large, jagged hole.
Then the man lit the bottle he was holding and lobbed it through the hole he’d made near the door. The glass that was still intact glittered with orange flame.
He pulled another bottle from his trench coat, lit that one, and pitched it into Aleksei’s living room. In moments, smoke billowed from both points of entry, and Maya could only imagine the damage inside.
All the nice things Aleksei and Katya had accumulated, the signs of their success and prosperity, would be destroyed.
She watched for signs of Katya or Aleksei. So far, no one had come out of the house. The devastation to their home would be awful, but what if they were home and trapped inside the fireball?
Behind her, Dato laughed. “Your son brought this on himself,” he said as if reading her thoughts and reveling in them. “If he’s home, we’ll smoke him out—or fry him.”
How long would it take the whole house to burn to the ground? She closed her eyes. She couldn’t watch.
Dato gripped her chin in his hand and turned her face toward him, forcing her to open her eyes and look at him. “No one fucks with me and mine,” he said.
“What do you plan to do?” Fear made her words a stuttering whisper. She could hardly swallow past the lump in her throat.
“Whatever I want.”
He placed his large, olive hand on her thigh. Her heartbeat quickened. Her chest felt so tight that she didn’t dare take the gasping breath she badly wanted.
She tried to shift away from him, but his grip tightened until she did gasp. The sound made him smile. His gold teeth glittered in the moonlight. He moved his face closer to hers, and she involuntarily reared her head back until she bumped against the headrest.
He bore down on her knee and thigh, letting her know he could touch her however he liked, however intimately he wanted, and that he’d give her no quarter. She squeezed her eyes shut again rather than look at him.
His breath was warm on her face. He smelled of lemons and aftershave—a surprisingly clean and pleasant smell, but not enough to cover the stench of blood on him or to overcome her absolute revulsion.
He caught her lower lip in his teeth and tugged almost gently. The he bit her hard.
She could taste the trickle of blood in her mouth. Never in her life had she been so powerless. This man was a barbarian who gloried in destruction.
Dato pulled back and laughed. “I enjoyed that more than I expected,” he said. “When I’m done with you, maybe I’ll even send you back to your husband—as a lasting reminder of who truly rules Brighton Beach.”
Bile filled her throat. If she were a heroine in a movie, now would be the moment when she lifted her chin and told the Georgian villain that her husband would finish him if he hurt a hair on her head. But she feared Artur might be relieved if she came home in a body bag.
So she lifted her chin and kept quiet. This wasn’t a movie, and no one would ever have cast her as the leading lady. Not anymore. Her time in the spotlight had been all too brief.
Dato gripped her chin again and steered her gaze back to Aleksei’s house. The drapes caught fire. The inside of her son’s dream house glowed brightly as the furniture and cabinets and light fixtures were swallowed in bright flames.
In a few minutes, the whole structure would be nothing but ash and the stones from the fireplace.
“You like that?” Dato crooned in her ear, as if he were a solicitious lover. “We’ll hit your son’s pharmacies next.”
All of Aleksei’s hard work, his hopes and ambitions, the dream life he’d finally started to achieve—Dato was destroying everything. Even if Aleksei survived, what would he have left? She felt a mother’s pain for her child’s loss.
“Why?”
“An eye for an eye,” Dato said. “He stole from my business and killed my man. He thought he’d get away with it, but he won’t. I’ll take everything from him. His business. His home. His family.”
“It wasn’t Aleksei,” she said, pleaded. “He didn’t do anything to you.”
“No? Who did, then? Tell me what you know, Mrs. Koslovsky.” He squeezed her jaw with his long fingers.
“No answer? We’ll collect your whore of a daughter next,” he threatened.
“It was me,” she said. “All of it was me. I’m the mastermind. I made the drugs for him and told him where and how to sell them.”
Dato let go of her and then slapped her hard across the cheek. Her skin smarted, but she didn’t dare feel the spot with her hands. His dark eyes burned through her. “I don’t like liars. Do it again, and I’ll cut out your tongue.”
She snapped her mouth shut. In the rearview mirror, she caught sight of the driver watching her and Dato with his good eye. She couldn’t read his emotions—whether he also thought she was lying, whether he felt sympathy for her, whether he wanted to revel in destruction the way his boss did.
Yet, through the separation between the front driver’s and passenger’s seat, she saw him fumble with her backpack. He sneaked a hand inside and stole a wad of the poisoned cash. Human nature was so dependably consistent.
Maybe all wasn’t lost.
INNA
WHEN INNA FINALLY arrived at the precinct and was seated in an “interview” room, her clothes stuck to her skin. The dampness wasn’t from the rain and drizzle outside, but her own sweat.
Her palms and forehead were slick with a sheen of perspiration, no matter how often she tried to wipe it away, and her mouth was unbearably dry. She had a tremor in her hands.
Her own weakness, her body’s betrayal, galled her. She had come so far, survived so much. She had even managed to get herself to work this morning.
And now she could hardly cope, could hardly breathe.
Falling apart. She was simply falling apart. She couldn’t handle the stress of all of this. She was going to die—if not at the hands of whoever was stalking her, then from the strain.
Detective Hersh entered the interrogation room and gave her a pitying glance. “Do you need something? Maybe a cup of coffee?”
“Water,” she croaked, breath coming fast, as if she were running. Her chest burned. Her mind sent the right signals to calm down, to breathe. But her body had other ideas. The panic she’d almost banished now took over her involuntary functions.
She needed a pill and peace and quiet. She needed to go home and lock her door and wrap herself in her down comforter and tell herself she was safe.
That tactic had worked in the past, when
she could dismiss her imaginings about the intrigue around her as fantasy. But she couldn’t imagine away the horrible, violent things that had happened in the past few days. Those things had really happened. There were witnesses and evidence.
And victims. Vlad and Nick had both been shot. Igor was dead.
No one patted her soothingly and told her she was imagining things now, least of all Detective Hersh.
“Have you heard what happened at Troika tonight?” the detective asked.
She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.
“Someone decided to throw a few Molotov cocktails and light up the place.”
“What?” She blinked at him. Surely she was hearing things.
“Firebombs. At the nightclub. Three people are dead, and more seriously injured.” He explained, as if he were almost reluctant to break the news to her.
“Is Aleksei okay?” she asked. “And Jack? Were they there?”
“We’re looking for your brother. We need to question him,” Hersh said. “But we don’t think he was there. Jack is fine. Any idea why someone would try to catch their nightclub on fire? Or target you?”
“No. None.”
“What do you know about your brother’s business?”
“You mean the nightclub? Or the pharmacies?”
“Does he work with your father?”
“No. They had a falling out. Papa wanted him to make it on his own.”
“But your father let you join the business.”
She thought she detected the slightest challenge in his words, a hint of doubt.
“Sort of,” she said. “I run my design business out of the import-export office, and I order furniture and decorative items through the company that I think will appeal to our clients. He’s my partner in that, but the rest is his show.”
“The rest?”
“The alcohol and packaged goods.” And the mysterious deliveries she had previously refused to consider. She took a sip of the water, almost spilling it from the Styrofoam cup with the shaking in her hands.
Kings of Brighton Beach Bundle Page 25
