by SR Jones
Ilya strolls up to the reception desk and asks for Konstantin Silvanov. The woman doesn’t even look at her screen. She immediately tells Ilya where we can find K.
Floor C, but he’s in surgery, she tells us.
We head to the elevators and ride in silence to floor C.
The doors whoosh open, and we step out through another set of automatic doors and down a long corridor. I see Andrius, Reece, and Violet all sitting on chairs to our right. Violet looks pale as a ghost. Reece is messing about on his phone, and Andrius is sitting with his face set like stone.
Andrius glances up and sees us and then gets to his feet.
“Thank fuck you’re here,” he says in Russian. “I feel so bad. I checked her bags; I always do. Must have had the fucking gun hidden.” His voice is low but not calm the way he usually is. “She went to the beach with K, Cassie, and the guard. She shot the guard in the back of the head. It killed him instantly from what we’ve been told. Then she shot K. She’s fucked his arm up bad.”
“How did you get him here?” I ask.
“Cassie called, and as soon as I picked up, I was moving. Girl didn’t have to say anything. She was sobbing hysterically. I told her to calm down and tell me clearly what had happened. She said K was shot. I asked her to tell me where, she did, and I grabbed my field first-aid kit. I knew he’d probably need a tourniquet. I called the paramedics and drove down to the beach. I had to give him some field care until they arrived. They were only five minutes, and they’d already called a medivac. Got him here in under twenty. They’re operating, but depending how it goes, and what further surgery he needs, they say it’s likely he’ll need moving to Athens.”
“Shit.” I don’t know what else to say.
“I want that fucking cunt found and killed, you understand me?”
“No,” I say.
Andrius rears back as if I’ve hit him and frowns.
“Listen to me,” I say in a low voice, walking away from the others to the end of the hallway. There’s a set of double doors, and I push through them to find a deserted stairwell. I gesture for Andrius and Ilya to follow me.
“This doesn’t make sense. She didn’t kill him. Why not?” I give them both a hard look. “We can’t simply kill her, not until we know more. It would be stupid.”
“She fucked up,” Andrius says. “Doesn’t mean she gets to live.”
“Think about it, though. If she were some trained assassin, she wouldn’t fuck up, would she?”
Andrius frowns, but I can see I’ve got him thinking.
“K would be dead. She had time with the element of surprise. Why not kill Cassie?”
“I don’t know.” Andrius is getting pissed.
“She’s working for someone. Someone sent her, and I think they sent her under duress.”
“Don’t give a shit. She came onto my property, shot K, and was going to shoot Cassie. I don’t care if aliens from the planet Zog made her do it; she’s dead.”
“Yes, but first, before we kill her, we make her talk,” Ilya says. “Vasily is correct in that this doesn’t add up. Why send someone like her to do this? Why? The only reason I can think of not to hire a professional is you’re some shady-as-shit organization that wants to stay completely off-radar. You and I both know that despite the best intentions, within our world, people often talk. They say things, they brag, and they get found out.”
“Or, like that fucker who was hired years ago to kill Sergei Yuchenkova, they freak out and admit what they have been paid to do because they realize it’s a death sentence,” I supply. I’m referring to a famous case in our world, where a top, feared hitman was paid to kill one of the most feared Pakhans. The hitman got cold feet, went to the Pakhan instead, and fessed up. The guy who hired him was the one who ended up dead.
Shit, but that story hits home hard. Zoey called me, didn’t she? She said she was in trouble. I could have stopped this.
“What do you suggest? We find her. We torture her.” Andrius says this without even blinking.
He’s livid, and I get it, but he’s forgotten all his rules. Those rules served him well.
“Torture isn’t effective,” I remind him. “People will say anything to get it to stop.”
“We’ve got to make her talk somehow,” Ilya says.
“I think I can make her talk. I think she was acting under duress, as I say. I think she’ll gladly talk to us. To be honest, I think she’ll be hiding out, terrified and worried either we, or those in charge of her, are going to kill her. She fucked up. She didn’t execute the hit, which means she’s a dead woman walking. What if we offer her sanctuary?”
Andrius slams his hand against the wall. “No fucking way. She came onto my property, and you want me to let it go? That gives the green light to every fucker to come after me.”
“Not if you only give her sanctuary for as long as we need her to help us,” Ilya supplies. “We get her to help us, if what Vasily presumes turns out to be correct, and then when we’re done with her, we kill her.”
Shit. They seem stuck on killing her, and as angry as I am at her for what she’s done, I don’t want her dead. Now that I’ve calmed down from the original shock, I know as much.
I’m not sure of anything beyond that, but I don’t want her dead. Still, Ilya’s plan buys time. It gives me the chance to find her first, before whoever oversees her does, and persuade her to talk.
“I need to talk to Cassie,” I say.
“She’s sleeping right now. They gave her a mild sedative. As soon as she wakes, we can talk to her.” Andrius runs a hand through his hair. He looks fucked. Weary, tired, and depressed.
I don’t blame him. He keeps trying to leave this life, and it keeps on reaching out for him, like some undead zombie, coming at him relentlessly, no matter what.
That's this life, though; it doesn't leave you alone. It never leaves you alone.
Footsteps from down the hall have me turning around. Oh shit. Damen, one of the Greek Mafia I asked to look into Zoey, is walking toward us, his face grim. I know the minute he opens his mouth and starts talking, I'm in so much trouble.
I brace and prepare myself for what's about to hit as he approaches. He’s about to give away to Ilya and Andrius that I called him and asked him to look into Zoey. Fuck.
“So…” Damen shakes his head and launches straight into what he's come to say. “You won't believe who popped up onto the radar literally one hour ago, Vasily.”
Oh, I think I will believe it. My heart sinks.
“I was on my way here when I got an alert. I've been tracking law enforcement chatter for a week or so, to see if anything pops up on our little suspect,” he tells me.
Andrius turns to me, and there is thunder in his already stormy gaze.
I swallow but look away and focus on Damen. “Go on,” I say.
“It seems that as of an hour ago, Zoey is being tracked by Interpol and all the other major agencies. There's an alert out for her, and it's global. Makes no sense, and I can't figure this out for the life of me. How the hell does a woman who's been completely and utterly her whole life a paragon of virtue, according to her online life and everything that I found out, suddenly become wanted by all the major crime agencies in the world.”
Andrius is breathing like an angry bull, and I keep one eye on him in case he suddenly charges me.
“You've been looking into Zoey?” Andrius asks Damen.
Damen nods, either unaware of his building anger or unfazed by it. “Yeah, Vasily asked me to as a favor.”
“You utter, lying sack of shit.” Andrius shakes his head and blows out a long breath, visibly attempting to calm himself.
“I can explain,” I tell him. “I didn't want to say anything until I was sure. It wasn't based on anything solid. I had a weird feeling there was something off about the girl. I can't explain it or put my finger on it, and frankly, looking into her felt stupid. Even more so when Damen didn't find anything, and any information on her was basical
ly normal.”
Andrius shakes his head and starts to pace, his hands bunching into tight fists. “It's not your call, V. You don't get to keep things like this from me. Not from Konstantin.”
I reign in my temper and try to speak calmly. “Actually, it is my call. K put me in charge; I'm the one who heads things up now, and you guys made it clear that you didn't want anything to do with that world anymore. I was doing what I thought was best. Assessing a threat before I came to you guys is completely legit. If I had found anything whatsoever, you would have been the first to know. As it was, neither myself, nor Damen, found anything concrete on the girl.”
“When someone comes onto my property...” Andrius thumps his chest as he speaks. “Then it is my business, and you should have come to me.”
“Perhaps you should have better security,” I say. I really shouldn't be taunting the bull, but right now he's pushing my every last limit. “After all, you say you check every guest. How come you didn't find the gun?”
“I searched her thoroughly, and that's what makes me so suspicious about this whole thing, period. I looked in her bag, and I didn't just look, I used a scanner and nothing. I didn't see that gun. It had to be expertly hidden.”
Ilya clears his throat. “This whole thing is pointing to somebody extremely powerful and organized, but using a badly trained woman to hit us. It makes sense in some ways, as we've already discussed because you don't run the risk of people talking in our circles. Then again, as we've just seen, you run the risk of the person you're using not being able to execute the task.”
“I'm going with the idea this Zoey is somebody who's been acting under duress or force to some degree,” Damen adds. “The fact that her file was so perfect raised the alarm, and no matter how much digging we did, we couldn't find anything. It leads me to believe that some very powerful people are pulling her strings. The fact that she failed and is now wanted by every law enforcement agency the world over absolutely confirms my suspicion. I think we're looking at some sort of possible quasi-governmental, and I hate to say this because I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but deep state, hybrid organization. Maybe they are private, but they work with various states. Whatever they are and however they work. We can pretty much assume they're extremely powerful. So the question should really be, who are they, and why did they come after K?”
Andrius is still pacing like that damn bull, still breathing hard, in and out through his nose, and I can see that any minute his patience is going to snap. He turns slowly, swiveling his head toward Damen. “We've been friends a long time, and you didn't think to tell me this? You didn't think to come to me when Vasily was asking you to investigate this woman? You knew she was coming onto my property, but you kept this from me?”
Damen shakes his head and widens his stance. It's as if he also feels that at any minute Andrius might snap. I hope not. The last thing any of us need is a hospital brawl and us all thrown out of here before I get the chance to speak to Cassie.
“Andrius, I didn't keep anything from you.” Damen is calm, measured, and it’s reassuring. “I didn't find anything to keep from you. Everything was clean, and it was a bit too clean yes, but there wasn't any smoking gun. I dug, and I dug, and I tried to hack into every aspect of her life, but nothing. There were no cracks, and there were no tiny clues of her life and her past being invented or put together by outside forces in the way that you would normally see. I agreed with Vasily that everything was a little bit too perfect, but there wasn't anything that I could point to which showed there was a definite threat.”
“So did you just assume that she was safe?” Ilya asks.
“Basically, yes,” Damen replies. “Vasily had this feeling but nothing more, and he asked me to look into her. I found nothing. Yeah, okay, her life was a little bit squeaky clean, and by that I mean not even one bit of missing medical information. Not one year where her notes have been lost. Not a few months where she fell off the radar. You know most people, maybe they lose a job and they have a couple of months before they claim any unemployment benefits because they think they'll get another job, and that's maybe a month or two where there's not really any information on them. Other people, they move doctors and there might not be any medical notes for a while. There might be a blank where there may have been some data lost, and that’s common. With her, everything was there. Her education, every single exam result, every single job she'd ever done. They were all linear and well organized without any employment gaps. Every single year was covered by medical notes, and they were fairly bland, I have to say. Even when she was just working for herself as an illustrator and not earning much money, all her records were intact. She was paying the rent on time every month it. It was perfect, and it made me a little bit suspicious, but I went digging and I found nothing. To be honest, if every time we found a person with a perfect record to be so suspicious that we told everyone about it, there would probably be a lot of innocent people being targeted.” He gives a harsh laugh. “You can’t go after someone for a lack of evidence, you know? I feel bad because I screwed up, but honestly, myself and Vasily, we didn't find anything. And although I personally feel badly that I failed to get into her real background, I don't think either myself or him were in the wrong in not coming to you guys with this because I basically assumed she was legit.”
“I'm letting this go for now because we need to work together and focus on finding this bitch,” Andrius states. “It's not forgotten, though, and we will be revisiting this at some point in the future because I am not a happy man.”
He opens his mouth, as if he's about to say something else, but a nurse bursts through the doors. “Cassie is awake now,” she says nervously, glancing around us all. “Maybe one of you can go talk to her because she is tired and very upset.”
As she stares at us, her face pales, and I imagine we hardly look like a respectable bunch of men. We’re all big, most of us are inked, and we’re livid with one another, so the air must crackle with tension. Not wanting her to be terrified, I soften my features and smile. “Listen, I know that she's tired, but Cassie will want us all to speak to her if possible. She needs our help right now in trying to find who did this to our friend. So if we promise to be quick and not stress her, could we all possibly go in? We would like to see her too. She’s a good friend.”
That last bit is somewhat of a lie. I don't think Cassie really likes me, and I doubt she ever will. She seems to have softened considerably toward Bohdan, but me … I guess she'll always have a dislike for me. I can't blame her either because I made things hard for her at the start and never made her feel particularly welcome. I need her to trust me now, though, and to understand that I'm going to do everything I can to sort this mess out and keep her safe.
The nurse doesn’t answer at first, but I can see with the half shrug of her shoulders that she's going to give in to my request.
“Okay,” she says. “Please don't tire her out, though, as she's very fragile still.”
We all mutter promises that we won't stress Cassie out and then file through the doors one by one into her hospital room.
The moment I see Cassie, my heart tugs painfully. She looks tiny and pale in the hospital bed. Her hair is pulled back from her face in a band, and she doesn't have her usual sunny demeanor. Instead, Cassie looks like a mixture of sorrow and rage. These are emotions I've never seen her wear before.
She reaches for Andrius, who goes straight to her and takes her hand.
She stares up at him, her face as serious as I’ve ever seen it. “I want you to find that girl,” she says in a throaty whisper, “and you kill her.”
I'm shocked at her words. I naively thought she'd be one of the few people on my side, calling for mercy for Zoey. I guess she really does love Konstantin with a fierceness that I hadn’t understood before. What if there are recording devices in this room? I doubt it, but you never know. I dart a nervous glance at Andrius, and he winces at Cassie’s words.
�
�Shush,” he says softly. “You don’t know what you’re saying.” Then he winks at Cassie and says very clearly, “I will do everything I can to find Zoey. And I will make it right. That is my solemn promise.” Andrius squeezes Cassie’s hand. “First, though, we need to find who did this, who planned it, and who put her in place to do it because she wasn't working for herself. We need to find her and … talk with her.”
Cassie’s face twists, and a tear falls down her cheek. She lifts her hand and wipes it away roughly as if angry at herself for crying. “Thank you,” she whispers. “I know you’ll do the right thing.”
Andrius nods, sober and serious. “Always.”
“I keep replaying it over and over in my mind,” she says. “K was on top of me, and I thought he was dead. For an awful long moment, I thought he was dead.” She sobs, and the sound tugs at my heart.
“Cassie,” I say. She turns to me, and the trust she has in Andrius disappears as she gazes at me. Her face smooths out and hardens slightly as she briskly wipes away the tears on her cheeks, composing herself.
I dig deep, trying to find the words to make this right.
“Listen,” I say. “I know we've not got off to the best of starts, and I apologize for that because it's all on me. But you need to understand something. You and I might not be good friends, but Konstantin is one of my best friends in this world. In fact, he is family. I'm going to do everything I can to find Zoey; I promise you that. Then I'll do everything I can to get her to tell me who made her do this. I'm going to find the people who are after us, and I'm going to put them out of business once and for all. But to do that, I need to know everything that happened on that beach. I need you to trust me and understand that in this moment, I'm on your side one hundred percent.”
Andrius looks at me with surprise in his eyes. I've always had a reputation of being hard faced, which amongst these men is something to behold. I am hard, but I can admit when I’ve been wrong and take it on the chin if it means getting Cassie to talk to me.
