*****
I stared in frustration at everything and yet nothing. Yes, someone had waited by this tree, but anything more than that was a complete guess. For all I knew it could of been a refugee from the hotel that had stood here.
I doubted it as the aura of evil seemed to linger yet in this place. Sighing I glanced up to the dark morning sky overhead.
Here I was trying to act the part of detective when I had neither freed myself from my jail cell or restored my own soul through any feat of ability that I could conjure up. Submitting myself I then said, as I had often heard Desirée say, “Help me please Abba Father.”
“East. A friend of the past that is no more.”
‘A friend of the past that was no more?’ It was a thing that I pondered on for only a moment before the answer came to me. Alexi.
It was a hard thing to have to revisit the memory of my boyhood friend, who I had killed, as I had been ordered to.
Alexi had wanted out of the game of being an assassin, a killer at the beck and call of the elite of this world. To escape such a life though was hard to do. I would say impossible, if it weren’t for my own current situation.
Alexi hadn’t gone my route to freedom though. He’d stolen something. Something I hadn’t been able to locate no matter how I had looked for it.
I had been disciplined harshly for my failure to find it, but not killed as I had proven my loyalty by killing the only friend I’d ever had as a boy.
“What do you mean by going east?” I asked softly. I looked around and then it suddenly dawned on me what city I was in and who else resided here in exile as it were. Alexi’s father.
Ivan Valprogze was a hard man. A man who had sworn to my face that he’d kill me if ever I stepped foot within his sphere of influence.
Looking down I saw the tattered clothes and a pair of donated slippers that I was clothed with. I didn’t have a weapon or a dollar to my name and yet here I was in a city where an ex-patriot Russian mobster ran his crime syndicate from.
A man, who had once thought as highly of me, as if I were his own son. Such was the case no longer and yet his sector of town was to the east. Coincidence or divine appointment?
I had no choice but to assume the latter if I hoped to save Desirée and so I started walking.
Fallen Ambitions Page 30
