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I nod slowly. Safe? Is she fuck; I have plans for her. I’ll let you in on that little doozy shortly, brat.
“Let me ask you something.” I suppress the urge to glare and opt for an expression of benign interest. “When this is all said and done, will you offer me a place in your bratva?”
Arman shakes his head. “No, tovarishch. We don’t do things that way. Truthfully, if I’d known you were back on the coke, I wouldn’t have asked for your help in the first place.” He shrugs. “I’m also not crazy about your desire to bail on your pakhan after everything he’s done for you. Doesn’t say much for your sense of loyalty. Go back to Chicago with your reward, and instead of snorting away every dollar, consider cleaning up your life. We need disciplined men around here. I appreciate what you’ve done, but that’s it.”
I knew the answer already, but hearing him say it was the last straw.
Arman turns to walk inside, and I bring my leather sap down on the base of his skull. It’s as though I turned him off at the wall; he crumples to the ground with a grunt, hitting his head on the door as he falls.
I drag him to his car and rummage in his pocket, locating the keys. With the unconscious man safely laid out on the back seat, I bind his wrists with duct tape, locking him in before returning to my vehicle.
I have to collect my tools.
42
Arman
Rumbling vibrations and a blooming, vice-like pain gripping the back of my head. My ear rests in something sticky, and as I return to consciousness, I realize it’s my blood congealing beneath me. Lights flash past above me—streetlights.
I’m in the back of my car, my hands taped together. What happened?
I was at Oleg’s house for the joint commissions meeting. Timur met me, and we were going to state our case against the Morettis when…what?
I cough, and Timur’s eyes flash at me in the rearview mirror.
“Oh, you’re back,” he says. “Feeling like shit, I expect?”
The amused edge to his voice throws me. I’m tied up and being driven somewhere by Timur? What the fuck?
“So, before you were a rude cunt and threw me out of the restaurant, I was trying to ask you a few questions,” Timur says, his tone as casual as it might be if we were sitting side by side. “Tell me what happened to your mom.”
Somehow, I’ve veered way off course. Whatever Timur is playing at, it seems wise to humor him; I’ve already clocked the pistol on the passenger seat.
“She left my father when I was a baby,” I reply. “He never knew the reason.”
“I can help with that,” Timur says. He swings a hard left, and my head bumps into the door, setting it off throbbing worse than before. “Are you interested in why?”
What other answer can I give? “Yes. Tell me.”
“Because your mom was a home-wrecking whore,” he yells, swerving for a second before regaining control. “Yaros was my father, too. He abandoned my mentally ill mother to run away with yours, and when my mom found out, she followed her one day and took her out.”
I swallow a sudden rush of bile in my throat. “My mother was murdered? By your mother? And my father had another family?”
“Yours was the other family, you prick! Timur snaps.” Mom and I were there first. She was okay when he was around. He kept her calm. Then he ran out on us just because his side piece got knocked up. My mom didn’t know about you, but if she had, she’d have killed you too and saved me a fucking job.”
My head is spinning. Timur is my half-brother. My Papa ran out on another woman and her child, and that woman took murderous revenge, leaving my father with one option only—to take me and disappear.
I have to think quickly. Timur is coming apart, and I have no idea what he’s planning.
“We’re brothers,” I say, observing how he reacts to my words. “You’re the only kin I have. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
He spits his words over his shoulder like machine gun fire. “We are not kin, asshole. You took my father from me, but as soon as I got my chance, I took him from you.” He laughs maniacally. “All those bratva fuckwits running around the city, kicking ass and taking names, trying to find the audacious bastard who dared to come after Sergey Kislev. Morons. Yaros was the target all along. I didn’t fail to assassinate Sergey; I succeeded in murdering my father. Our father.”
Timur did it. He was the one who rigged a bomb and blasted my only remaining parent to Hell.
“Why?”
“Because my mother wanted it so,” Timur says, a tinge of melancholy creeping in. “She hated me, but she hated him more, and if she’d known you existed, there would have been no depravity too twisted to inflict on you. Hence why we’re going on this little drive.”
