I gesture my gun at him from across the vault. “Youdohave to say, asshole. Tell me right fucking now or that painting is the last thing you see.”
One second I’m looking at Ponytail’s scared eyes behind his thick glasses. The next, I’m staring at the ceiling of the vault.
The corner where he was standing exploded with a force that knocks me off my feet.
Fuck.
The sandbags are explosive and Maksim is in control of their detonation.
“Shame to kill a man of culture like myself. Interesting that you don’t trust my daughter, after all,” Maksim says, sounding smug about something. “I thought you were in love. Now you know that she’s been lying to you. You found out about the listening devices, I expect.”
I cough the smoke out of my lungs. “She’s as untrustworthy as you are.”
I’m gonna die without knowing whether that’s true. The one man who could have told me is lying dead in the corner of the room.
“And yet you came here on the basis of her notes. Still hoping my daughter is telling you the truth?”
If Maksim was here, I’d be pummeling his face until her name flies out of his mouth. I hate the way he talks about Natalia like she’s his property.
“I thought you disowned her. As soon as she wasn’t your perfect little asset to sell off to the highest bidder, she wasn’t good enough for you.”
“You know, I really thought you would have better security arrangements in your own home.”
A recording starts playing. Even over the hissing connection, it’s familiar. It’s a conversation about the paintings. One which Natalia and I had in the depths of last week, when I was explaining what the plan was, which paintings she should analyze.
No one else was in the room, I’m sure of it.
Fuck. She really was spying on me.
Smoke is filling the confined space, the acrid smell of gunpowder making it hard to breathe.
Panic crawls up my throat.Maybe this was a trap. Maybe that’s why Natalia flagged the paintings as fakes. So that I would come here, investigate them, and her father could kill me.
The shortness of breath is making me light-headed. Every movement feels like an effort.
Maybe I should just accept it. That my fatal flaw was a Bratva heiress who looks like an angel and talks like a boarding school teacher, who can talk about one painting for a whole day, who made me think maybe I wasn’t such a monster. She might be my downfall, but at least I had a month where it felt real. Where we had something I thought I’d never get.
Maybe I can die pretending that it was real.
“Does it hurt, Aleksandr? Knowing that she was never on your side, after all…that muststing.”
His smugness turns my stomach. I can’t die without taking him with me.
Another boom sounds from the corner where Ponytail was blown to smithereens, making my ears ring.
I call out, wondering if Maksim’s still on the line, or if I’m going to die alone surrounded by fake paintings.
“You’re really gonna blow this sky-high?” I choke out. Speaking is getting hard now, and I can barely see the paintings through the smoke. “This is your own business. There are enough explosives in here to destroy the whole port.”
Talking feels like swallowing a bunch of nails.
“A small section of it, Aleksandr. It’s a simple mathematical calculation. Blowing up this vault will do far, far less damage to my business than you spreading your false rumors about the paintings and their authenticity.”
Another explosion knocks me to the ground, the pain clearing my head for a second.
“Besides,” he adds. “There’s no one else in the room right now. And you have a reputation as quite the arsonist now, Aleksandr. Who do you think’s going to get the blame for this?”
Something about this doesn’t make sense.
