“How sure is ‘sure’?”
“Sure enough that Lukas is already planning the funeral.”
My office suddenly feels like it’s shrunk two sizes andfucking hell,this tie is killing me. It’s the same one that I not-so-long-ago threaded through Cassandra’s teeth before I?—
Well, best not to go there right now. I’ve got enough shit to think about without draggingherinto the mix.
I rub my hand down my face. My stubble’s longer than I like it, since I didn’t shave yesterday. Didn’t sleep much, either. I’ve been up half the night for two weeks running, working and not-working, which is what I call it when I sit at a desk and pretend to parse through legal documents while I think about a woman in a hospital gown instead.
I shake that thought loose. Not now. Not with Afon in the room. He can smell a distraction on me from across a city block.
“Walk me through it,” I say.
Afon explains quickly how they puzzled it all out, though I’m not really listening. I only asked him the question to buy myself time to think, to process this awful churning feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I knew the price of getting out of the Bratva for good would be steep. After all, look at what my father paid.
But this is a shitshow of epic proportions. A fucking disaster in the making, really. I guess I should’ve expected it. When you’re born into a den of vipers like I was, there are tangled tails and venom aplenty everywhere you look. Working my way free was never going to be easy.
My rib gives a sudden pang, an internal punch vicious enough to rip the breath out of my lungs. It’s like a saw-toothed hook sinking into my nerves and yanking hard as fuck. I keep my face still, but only barely.
Afon notices. “Your side?” he asks.
“It’s nothing. Keep talking.”
He frowns, but he does. By the time he’s finished, the ocean of coffee in my stomach has turned to battery acid and my rib is on fire. “So turns out my boss is a bad dude, in bed with bad people, and Lukas wants him dead.”
“As dead as you can get him,” he agrees. “And as soon as possible, too.”
“You sure I’m the right kind of trigger man?”
Afon inclines his head. “Who else?”
“Anyone,” I suggest. “Literally anyone. You know that I…” I swing an arm around to encompass the whole building and all that it contains. “I can’t just walk into that man’s office and put a bullet in him. It’s his fucking firm, Afon. Iworkhere. Every case I’ve touched for six years is tied to his. If he turns up dead in his office, I am high on the list of guys that every single cop in this city is going to want to talk to.”
“Yes. Which is why we’re not going to do it in the office.”
“Where, then?” I ask, even though I know I’m walking blindly into something I won’t like.
“At home. In his home. In his bed, if possible. With his wife sleeping next to him, preferably.”
“Dare I ask why?”
He leans. His elbows go on the edge of my desk. His face is in that same patient, fond configuration he’s used on me since I was fifteen years old, when he first had to tell me something I was going to hate.
“Because the wife,” he begins, “is the coup de grace. She’s a walking bruise, the poor thing. The concierge at their buildingtold one of our guys that paramedics have been to their penthouse four times in the last year. Everyone on the block knows Raymond Snyder plays rough with his toys, but nobody says anything, because he donates to the right people and sits on the right boards and his lawyers are very, very good.”
My rib is strangling me from the inside now. I press the heel of my hand against it under the desk, out of sight, and keep my face flat. “Okay,” I say. “And?”
“So she’s the perfect frame,plemyannik.”
The acid in my stomach intensifies. “You want toframeher? Why?”
“C’mon, nephew,think.Use that big, legal brain of yours!” he crows. “She has motive and opportunity. A battered woman with a rich, nasty husband and a prenup full of landmines is catnip. She’s been living in that house for four years with a man who puts her in the emergency room every few months. The jury will reach a verdict before they even get out of the bleachers.”
“Afon…”
“It’s clean, nephew,” he insists. “Cleaner than clean. We go in after they’ve both gone to sleep. We put the gun in her hand. We put the residue on her fingers. Then she wakes up in a bedroom with a dead husband, the murder weapon, and a lifetime of reasons to have pulled the trigger. No matter what she says, it’s open-and-shut. And then you’ll be free. We both will.”
