Page 143 of The Wrong Monster

“Tell me what you mean,” I say. “No promises I have to translate afterward.”

His gaze doesn’t move. “He won’t come back, Matilda. He won’t be alive to hurt you or anyone else.”

The words settle between us. This isn’t getting my client acquitted. It isn’t a verdict, or something I can dress up as doing my job. I could walk away now. He has just given me that choice.

“I understand,” I say, and wish understanding made it easier.

For a moment, I can’t speak. I’m thinking of my mother, of how abandoned she must’ve felt when she realized she was pregnant with me. My hand almost, almost goes to my waist, and I stop myself short.

I should be afraid of what that means. Of what Vasily is capable of. The fact that when he makes a promise like this, he doesn’t make it lightly.

Instead, I nod.

“Yes.”

His expression changes immediately.

The softness disappears and the Bratva boss returns. He turns toward the men waiting near the vehicles and gives a short gesture. “We’re leaving.”

No explanation, no discussion. They move.

I watch the way they respond to him: immediately, silently, without question. This is the man people fear. The man who can make an entire organization move with a glance.

Vasily opens the passenger door for me.

“Stay close to me,” he says, as if we’re going to war. Maybe we are. I know the ending he intends; I don’t know whether I’m ready to watch any part of it.

I slide inside. He closes the door, and for some reason, that simple gesture makes my heart race even harder.

Whatever happens next, I know one thing: Vasily intends to keep his word.

* * *

We park a block away from the house.

Vasily doesn’t say much as we wait. We sit side by side in the back seat, and one of his massive hands rests loosely over my thigh; his gaze fixed on the condo across the street. His entire presence has changed since we arrived. The warmth I saw after Mikhail’s release is gone.

This is the man people fear.

I watch the front door, unsure what I should be looking for. A body being removed in a rolled-up rug?

A few minutes later, two unmarked vehicles pull up nearby. Men get out, moving with the kind of efficiency that tells me this isn’t some hastily assembled operation. But they’re dressed surprisingly casually. In near-identical outfits, jeans and dark blue t-shirts. Vasily watches without blinking.

Moments later, as the men watch from less than a block away, smoke begins to unfurl from under the front door of the condo.

“What?” I straighten up.

How the hell?

“There.” Vasily chucks his chin in the direction of a small pond back behind the condos and a shadow moving toward the tree line.

The smoke gets thicker. One of the men in the blue shirts puts out a cigarette with his work boot and says something to the others. They start moving toward the condo, and that’s when I see it. It can only be the logo of a firehouse on the shirts as the men jog in a loose formation, calling out to one another.

A neighbor steps outside. A woman walking a dog down the street pauses.

Then the patio door opens and Semiyon stumbles out, coughing.

My breath catches.