AllFreeNovel
Share Us
After I calmed down I assured myself Diana had given me enough. I could find the answer to Ray’s disappearance, and it wasn’t by asking Milos or Aleksander Levin. They wouldn’t tell me. The more I looked into them, the more I was certain either they had killed Ray or they knew who did. Either way, I wouldn’t find out the truth until I had enough on them to turn their world to ash. I’d blackmail them to tell me what I wanted to know, but I would still light my match to make them pay.
Except in the months I’d been digging, I hadn’t found a single thing. When I went to John, sure from all the information I’ve given him in the past he would believe me and help me, he shrugged. He told me the FBI knew what the Levins were and they were going to stay in power. At my shock he shook his head, asking me if I knew how many people the Levins employed in the city and all the good they did? It wasn’t just about that, it was that they kept the truly nasty Chechens and Serbians out of the city and power.
The shake of his head was sad. Did I really want to know everything about Ray? Why couldn’t I let it go?
I was stunned. How could he ask that? Ray was the only person who loved and cared about me. It wasn’t the mother who had left me with my father and ran away with a boyfriend when I was seven. Definitely not the father who sold me when he got tired of taking care of me three months later, then committed suicide when the man who bought me was caught trying to sell me again once I was too old for him at thirteen, rather than face the jail time he would get. Ray took me in and did his best for me for four years. He would never have walked away from me—someone took him away from me.
John simply said, in the end the truth could hurt more than not knowing.
Bullshit. He didn’t know a damn thing. I need to know what happened to Ray. And I will, one way or another.
CHAPTER2
Aleksander
Nikita enters my office followed by a waitress carrying a tray. The nightclub I own and run doesn’t have a huge kitchen—it only serves food for me and my brothers and those allowed into the gambling area. It’s our usual eveningzakuski, a platter consisting of snacks to keep us from getting drunk on an empty stomach while we enjoy our vodka and discuss the day’s business and the coming night.
Since my nightclub opens at eight in the evening and is open until four in the morning, I’m mostly nocturnal. We each have businesses we run under our own names to launder money for our real Bratva business.
I run the club and the brothel, which is an apartment building only on paper, hands on. Nikita has his office out of and runs the restaurant our father created in honor of our mother, while Milos runs the grocery stores and has his office out of the restaurant he created in honor of his woman.
I’ve tried on multiple occasions to handle all business while I’m awake. However, Milos refused to give up business calls he gets in the middle of the night. Only once I was busy with a high-stakes game and missed an important call that caused a loss of a lot of money more than five years ago. Ever since, Milos has required all calls go to him. When I tried to discuss it again a few years ago, he admitted he liked keeping busy—the better not to dwell on not having his woman.
After our meeting they’ll go home to their condos and go to bed. I’ll close down my club and be in bed a little after six, then up again by noon.
The call comes through right on time, we could set our watches to it—Milos certainly does. Nikita’s eyes meet mine when Milos stands and begins pacing. It means something happened to upset Celia.
“Buy her another one, damn it,” Milos orders. “I don’t give a fuck if it’s been discontinued. Call the manufacturer, they almost always keep some in reserve, and buy the whole lot they have in case she needs another in the future. I don’t care if she said it was fine that isn’t the water bottle she likes, get her the one she does. Another thing, I saw her cleaning today. What the fuck have I told you? She doesn’t clean. I don’t give a fuck if the maid is sick, thenyouclean.”
Nikita laughs as he shakes his head. I don’t. Milos is prickly enough as of late, I like my body unbruised. The closer the date comes to Celia graduating so he can claim her, the more he is on edge. Popping a blini in my mouth, I give Nikita a look of warning as Milos ends his call with a final aggravated curse.
Once again, I’m grateful I have not and never will suffer as Milos does over a woman. I fight not to shudder at the thought of it. It doesn’t matter Milos long ago gave up resenting it and accepted it, swore he found a certain peace from it.
While I enjoy women in all their many varied shapes, sizes, and silky-soft skin, they are emotional, illogical, and more trouble than I am willing to endure. I limit myself to women who are content with sex for a night or a few weeks and nothing more. The moment they wanted something more or they failed to hold my interest, I ended things.
There’s a brief knock on the door. I check the camera to see Peter. Pressing a button on my desk, it disengages the magnetic lock, allowing him to enter. I’m curious why he’s here. While he’s head of our security and usually at Milos’s side, and practically a brother since he’s been in our lives since I was thirteen, he doesn’t sit in on our meetings.
Milos is surprised as well. “What’s the matter?”
“We might have an issue. I want to reach out to Valdez to confirm.”
“Explain,” I demand.
He pulls his phone out and connects to the large television screen on the wall. A woman flashes on the screen. “This is from last week, Tuesday, an hour before you open across the street. She knows the time you get here.” Another flash and she’s outside Kotyonak, Milos’s restaurant. “Wednesday of last week.” One more flash and she’s outside the house I have right around the corner from here.
The house isn’t my favorite. I won it in a hand in a poker game almost a decade ago and because of the value and the fact it’s less than five blocks away, I decided to keep it. I hated all the levels and only used it for women I wasn’t going to see again, preferring the condo I had in Water Tower Place, then the condo Milos gave me in the Hancock several months ago. “And this is from yesterday. I’ve gone through the cameras around the Hancock and I can’t confirm one hundred percent it’s her, but I believe she was there this week.”
“What the hell?” Milos mutters.
“Exactly, if it were one of you it would be a question of her fixating on a pretty face, but she’s been to all the locations at least twice.” Peter scowls at the screen—he sees her as a threat.
Studying her, I can’t for the life of me see her as something to fear. Which makes her all the more dangerous. I can’t call her a woman—she’s too young for the word.
It’s clear she isn’t thin within the baggy clothes she’s wearing, with round cheeks and a double chin beneath a small round face. She has light golden blonde hair that’s in a messy bun in all the photos. Her face is an oval cameo with a thin nose above a wide mouth. As young as she appears, there is a network of lines across her forehead, and those sky-blue eyes are filled with darkness.
“She looks like a teenage school shooter in those atrocious clothes,” Nikita muses as he studies her. “If it weren’t for the fact her face is pretty enough, you would have no idea she was even a girl in that awful hoody and sweatpants. What woman wears sweatpants anymore?”
Milos and I connect. “A woman who wants to hide her body from scrutiny,” Milos says aloud.
