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And keeps staring at me.
Fuck. I actually prefer the tongue-lashing. “What?”
She folds her arms and shifts her weight on one foot. “She called, you know. She called Pavel, actually, who was too busy swinging transport around to pick you up to hear his phone buzz. She got some pretty juicy evidence for you. So again, I’m gonna ask: where is she?”
I frown. “What evidence?”
“The kind that would get Tolya out of prison. Tomorrow.”
Shit.I jump to my feet, then immediately regret doing that when the pain whacks me in the head like a nightstick and makes me sit back down. “What? Where? How?”
“Nuh-uh.” Bambi shakes her head, and a finger, at me. “Not this time,boss.You don’t get to use her and abuse her and then discard her like some used garbage. Especially not in exchange for shit this good.”
Now, I’m seeing red. She’s pushing my damn buttons and she knows it. “What. Do. You. Have?”
She sighs and lowers her guard enough to be one percent less bitchy. “Raizo’s been in on it the whole time. Raizo, Greg Everett… they’re setting you up. They’vebeensetting you up.”
“No.” I refrain from shaking my head because it still hurts like a motherfucker where Martin cracked that vase over my skull. I wince in pain and at the memory. “There’s no way. She’s lying.”
“Right.” Bambi chews on her bottom lip and glares at me. “Because there’s no way Clara would actually try to do the right thing and get the information you’ve been so desperate for.”
“I heard her. Talking to her father. She’s encouraging him. She wants him to do all this shit. She’s been playing me—us—from the start.”
“And part of her master plan was to leave her kid here with you?”
I pause. “Listen?—”
“No, Dem, I thinkyouneed to be the one to do some more listening. Because I wasn’t even there and I can already tell you, you didn’t hear what you think you heard.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “And how wouldyouknow?”
Bambi leans down and hovers her own glowering face inches from mine. “Because I know what it’s like to say whatever needs to be said, to sound however I needed to fucking sound, so my daddy wouldn’t beat me to a pulp. Or worse.”
I swallow. I don’t like where this is going. Worse—I don’t like the increasingly strong possibility that she may be right. “Clara is a master manipulator, Bam.”
“Of course she is!” She leans back with a laugh. A humorless, calculating laugh paired with a joyless clap of her hands. “Who do you think taught her? And it’s not what you think, even though yes, it was her father. I promise you, Dem: Clara Everett is avictim.A vic-tim. Not a predator. Not a murderer. She’s been prey her whole fucking life, and just like prey in the wild, she learned how to adapt. She learned to do what she had to do tosurvive.”
The only sound for a while is Bambi’s furious breathing and my labored inhales and exhales. My head hurts—both physically and from considering all the possibilities at play.
The thing about all this that has me the most frustrated, the most pissed off, is that openly admitting that she’s right is the same as openly admitting that I was wrong.
That I made some bad fucking decisions.
My standing with the Bratva is on thin ice as it is, given Pavel’s latest report. My decision-making skills have been called into question amongst the ranks, and it’s shit like this that underlines their concerns.
Validconcerns.
Agreeing with Bambi means admitting that shit out loud, though. It means saying I was wrong, and stupid, and blind, and short-sighted. I can either cop to all that…
Or I can hold my ground.
And a lifetime of my father’s training means I always,alwayshold my ground.
So instead of listening to the whisper in my mind and my heart that says I need to get the fuck back to the casino hotelrightfuckingnow, I shrug it off.
“What’s done is done.” I pop the cork off the nearest bottle with my teeth, spit it out, and take a swig. It’s a nonverbal “fuck off,” and Bambi knows it.
She straightens, then folds her arms and shakes her head with a sigh. “Watching you is like having a front row seat to a fucking Greek tragedy. The worst part is, you’re thinking this whole time that you can’t trust Clara, Clara lies, Clara’s a murderer, Clara, Clara, Clara. Butshe’sthe one who can’t trustyou.You’rethe one who lies.You’rethe one who kills.You, Demyen. And you lie so goddamn pretty, I almost started believing it myself.”
