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“Valery?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“Of course.” He disconnected and I let my shoulders drop. Was it a coincidence those Neon Kings showed up at the house on the same night they murdered Axel? I highly doubted it. They might have been street thugs but they clearly weren’t stupid. Unfortunately for them, their boss chose to make an enemy out of me.
Alonzo was a dead man the minute Marek told me about their history together. But now, instead of making it look like an accident, it was going to be painful.Beyondpainful. And I wasn’t going to stop with one man. For disobeying my directive, I was going to paint the city with the blood of every Neon King I could find.
37
MAREK
I shouldn’t have been snooping,I knew that. But while Misha was out doing whatever the fuck Misha did all day, there wasn’t much to do in his penthouse other than wander around, trying to keep Bri, Ezra,andNadia (whom Anton had brought to the penthouse earlier that morning) entertained long enough that they didn’t get themselves into mischief. That’s how I ended up in his office—a game of hide-and-seek turned into me stumbling across Misha’s vast wall of intel.
Just like in the movies, he had photographs and maps and sticky notes all over a large whiteboard behind his desk. The writing was in Russian but I had enough of a clue to see what the hell he was working on.
He was still ferreting out the source of the Nirvana.
The sickening news was that he had.
Brooklyn’s face was plastered on the board, along with surveillance photos of her at her apartment and from her tattoo shop. The space above her was blank, save for the giant question mark. That part didn’t worry me as much as all of the arrows beneath her name, including the one that pointed directly to two phone numbers:mine. My real number and the burner number that was designated to me, a number that was supposed to be untraceable through the VOIP app we used.
Only two people had that very specific number—me and Brooklyn—which meant there was onlyoneway Misha could have gotten it.
Bile gushed up the back of my throat.
He’d used me.
I yanked the phone out of my pocket and stared at it likeithad betrayed me and not the man who said he loved me. Disgusted, I threw it on his desk and stared at the information he’d compiled, trying to figure out how much of the network he’d uncovered.
Different colored circles appeared on a map of the city—blue for Brooklyn and red for me, although I wasn’t actually named on his fucking board. Enthusiastic green circles ringed the areas where Brooklyn and I overlapped, locations that spanned the course of our friendship, pulled deep from the data in my fucking traitorous phone.
To go along with the green circles, he had a list of dates and times spelled out right next to the map, tracking our movement and working backward chronologically until he got to where it all began—Cloud 9, the invitation-only social club for Chicago’s high and mighty.
Next to pictures of the swanky lounge, he had a list of names and more arrows shooting off in other directions. Some names he’d crossed off; others had a red line slashed underneath. All of them were connected to the building where Cloud 9 was located. And all of the ones underlined were part of the Nirvana ring.
I felt sick, dizzy and lightheaded.
He’d identified about half of them and it looked like he was well on his way to figuring out the rest of the Nirvana founders—bankers, aldermen, CEOs, lawyers. I hadn’t been lying when I told him they were businessmen. They ran Nirvana like they ran their day jobs. What started out as a fucking pipe dream one night at Cloud 9 between a bunch of shit-faced elite had turned into a very real money-making operation. I knew because I’d been there.
Cloud 9 was where I met Brooklyn and Ken, when she was a server who dreamed of opening a tattoo shop and Ken was a frequent patron, already an addict and steadily making his way through every high-end rent boy he could find. It’s where I’d explained how Alonzo ran things in Colomb to a bunch of “curious” guys having a “hypothetical” discussion on how they’d do it. Where the lawyers in the group openly discussed their clients and what the cops were doing in regard to narcotics busts, andhow they’d do it. Where the pharmaceutical execs talked about how easy it was to grease palms and concoct whatever the drug du jour was instead of importing the shit, thus limiting law enforcement seizures. It was all an imaginary, hypothetical game—how they’d do it—until it wasn’t.
Misha killing Ken was one thing. But to take on the rest of them? There was no fucking way. Russian spy or not, Misha couldn’t fight an entire city that was rigged against him. I stupidly thought that by keeping my trap shut, he’d lose interest, and then he’d be safe. Turned out he was just biding his time, using me along the way like the rest of them.
By the time Misha came home, it was after midnight. The kids were asleep. I’d packed their shit earlier and everything was ready to go at a moment’s notice.
As the elevator doors opened with a soft chime, I took a steadying sip of vodka in case the first third of the bottle hadn’t done the trick. My knee started bouncing when he keyed himself in the door, bolting it behind him.
Misha didn’t notice me at first, sitting in the dark at his granite countertop like a psycho. He flipped on the kitchen light and startled but regained his composure quickly. Not very spy-like, if you asked me.
“Marek… What are you doing up?”
“Are you a spy?” I blurted out, unable to keep it in anymore.
He gave me a weird look, like he couldn’t decide if he was annoyed or confused. “Of course not.”
“Wereyou a fucking spy?”
