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Disconnecting, I returned the phone to my pocket and faced my detainee again.
Keeping the red and black cables at the ready, Valery stepped back, making room for me.
“Just give us the name of your supplier,” I said to the man, not even bothering to hide the exasperation in my tone, “and this is all over. Why die to protect him? Who are you so afraid of?”
The man panted away but remained silent. His eyes had glazed over. I doubted he was even listening.
I nodded to Valery again and walked away.
A second round of electricity ripped through him. His desperate scream was cut short and he went limp. Anton moved forward and checked for a pulse, glancing at Valery and then me.
“Did his heart give out?” Valery asked, throwing the jumper cables on the table with an irritated scowl. “The voltage wasn’t eventhathigh!”
I refrained from commenting. I wasn’t sure I could speak without a scream of my own.
“What a waste,” Anton said, shaking his head as he lowered the corpse to the floor so he could unchain the man’s wrists.
“We still have one avenue we haven’t tried,” Valery said behind me. “Boss?”
“No.” I didn’t even turn around to face him. I knew exactly what avenue he was talking about but I wasn’t ready to go down it yet. Why? I had no idea, other than a gut feeling that had kept me alive more times than I could count.
“That bartender’s a part of the same ring, Misha. He has to be. Same compound in the drugs. Same stamp. But the quality? You saw the lab results!”
“Facts I am well aware of,” I snapped, pivoting slowly to glare at him. “But seeing as he’s no longer at Dalton’s, he’s no longer a threat to Sergei’s operations, now is he?”
Valery met my glare with one of his own, unconvinced and unrelenting. “Doesn’t mean he quit dealing, especially with access to shit that good.”
“No. In fact, I’m sure he’s ramped it up since he lost his legitimate stream of income. But since he lives on the other side of the city, he’s no longer our concern. Someone else can deal with him if they have a problem with his business.”
“Problem or not, he could still give up his supplier and bring an end to all of this,” Valery said with a huff, looking to Anton for backup.
Anton remained silent, running a hand over his bearded chin and turning his focus to the body in an attempt to stay neutral.
“He won’t,” I replied tersely. “He’s not the type.” That was as clear as day in every furious line on Marek’s face when I confronted him, from the way his mouth set in defiance to the anger that flashed in his dark eyes. Even when he thought I was there to proposition him—an idea that he was none too eager about despite his later cockiness—he didn’t back down.
“And you know that from a five-minute conversation?”
I leveled another irritated look at Valery. “I do.” While I appreciated my men thinking for themselves, there came a point where their independence rubbed the wrong way. Sometimes orders were orders and in case Valery missed it,myorder to leave Marek alone remained in full effect, even if I had no idea where he’d scampered off to since quitting Dalton’s a few weeks ago.
Valery must have registered the edge in my voice. He held up his blood-stained hands in surrender and took a visible step backward, toward Anton. “We’ll find another one.”
“Good. I don’t need to remind you what will happen if I fail.” I arched an eyebrow at him.
They both swallowed hard, nodding silently.
Sergei understood when I told him my nephew, Ilya, was leaving our organization after nearly losing his life. But when I told him one of his top enforcers had also left? A manIbrought into the inner circle and personally vouched for? Well, I’d used up my one favor for Ilya. In order to give Sasha a way out, as I promised him I would,someonehad to pay the literal and figurative price owed to the brigade.
Money wasn’t an issue but getting worked over by my own men? Men I’d trained; men who knew they couldn’t pull their punches unless they wanted to be next? Men who left bruises and broken bones that would have killed a weaker man?Thatnearly did kill me.
In the end, I found a silver lining. What I suffered in pain, I reaped in loyalty from the same soldiers tasked with carrying out the order. They were devoted before but knowing how far I’d go to protect them, especially someone queer like Sasha? Even God himself couldn’t turn them from me. It’s why I forgave their impertinence and their overprotectiveness. They didn’t want to see me beaten a second time—or killed.
Leaving Anton and Valery to get rid of the body, I headed upstairs, peeling off my navy suit jacket the closer I got to the manager’s office. My office. Hopefully my temporary office since I was as healed as I was going to be. Except for the damn headaches, I was mostly back in prime fighting shape. As soon as I found a suitable manager for Delirium, I could move out of there and get back to my real job—handling Sergei’s businessoff-book and saving my own skin in the process.
I opened my laptop and pulled up Marek’s sparse dossier for the hundredth time. Honestly, I was surprised Eduard couldn’t find more on him. Americans these days were all over social media, yet Marek seemed to have none. How was that even possible? Someone his age withnosocial accounts? I didn’t buy it but I couldn’t find anything to the contrary, either.
He grew up south of the city in a small town I’d never even heard of. According to the surveillance photos, the dilapidated house summed up the town as a whole; they were both long past their glory days. There was no father listed on the birth certificate. His mother was chronically unemployed and in and out of jail for most of Marek’s life. He dropped out of high school at sixteen. Got his GED a year later. Nothing but sporadic employment ever since he turned eighteen. He bounced around bars and restaurants in Cook County. Once he turned twenty-one, it seemed his jobs were exclusively in Chicago. For the past few years, they had all been at high-end bars or restaurants, like Dalton’s.
Frustratingly, he didn’t have a fixed address. His one vehicle, a motorcycle of all things, was registered to an address in one of the wealthier sections of the city on the north side. His cell phone had yet another location on the south side in a lower-class neighborhood. And there was a utility bill listed with a third, not too far from Delirium. Adding to the confusion was the fact the dates overlapped with one another, which meant he somehow lived at all three places or possibly none of them. My men had scoped out each residence and found nothing to confirm if he was there or not. It was a vexing shell game I hadn’t been able to crack.
