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I scowled down at those little footprints. I would have to keep an eye out. If there was a child, my whole game plan would have to change.
I left the basement and headed upstairs. The house had three levels, including the converted attic. The second level looked to be all bedrooms. I listened at every door before I opened it to check.
The second one I checked had snoring beyond it. When I opened the door, I saw a large shape curled up in bed alone. The silencer thumped softly as I put two bullets into him. The snoring stopped.
Silence behind two more doors, which were empty bedrooms. This house seemed to have a lot of them—and most of them had locks on the outside. Like you might see in a mental ward or a prison.
What the hell was going on here?I was a hard man, but something about all this was giving me the creeps.
I found a bedroom without an outside lock, the glow of a computer screen and the faint scent of marijuana trickled around the edges of the door. I turned the doorknob gently and pushed the door open a crack. A large man with a 9mm pistol on the table next to his laptop was sitting there raptly watching some kind of porn, a joint hanging from his lips. I ignored his fondling with himself under the desk as best I could.
“Yuri, for the third time, no, you can’t have any—” the man grumbled as he looked up. I shot him between the eyes, and he fell out of his chair with a startled look frozen on his face. I stepped inside and shut the door. He was alone. No cameras. The one on his laptop was covered with tape.
Then I noticed what was on the screen. I closed the laptop quickly and turned to the dead man in disgust. “Sick fuck,” I growled, wanting to scrub those images out of my brain. I even put another bullet in him out of sheer outrage.
I didn’t want to think too hard about the fact that a child and a kiddie porn enthusiast might have been living here in the same household. Maybe I would get lucky. Maybe the kid was just a visitor, and, gone now, I was worried over nothing.
I was almost at the master bedroom. The Ivanovs would be there, and I would have to be quick. I didn’t want to give them time to cry out, even with both bodyguards dead.
I checked my weapon before listening at the door. No movement inside, just soft breathing punctuated by slow, rumbling snores. I slipped inside, into a darkness that smelled of sweat, whiskey, and talcum powder.
They were back-to-back, as distant as the mattress would allow. The woman wore a sleep mask, the man had a chestful of dark, wiry hair that clashed with his bald spot. Both of them stank of whiskey. I shot the wife in the head, and, unexpectedly, Mr. Ivanov opened his eyes as I took aim at him.
He stared at me over the barrel, his dark eyes full of drunken confusion. “Why?” he managed after a few seconds.
“You already know,” I growled a second before I pulled the trigger.
But I didn’t know. From the resignation in his eyes before they went dull, I guessed Ivanov did. But there was nothing in my night’s orders about questioning him.
I had to check the rest of the place before I turned it into their funeral pyre. I moved quickly around, grabbing laptops and external hard drives and disabling a few more security cameras as I went.
After the austere basement, I didn’t know what to expect as I mounted the narrow staircase to the converted attic. But once I entered the room, I was stunned to see something like a movie set. It wasn’t very large, and since it focused on a wide, low bed covered in luxuriant fabrics, I could guess what kind of films were being made.
My eyes narrowed. There was another set of rooms across from the staircase, as with the ones downstairs these had locks on the outsides of the doors, though all were unlocked. I kept my pistol drawn as I opened them one by one.
Three of the windowless bedrooms were empty, of those, one showed signs of a recent occupant. Makeup smears on the tiny vanity. Rumpled bedding. A bodice-ripper romance paperback sat open on the bed, facedown.
The room still smelled of cheap perfume. The trappings left behind, coupled with the locks on the outsides of the doors, told me an adult woman had been in here—maybe staying willingly, maybe trapped. Whoever it was, they weren’t a small child. Small children didn’t read bodice-rippers and I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
I went to check the last door and froze when I heard movement behind it. Shit. Well, if it was a captive, maybe I could get some answers out of them.
I unlocked the door and opened it. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I gasped.
Inside was a tiny, elfin girl, maybe three or four years of age. Pale, thin, with enormous crystal-blue eyes and ash-blonde hair so light it was almost platinum. Her face was very solemn, and fear lurked in her eyes as she looked up at me from her perch on the bed.
Damn it, sometimes I hated being right. “Hey, kid,” I managed after a moment.
She waved shyly but didn’t speak.
My mind started racing and landed on a conclusion that suddenly made things a lot more complicated. I couldn’t kill her, but I wouldn’t leave her there to die either. I’d figure out what the heck to do with her once we were safely away.
She was in pink footie pajamas, the kind with a hood. Still not warm enough for her to go outside in. “Have you got a jacket?”
She looked at me quizzically for a moment, then shook her head.
“Okay. Look, we need to go now, there’s a fire.” I started stripping off my parka without even thinking about it. “Put this on, it’s cold.”
Even as I wrapped the girl in my parka and scooped her up in my free arm, I knew I was going off script. Against Vasily’s orders. But right that moment, as I made my way outside withthe girl bundled against me, I knew one thing, Vasily’s mistake was not going to be my downfall. Or hers.
