Kissing My Killer (11 page)

Alexei

There was another motel across the street, which was perfect. First, I walked down the street to a bank and emptied my bank account—it wasn’t much, but it would cover us for a while if we lived cheap. Then I walked to the motel across the street from ours, picked a room that had its curtains closed, and hammered on the door until I was sure it was empty. Like our motel, there was a payphone in the office. I dialed Nikolai and he picked up on the second ring.

“It’s me,” I said. “I’m alive.”

“What the
fuck
is going on?” yelled Nikolai “I sent people to the hacker’s apartment. Lev’s dead.”

I wanted to gauge how much he knew. “The hacker stabbed me and then shot Lev and escaped. I had to get to a doctor, but I’m okay. I’m tracking him down.”

Nikolai’s tone changed. “Bullshit. We searched the place. We know it’s a girl.”

Shit.

“She’s with you, isn’t she? Why are you protecting her?”

“We can use her, Nikolai. She could hack our rivals—”

“Jesus
Christ,
Alexei, just kill the bitch!” Then he managed to calm himself a little. “Just...finish the job.”

I took a deep breath. “I can’t do that, Nikolai. Not this time.”

“You killed Lev, didn’t you? That
wed’ma
sucked your cock and made you turn on your own.”

“I had to kill him. I didn’t want to.” It was important that he knew it was me. If they caught us, I didn’t want Gabriella taking the blame.

I could almost hear Nikolai shaking his head. “You pathetic, traitorous bastard.”

“Look, I just want to walk away. Both of us. I leave and she never bothers you again.”

There was a long pause. I could hear him sucking in air through his nostrils,
fuming,
trying not to scream at me. Finally, he said, “I want her questioned. I want men I can
trust”—
he emphasized the word—”to talk to her. I want to know that she gets the message.”

“I won’t let her be hurt.”

“We won’t hurt her. We’ll talk to her. And then the two of you can fuck off to Mexico for all I fucking care.” I could hear something else in his voice, now.
Worry.
This whole situation had Nikolai scared and
nothing
scared my boss.

“We’re in a motel,” I told him. And I gave him the number of the empty room. Then I walked back to our motel, my stomach churning. I was sure, now, that Nikolai wanted both of us dead. In minutes, we’d find out how badly.

Gabriella

Alexei told me to grab my stuff. I threw everything into my bag and then joined him at the window.

No more than five minutes after Alexei had returned, a car pulled up across the street and four men approached the other motel. They went straight to one particular room—

I stifled a scream as all four of them pulled out guns and started firing through the window and door. It wasn’t just bangs, it was a continuous roar.
Machine guns.
They were absolutely guaranteeing that anyone inside was dead.

“Oh Jesus,” I whispered, looking at our own room’s flimsy door.

The men didn’t stop until the window, door and the room beyond were utterly destroyed. Then they kicked in the remains of the door and checked inside. They were out in moments, one of them already putting a cell phone to his ear.

I looked at Alexei. From the expression on his face, it was even worse than he’d thought.

“We have to go,” he said. “Right now.”

My stomach tightened at the thought of the world outside the door. But this place wasn’t safe anymore. I felt like a mouse, scurrying between hidey holes.

As soon as the men had driven away, Alexei led me down to the parking lot. I leaned against a wall, trying not to panic breathe, as he looked at the cars. It was only when I saw him draw back his elbow, ready to smash a car window, that I came alive. “Wait!” I said quickly.

He hesitated. “What?”

“
That’s
how you steal a car? Smash the window and then...what, twist some wires together?”

For a second, he looked abashed. Then he lifted his chin. “So?”

This whole time, he’d been looking after me and that left me with nothing to focus on but my fear. The chance to
do something
was exactly what I needed. “Oh, for God’s sake. Move out of the twentieth century!” I pulled out my laptop and looked around. “There. See that car?” I hunkered down beside it. “Wireless everything.
Including
door locks and ignition.” I started keying in commands. “But it’s one of the early models and the security was weak, so unless the owner’s updated it—which they never, ever do….”

Alexei gave a sort of grunt of disapproval. But after a few seconds, he came to stand behind me, looking over my shoulder at my screen. “I don’t trust this stuff,” he muttered.

“Hacking was how I found out your boss was up to no good,” I said without turning around.

“And how you got caught.”

I typed in a final command and looked at the car. There was a very satisfying
click
as the doors unlocked and then a roar as the engine started up. I climbed into the passenger seat and waited, trying not to smirk.

“My way is faster,” Alexei muttered. But he walked around the car and got in beside me. As we drove off, we could hear police sirens coming down the street.

We passed the other motel, where people were already congregating to look at the ruins of the motel room. My stomach churned as I saw the hundreds of bullet holes. “We can’t just run, can we?” I asked.

Alexei shook his head. “Nikolai wants you dead...but it’s more than that. I thought he just wanted to kill the hacker, to send a message. But he sounded worried. He’s scared of what you know and scared you’ve told me. He’s not going to let us go, ever.” He turned into an alley and parked, then turned to me.

“Do you think he’s doing something with that trafficking guy, Carl?” I asked. “Some deal the big boss—Luka, right?”—Alexei nodded—”Some deal Luka wouldn’t approve of?”

Alexei shook his head. “Anything big and Luka would find out. If it was small, it wouldn’t be worth the risk. But he
is
doing something, or planning something.” He stared at me with new respect. “I think you stumbled on it when you hacked him. Now he’s worried I’ll find out what he’s doing and stop him.”

“Can’t we just go to Luka and tell him something’s going on?”

“No one in the Bratva will even talk to me now. They’ll shoot me on sight. Word will have passed round that I’m a traitor.” He almost spat the word. “They will not listen to accusations.”

“So what do we do?”

He thought. “Work out what Nikolai is plotting. And then stop him. If he really is doing something against the family’s code, we would be heroes, not outlaws. All this would be over.” He nodded at my laptop. “Can you find out what he was doing? A name, somewhere we can start looking?”

I stretched my fingers and went to work. I had Nikolai’s email archive on the portable hard drive, plus some of his bank records. All of it was in Russian but, with a lot of backtracking and cross-referencing, I started to piece things together.

We went to a drive-thru and got fried chicken for lunch, eating in the car. I wrinkled my nose at Alexei’s choice. “Chicken?” I asked. “
Just
chicken? No bread, no fries, no slaw or beans or salad?
Just
chicken?”

“Protein,” he grunted.

I shook my head and focused on my own food. It was some mom and pop place and the fries were amazing, crispy on the outside and meltingly fluffy on the inside. I munched through half a bagful of salty goodness and then took a long pull on my soda—

And noticed something in the reflection in the windshield: he was looking sideways, watching me.

I pretended I hadn’t seen. Eating takeout food had to be the least sexy thing to do in the world, right? So why would he be watching me?

When we’d wiped our sticky fingers, I went back to work while Alexei kept watch, sitting still as a statue. I got the impression he could do it for days at a time, if need be.

Eventually, I sat back, stretched my aching shoulders and pointed at the screen. “There.” It was an email sent from Nikolai to Carl, one of the most biggest human traffickers we knew of. Lilywhite had been after him ever since she’d set the Sisters of Invidia up, but so far we hadn’t been able to track him down. The email said simply, “Payment sent to Semnadtsat.” That same day, $150,000 had left Nikolai’s private bank account, destined for a numbered Swiss account. “What’s
semnadtsat
?”

“It’s ‘seventeen.’”

“You think he
is
doing trafficking after all? Seventeen women?” My guts twisted. “Jesus, ‘seventeen years old?’”

He looked at my screen. “It says
to
seventeen. And it has capital letter, like a person.”

“Who’s called ‘seventeen’?”

“I don’t know. But I know someone who will.” Then he pressed his lips together, tracing the shape of the steering wheel with his fingers as he thought.

“What?”

“We will have to go into
my
world.” He shook his head. “It is not a place for you.”

“For me, a woman?”

He turned and looked at me and I saw that flash of blue in his eyes again, the fierce fire of emotion under all that cold. “For
you.”

“I’ll be okay,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.

He considered, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. “What about…?” He indicated the outside world through the windshield.

“Better than staying on my own.”

He looked at me again, this time for longer. Eventually, he seemed to make his mind up. “OK, then. But you do just what I say and you stay
right the fuck
beside me.”

I nodded quickly, trying to ignore the building fear inside.

And I tried to ignore something else, too: the fluttering in my chest when he’d turned all protective of me. “Where are we going?” I asked.

Alexei started up the car. “Little Odessa.”

Alexei

Little Odessa. A little bit of Russia, right in the heart of Brooklyn. It had always felt like home...but I knew that would already be changing as word got around of what I’d done. By tomorrow, it would be hostile territory...and that tore me up inside.

We pulled up outside a place called
Soblazn
, with a broken neon sign of a cocktail glass and a heavy, steel-reinforced door. I’d been there twice, when Nikolai wanted something delivered to Vadim, the owner.

I looked between Gabriella and the door. “Stay
right beside me,”
I told her. “Okay?”

She nodded. Then said, “Why? Who’s in the bar?”

“It’s not a bar.”

I led her up to the door. We were still a few feet from it when one of Vadim’s thugs filled the doorway. He seemed to have no neck, just a line where his chin met his muscled chest, and he was rolling a lollipop from one side of his mouth to the other.  “Alexei,” he growled. It could have been affectionate or threatening—he made it deliberately difficult to tell. “Business?”