22. Dimitri
22
DIMITRI
PRESENT DAY
I t’s past midnight, but I can’t sleep.
I sit in my office with some of my closest men around me. They’re all insomniacs too.
It’s been a long fucking day, so we just drink in silence.We don’t have anything to say to each other.
I can’t stop thinking about my pretty little captive. She’s all alone in that guesthouse. I want nothing more than to pin her down on the mattress, but she wants nothing to do with me.
“Boss, we received the forensic report,” Pavel says, interrupting my daydream. I glance at my second-in-command to see that he’s looking at his tablet.
“What does it say?” I ask.
“The DNA sample shows that it’s an exact match to Malorie Thorne,” he says.
“An exact match?” I ask.
“That’s what it says.” His eyes flick down the rest of the report.
“So the woman who was killed was, in fact, Malorie Thorne?” I ask.
I should be relieved. But for some reason, I’m more anxious than ever.
Pavel purses his lips. “There’s a caveat. While the DNA was a perfect match, the rest of the forensic findings were inconsistent with what we know about Malorie Thorne.”
“What does that mean?” one of the men asks.
It could only mean one thing.
“It means that Malorie Thorne had a twin sister,” I say. “And we killed her.”
I don’t know what to make of this information. It was one thing to suspect it, but another thing entirely to have it confirmed.
An innocent woman died today. She was shot by one of my men.
I glance around at all of my men. They look equally dumbfounded. It’s in moments like these that I miss my little brother the most. Rurik always had a way of defusing the tension in the room. Without him, everything feels infinitely more stressful.
I look at the elder statesman among my men. “ Starshina , what do you think is going on here?”
Grigori has been in the Bratva for the longest time. Twenty-five years my senior, he has seen it all. I always turn to him when I need advice.
“I think that this is a tricky situation,” he says. He places the end of a cigar into a little silver guillotine and chops it off. “Things aren’t what they look like. We’re missing something. A piece of vital information.”
I nod.
Somehow, that makes perfect sense.
The Thorne family are old money. They have their roots in Pennsylvania, and they’ve been around for generations. Malorie Thorne and her children are the only surviving members of the Thorne family, and it has been documented that Malorie was an only child.
“According to the records, Malorie didn’t have any brothers or sisters,” I say. “If she had a twin sister, we would have known about it.”
“Maybe they were separated at birth for some reason,” Pavel suggests.
“It still doesn’t explain why there are no records of the twin sister at all,” Grigori says. “This isn’t just any family we’re talking about. The Thorne family were wealthy, high-status individuals.”
“We’re missing something,” I say.
“Exactly,” he says. “Is there anyone alive today who knew the Thorne family?”
“Not that we know of,” I say. “Everyone died the night of the fire.”
About twenty-eight years ago, the Thorne family threw a lavish party. They invited everyone they knew—family, friends, colleagues, neighbors. It was a night of drunken revelry and celebration. But it didn’t end as such.
Every person at that party perished.
They all died in a fire. And by the time help arrived, it was too late. The entire mansion and everyone in it had burned to ashes.
The only person who wasn’t at that party was Malorie Thorne. She had sneaked away from home to meet with her then boyfriend.
She was the only living survivor of the Thorne family.
“But I found something interesting,” Pavel says, flipping through some pages on his tablet. “The lead detective of the case ruled that the cause of the fire wasn’t accidental.”
“He thought it was arson?” I ask.
Pavel nods.
“What about the insurance company?” I ask.
“They ruled it as accidental,” Pavel says.
I pick up the paperweight from my desk. I shift it from one hand to another. The answer feels like it’s in my reach but far away at the same time.
I didn’t think this would be so complicated.
Even if someone were to set fire to the house, what did they have to gain from it?
It crosses my mind that Malorie herself could have been responsible for it. But again, that begs the question, what did she have to gain from it? It couldn’t have been for money. She had an abundance of it all her life.
“That lead detective,” I say. “Where is he now?”
“Let me look him up,” Pavel says, typing into his laptop. He frowns at the screen. “His name is Detective James Sterling. It shows that he retired.”
“Recently?” I ask.
“No. He retired over two decades ago.”
“How old was he then?” I ask.
“That’s just it,” Pavel says. “He was in his forties when he retired. He was in the prime of his career.”
“When exactly was it?” I ask.
“Right after the fire,” he says, squinting at the screen. “The fire at the Thorne mansion was the last case he investigated.”
“That’s odd,” I say. “Get me his address and phone number. I want to talk to him.”
“There’s nothing here,” Pavel says. “He’s a ghost. But I’ll see what I can find.”
I nod. Pavel is one of my hardest-working men. He’ll leave no stone unturned in his quest to find the detective.
I turn to another one of my men. “Oleg, I want you to make a report on everything that’s related to the Thorne family. Not just about the night of the fire, but everything that led up to it.”
I’m not certain of much right now, but I know one thing—the answers I’m searching for lie buried somewhere in the past.