Chapter 69
ALISON
Caroline is the mole.
Maybe it was the blood loss—already, it was a spreading red lake beneath me—but I couldn’t make my brain focus on anything aside from the betrayal.
I’d thought she was a friend. My only friend.
But she’d been Grushin’s inside woman from the start.
She’d taken the bullets from Evidence to frame Gennadiy, and the cocaine to frame me.
She must have told Grushin my address so he could send the assassin to my apartment.
That’s why she’d hugged me so hard when she showed up afterwards: she’d been wracked with guilt.
And she warned Grushin we were coming for him tonight, that’s how he’d laid the trap and waited down the street.
It was all so fucking obvious, now. The only thing I didn’t understand was…
“Why?” I rasped.
Tears were flooding down Caroline’s cheeks. I just didn’t understand it. Money? Did he bribe her? She’d always been such a warm, kind person. Either I’d utterly misjudged her, all this time, or—
Oh. Oh fuck.
Jack. Her kid with a heart condition. The one who’d suddenly gotten better, a year ago. “Grushin gave him a new heart,” I whispered.
Her face crumpled, and she dissolved into sobbing. “He was going to die!”
Oh God. Grushin had shown up on her doorstep and offered to save her kid. What would I have done? What would any mother have done? And once she’d accepted his offer, he owned her.
The toe of a leather shoe hooked under my cheek, and I was flipped onto my front.
There was a nuclear flash of pain from my ankle, and I screamed, and then the wound in my back opened up, and I gave a guttural grunt, tears springing to my eyes.
I lay there terrified to move, because the slightest movement hurt so much.
Viktor Grushin stared down at me, shaking his head.
“I don’t understand why he’d want someone who’s so much trouble,” he told me.
He glanced towards Caroline. “Come inside. Once they’re all dead, you’ll help me burn the place down.
We can make it look like the Aristovs had a fight with the Irish.
” He started strolling towards the house. Then, as he passed me, he—
NO GOD NO PLEASE—
—grabbed my broken ankle.
I screamed long and loud as he dragged me along the ground behind him. Before we even reached the house, the pain and the blood loss had made my vision shrink to a dark tunnel.
My last thought before I passed out was a horrible realization. Caroline hadn’t told the FBI we were here. Which meant no one was coming to save us.