Chapter 22 #2
There’s a tarp on the shelf we keep for when men choose the messy route.
I take it down and shake it once to clear the dust. The smell of treated plastic fills the air.
I throw it over Kyle’s head and the sound he makes is animalistic.
His hands jerk, the chains bite. I put a boot on the line between the chair legs and lean until the steel complains.
The tarp sucks into his mouth when he tries to breathe.
The room fills with the wet sound of a desperate man.
I count to three and lift the edge so air returns to him.
“South?” I ask.
“Yes,” he pants.
I drop the tarp. The sound comes back. It’s louder. He’s learning. I lift it up for five. He coughs a thread of spit, and it hangs between his lip and the plastic like a ribbon.
“Miami contact,” I say, as though we weren’t having a different conversation a heartbeat ago. “Who is Delgado’s man in Bayonne? Who meets the vans?”
“Manny,” he gasps. “Delgado sometimes, or his cousin Tito. I only heard the names. I swear!”
“What does Manny drive?” I ask him. “And what color is it?”
“W-white van,” he stammers. “One door has a red smear from paint like someone brushed it by accident.”
I press the tarp onto his mouth with my palm until his jugular pulses against the tendons in his neck like it’s going to learn to beat for me. I lift it again when his hands start to go numb and the fingers twitch like white fish.
“Where do they stop between Kearny and Bayonne?” I demand, because nobody drives a van full of guns without a plan for what happens if shit goes sideways.
He’s crying now and trying not to. “Greene Street,” he says. “Abandoned railroad. They think it’s quiet.”
I take the tarp off his head and hold it in my hands for a moment because I can feel Alina’s eyes if I let myself.
She isn’t here. She was never meant to spend a second in rooms like this.
But I drag her into it anyway in my head, because the version of me that’s kept me alive this long wants her to see the worst and stay.
I imagine walking back upstairs and telling her I put a bag over a boy’s head until he remembered the names of the men he swore his loyalty to.
I imagine the way her lips would press together, and her pretty green eyes would heat in anger.
And I hate that the thought doesn’t even push her farther away.
She’ll look at me anyway. She’ll choose me anyway.
It makes me want to make a bigger mess. It makes me want to be better. I’m not fucking built to be both.
“Again,” I say to prove that I can. “Who holds the keys? Who holds the codes? Who makes the call to go south?”
Kyle answers. He gives me names already floating in my men’s mouths and one we didn’t have yet.
He gives up the time the drunk in the sedan would change shifts—1 a.m., 4 a.m. He tells me the color of the tarp—blue—that cover the pallets and the way it smells like mildew because somebody stored it wet last month.
He gives me the container number the Miami buyer likes to use when he wants to pretend this is legitimate.
He offers me more information I don’t need out of the simple human desire to keep all the pieces of his body attached to itself.
When he runs out of details worth hearing, I put the tarp away and choose a different instrument. I grab up the pliers and take his left hand again, rolling the fingers between my own like I am counting prayer beads.
“Last thing,” I say. “The address of the bar where Popeye goes to pay men who don’t ask him for receipts?”
He shakes his head because he thinks this information on the president is a holy thing.
I put the pliers on his ring finger and watch the way his chest closes around the word no and wrestles it to the floor.
I squeeze slowly until he screams once and then bites it off because he still wants to be a man.
“Redline!” he blurts, voice shredded. “A bar in…Jersey City. Neon sign. The letters burn out, so it reads ‘Re-line’ on Tuesdays if it’s clear of cops and anyone suspicious. That’s where Popeye meets up with AK.”
“AK?” I repeat, already certain I know who those initials belong to.
“Archer Kent,” Kyle chokes.
I let the pliers sit there, pressure notched into a promise, and look at him for a long breath that hurts my ribs.
“Where he ‘meets’ Archer? As in Popeye’s had multiple meetings with Archer?” I ask.
“Yes. Monthly. Sometimes every other week.”
“For how many months?” I ask, dreading the answer.
“Five or six. I don’t know. I think it’s six!” he says in a rush.
So, Archer’s betrayal wasn’t a onetime stunt. I’m not fucking surprised. I am, however, sick to my stomach that every new lie of his nudges Alina a step farther from me. This hits deeper than the bullet ever did.
I set the tool down because even I like a world where a young man with his whole life ahead of him keeps ten fingers when he helps. His intel on Archer is worth almost as much as the rest put together.
“Petrov,” I say.
“Got it,” he answers, already typing, already sending men.
“Renat, keep an eye on him. Feed him water and enough bites of food to keep him breathing while we verify.”
“Yes, sir,” Renat says.
Kyle starts crying like he’s won something he isn’t sure he wanted. I take his leather jacket off the nail by the door and hold it up where he can see it.
“If what you’ve told me is true, then you may leave here alive. But you don’t get this or your patch back. If you’re smart, you’ll leave the city, the state, hell, the country, when we’re done with you. Understood?”
He nods until nodding his head is all he knows how to do.
I step out into the main parking garage where the air is cold enough to make my wound pucker. Petrov follows, silent at first.
“Boss,” he says when we’re halfway to the elevator that takes me up to Alina again. “You keeping him breathing because of the girl?”
I turn and look at him. He holds my gaze. He doesn’t say Alina’s name. He doesn’t have to.
“I want him to keep breathing because I may need his mouth tomorrow,” I say. It’s true. It’s not the only truth. “I’m also working on a deadline that doesn’t include time to bury a mistake tonight.”
He nods. He approves of efficiency. He pretends not to approve of mercy, but he likes serving a man whose violence looks clean enough to admire in the morning.
On the elevator, I brace my palm on the wall of mirrors when the car lurches and the wound pulls.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, as if it senses my moment of weakness.
Gavriil’s name lights the screen as the elevator doors open into the penthouse corridor where my two men stand watch.
I let his call go to voicemail. I can’t deal with him right now.
If Gavriil senses hesitation, the clock will run faster.
Inside the apartment, my jaw clenches when I see the white roses on the kitchen island.
Gavriil must have had them delivered while I was downstairs and none of the guards thought to mention it. I count them twice, relieved that there are only eleven before heading to the bedroom.
Alina sleeps on her side, clutching the other pillow, undisturbed by my presence. She looks softer in sleep, untouched by everything I am. I shouldn’t lay my hands on her again. I plan to as soon as my side heals and Archer is dealt with.
The chair that was only for decoration before she arrived and took over my bed has now learned the shape of me.
I retake it and count her breaths. Each rise and fall remind me why I claimed her.
The number is the same as the number of men I would kill to make sure she keeps doing it just like that.
I don’t love that about myself. I accept it anyway.
I must have dozed off, because the next time I open my eyes, Alina stands in front of me on bare feet. Her long, dark hair is unbrushed, like she just rolled out of bed. My bed. She’s never looked more beautiful.
She takes me in all at once—shirt with its new, angry stain mostly hidden by dark fabric, the way I’m bracing without admitting it.
“What did you do?” Alina asks.