Chapter 30
CHAPTER
THIRTY
DANIIL
“Look over here,” Yulian says. His fingers fly over the keyboard of his laptop, clicking and hitting keys until he finally zooms in on a frozen image on the screen. It takes me a minute to understand what I’m seeing, but my blood runs cold when I realize what I’m looking at.
Jorge and Bianca. Together.
It’s from the night of the art school fundraiser at the casino, over a week ago. The image was taken from the back stairwell of the casino that leads to our offices. What either of them are doing there is unclear.
Jorge wasn’t invited; I banned all Zega members from attending.
And Bianca, why would she be in the back stairway?
Separately, either of these things doesn’t make sense. But together, it raises a serious fucking red flag. Yulian is watching me, gauging my reaction to the freeze-frame.
“What is this?” I rasp, feeling unsteady.
“I had a few motion-activated cameras installed in the less-used stairwells and back rooms. These cameras aren’t monitored, but I’m alerted to unusual activity. This stairwell should have been quiet during the party.”
“Blyad,” I say, an agitated hand running through my hair. I know I will not like whatever comes next.
Yulian presses play on his keyboard and sits back in his seat.
The video is grainy because of the low light, but it shows Bianca in the service stairwell, about to make her way upstairs, before a lone male intercepts her with a hand on her arm.
She turns, startled. He pulls her off the first step, where they engage in an intense conversation.
“What the fuck was he doing there? He wasn’t invited.” My mind reels trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. But that’s the problem, there’s little to see. Jorge’s back is to the camera and while Bianca is facing the camera, she is bathed in a deep shadow.
“Did she tell you about this?” Yulian grunts.
My jaw tightens. “No.”
Their exchange lasts for only a few minutes before Bianca continues up the stairs, and Jorge exits the camera’s view.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I rail, anger blazing down my spine like a bolt of lightning. “How did he make it past security?”
Yulian shakes his head. “Let me worry about that. You need to worry about what’s going on with your wife.”
“You think they’re working together?” A battle plays out inside me. On one hand, I don’t believe it, don’t want to believe it. But on the other hand, there is no reasonable explanation for their secret stairwell meeting. Or for Bianca to not tell me about it.
Yulian’s mouth is set in a hard line. “It doesn’t look good.”
“Have you shown this to anyone else yet?”
“It was just brought to my attention. I thought you should be the first to see it.” He runs his thumb across his upper lip. “I’d say this is the proof you need to convince Andrei that Jorge can’t be trusted. Because whatever is happening here is not good.”
“What am I supposed to do with this?” I yell, anger swallowing me whole. I curl my hand around our wedding picture propped on my desk and hurl it at the wall. Fuck. Violence is the only way to calm my raging nerves right now. My next victim is the decanter on the bar cart.
Yulian leaves the room and lets me rage. I’ll smash, burn, and destroy everything in my sight until I’m too broken, too numb to feel anything at all.
I’m barely able to form a coherent sentence by the time we pull up to the estate.
I’d forced Yuri to stop at every watering hole between Brooklyn and East Hampton, and like a good soldat, he’d done his job and kept his mouth shut, accompanying me into every seedy dive bar I demanded we visit.
He supported my weight once I got too sloshed to walk in a straight line as we left the final bar on my route to hell.
After we pull up to the estate, I have a vague notion of Yuri trying to help me from the back seat, but I shove him off, and when he doesn’t get the message, I pull a gun on him.
“Crazy motherfucker,” he mutters, slamming the door and stomping off. It’s true. I am a crazy motherfucker. A heartbroken one, too, and I need to be left alone in an alcohol-fueled abyss. So I curl up in the back seat and allow sleep to be my savior.
It feels like I’ve been dead to the world for days, but in reality, I wake up only hours later, curled on the hard leather seat.
I have a throbbing headache, a mouth full of cotton, and a cramp in my neck.
In short, I’m a fucking mess. But worse, I’m no longer drunk.
I’m no longer a mindless pool of incoherence.
I’m way too sober for my liking, and there’s no more running from the truth: Bianca used me like a pawn for her own advantage.
Why, and how deep her betrayal goes is what I need to figure out.
Stumbling from the SUV, I enter the mansion quietly and get a drink of water from the kitchen.
After chugging it down, I chase it with an espresso and two aspirin.
I have to be sober for what I’m about to do.
Well, get mostly sober. Bianca deserves that much—for her final judgment to be from a sober man.
I’ll catch a few more hours of sleep on my office couch before I confront her. The hallway is dark and empty. Not a surprise, considering it’s three in the morning, and the guards don’t roam the halls unless movement is picked up on the cameras.
I fling the door to my office open and then pause. It takes my brain a moment to register what I am seeing.
Bianca.
On her hands and knees.
Groping the underside of a potted plant. What in the fuck?
She jumps up, her face pale, frozen in a mask of surprise. “Daniil.” She reaches out to me, but then drops her hand, seeming to think better of it.
“What are you doing?” I know what she’s doing, but I need her to say it.
“I was—” She’s breathing hard, her body trembling. “I can explain. We need to talk, you need to—”
I’m on her too fast for her to get the rest of her words out. In a blink, I have her arms restrained behind her back as I push her upper body onto the desk, holding her there, but at a loss what to do with her.
“I know this looks bad. I know you’re angry,” she sobs. “You have every right to be, but you need to hear me out.”
Icy rage works its way through me, a pit in my stomach threatening to explode. My heart jackhammers in my chest as I pull a knife from my ankle strap and hold it flush to her throat. Wrenching her up by her hair, I whisper in her ear, “We’ll talk downstairs. Where I question traitors. Now move.”
Pushing her along, she walks in front of me, my fingers still curled against her scalp. She silently weeps, her delicate shoulders shaking as she steals a glance at me. I enjoy her pain, her panic—she needs to know how we deal with traitors in the bratva.
But it’s not rage filling my chest, though, it’s deep sadness. The kind that could suck me under and hold me down like some possessed sea creature, never to rise again.
We are in the dungeon before I realize it.
It’s not really a dungeon, but it has all the charm of one.
It’s more like a holding cell. A small bare room, the only light coming from a single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.
Other than the chair I’ve deposited Bianca on, there’s a rickety table, a stripped mattress in the corner, a sink, a toilet, and four blank walls.
In other words, this place looks medieval, and purposefully so. We don’t actually torture anyone down here, that happens at the factory, but we keep people here to scare the wits out of them before we’re ready to bring them in for questioning.
“Why?” My anguished voice echoes off the barren walls. “I gave you everything. Why would you side with that monster, with Días?”
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t fucking lie to me,” I roar, causing a fresh round of tears to fall down her beautiful face, onto to her thin white nightgown. I can practically see her naked curves, but it only serves to remind me how she manipulated me with sex, with my incredible need for her.
My breath comes fast and hard, I must look as unhinged as I feel because terror flashes in Bianca’s eyes. I’ve never seen her look so wrecked. Devastation written all over her face, but it’s nothing compared to the storm brewing inside me. Nothing.
I hold her jaw tightly and stuff my thumb into her mouth, wondering if she’s going to bite or play nice. I can’t stand to see her all misty-eyed and broken. She has no right. I’m the one who is hurting. She inflicted the pain.
But she takes it. She closes her eyes and sucks on my thumb so tenderly. It’s fucking confusing. Her warm mouth, the softness of her tongue. I don’t know what she is doing to me, other than rubbing salt in the wound.
I wrench my hand back and bring out the knife instead, but I don't have the heart to press it to her throat. It hangs limply by my side, as I stand in front of her, waiting for answers I don’t want to hear.
“It wasn’t Jorge and my uncle I was working for, it was the FBI.
” Her words hit me in the gut. Before I know it, I fist her hair in my hand, and I press the knife into her flesh, hard enough to sting.
Bianca’s not crying anymore; she’s not hysterical.
She seems to understand and accept that I must kill her. Even if it destroys me.
Which it will.
“It was never about you. I never wanted to hurt you or your family. I’ve been working with the feds to sink my uncle. He killed my family, and he will pay for that. I’ve made it my life's mission.”
I pause, her words throwing me. But then I remember she’s a master liar. “I don’t fucking believe you. I don’t believe a word you say.”
“It’s the truth, Daniil. I swear. I’m not lying. I can prove it.”
“Except you’re a liar,” I bellow, ragged emotion clear in my voice. “We caught you on camera conspiring with Días in the fucking back stairwell at the casino, a place neither of you should have been. Just like now. What were you doing in my office, Bianca? Planting a fucking bug.”