Chapter 9
9
ROMAN
M ickey folds his arms stubbornly. “I’m coming with you.”
I run an impatient hand through my hair. “No, Mickey, you’re not. I want you here.”
“I’m the one who found her. I want to be there.” He stares me down, something I’m becoming more used to than I might like. “I want Darya to know she has a family. She thinks we don’t care.” He gives me a rather hard look. “She should know that we do. That I do,” he adds pointedly.
Christ. The kid hasn’t let up on me for a second. “I’m beginning to regret letting you back into the lab,” I say resignedly.
Mickey smiles tightly. “You need me, and you know it.”
I shake my head. “You’re turning into an arrogant little shit, you know that?”
He shrugs. “I learned from the best.”
We both almost smile, then a computer pings, and we zero in on the screen, all trace of humor lost. That’s the thing, the last couple of days. There are moments, here and there, when I forget the hellish reality we’re all living. Moments when Mickey makes me smile, or Dimitry and I fall into our familiar banter. But as soon as the moments come, they go again, and the darkness descends.
I still haven’t heard back from Makari. And I still don’t have a plan.
For once, I’ve listened to Dimitry and Mickey. And, yes, to goddamn Abby, though that girl pisses me off beyond recognition at times. They’ve all advised me to wait, to hear what Darya has to say before I make an attack plan for Miami.
Mickey has also suggested talking to Sergei, Darya’s father. That’s a conversation I’m not ready to have. I did send Dimitry there, to find out if Sergei knows anything about Darya’s whereabouts, but I already knew before he went that the visit would be useless.
Darya’s been running a long time. She knows her father is the first place I’d turn for information. She’d never risk telling him anything that might endanger him or betray her whereabouts.
Mickey’s phone buzzes again. He holds it up, waving the screen at me. “It’s Sergei again. You should talk to him, Roman. He’s worried about the girls.”
“Oh, I bet he fucking is.” I don’t give a shit how Sergei Petrovsky feels. No matter how much I might love his daughter, I doubt I’ll ever forgive the man whose ineptitude got my parents killed and whose greed got my daughters kidnapped. He can worry all he likes, as far as I’m concerned.
“Come on, then.” I tilt my head at Mickey and hold the door to the lab open. “If you’re coming, get in the bloody car.”
He almost takes my arm off in his haste to duck under it.
“You should take the chopper,” Dimitry says, frowning. “It’s quicker.”
“It also draws attention.” I don’t mention the fact that I’m actually looking forward to the drive. I need some time to get ready for the upcoming encounter, to prepare myself for the fact that Darya just might not want to come back, not after what I said to her. She might not want to be found.
She certainly did a good job of running.
Without Mickey’s eagle eye and insane skill at hacking cameras in places I never would have thought of, we’d never have tracked her. Even now, we’ve only narrowed her location down to a rough area in Granada. It will take a bit of footwork on the ground to pinpoint exactly where she is.
If I’m honest, Mickey is the right person for the job. A kid asking questions is a lot less obvious than someone like me asking them. But the thought of being alone in the car with him for several hours isn’t quite so appealing. Mickey might have kept the worst of his opinions to himself, but his snarky asides and hard side-eye have spoken volumes.
He’s pissed at me. Seriously pissed. He’s also terrified for his sisters, and frustrated as hell at how long it’s taking to get them back. I’m guessing this car ride is about to become an interrogation, one I’m not really looking forward to.
“What are you doing?” I glance sideways to where Mickey is tapping away on his laptop. Dusk is falling behind the mountains, purple and gold in the distance. The coast is fading behind us as we go further inland, through the steep passes and winding roads that lead to the ancient inland city of Granada.
“Still trying to hack into the security cameras at the Coconut Grove compound.” He glares at the screen. “It’s surprisingly difficult. And the connectivity up here is cooked.”
“Doesn’t Pavel have a whole team working on that?”
“I’m better.” He hunches over the screen, his lips pressed hard together.
“Mickey.”
“Hm.” He doesn’t look up.
“Mickey. Put the fucking laptop away.” That at least gets him to turn my way. “The reception won’t get any better until we’re through the mountains, and that’s at least one hour, if not two. Pavel has a team working on hacking the system, with all the lab’s power behind them. You clearly have some things you’d like to get off your mind. Now’s your chance.”
I take the corners at a measured pace, watching him from the corner of my eye. After a while he closes the screen and half turns in his seat, so he’s facing me. “I’m not sure you want to hear what I’ve got to say.”
My hands tighten on the steering wheel. I relax them with an effort. “I’m not going to beg, Mickey. You want to talk, you don’t want to talk—it’s up to you. But don’t assume you know what I do and don’t want to hear. If I wasn’t interested, I wouldn’t ask.”
“Okay, fine.” I can feel his eyes boring into me. “Why didn’t you ever tell us your real name?”
“I’ve never told anyone my real name, Mickey.”
“What about Papa? Or Deda Yuri? Didn’t you have to tell them when he adopted you?”
“We’re bratva. We do things our own way, Mickey, you know that. I told Yuri there was no record of my birth anywhere, and that I didn’t want to know where I came from. He respected my decision. Pulled strings, got the adoption pushed through without the regular papers. Cut through bureaucracy.” I shrug. “Rules have never meant much to people like your Deda Yuri and me.”
“What about Papa? I thought you were like brothers. Why wouldn’t you tell him the truth?”
My hands tighten again. I flex my fingers, trying to work out how to answer him. “Firstly, because he never asked.”
He snorts. “That’s not an answer.”
“Well, it kind of is, actually.” I cut my eyes to him briefly and see the skepticism on his face. “Look. Your father and I were teenagers when we met. Not much older than you are now. We didn’t sit around discussing our feelings, Mickey. Our conversations tended to revolve around work, partying, and women, more or less in that order.” I shrug. “Your father wasn’t one to push for answers, particularly on private matters. He always respected my right to keep my past to myself, just like your Deda Yuri did.”
“But didn’t you want to tell him? Weren’t you curious about your past? About the vault and the Naryshkin treasure?”
“Woah.” I hold up a hand to halt his flow of questions. “That’s a whole lot of questions. Let me take them one at a time. No, I didn’t want to tell your father who I was. I didn’t want to tell anyone. I’d been on the streets since I was ten. I’d buried my past a long time ago, learned to become someone else. Those years weren’t easy. I guess it was simpler to look ahead, rather than behind.
“As to being curious... well, that’s different. I knew some things about my past, though next to nothing about the Naryshkin treasure. There’s a hell of a lot that I still don’t know. For a long time I didn’t want to know. Lately—since the Ryder stuff came out—I’m more curious, yes. But I’m wary, too.” I can feel his eyes searching my face as I talk, taking in every nuance in my expression. I meet his eyes in the growing dark. “My past was a dangerous place, Mickey. The fact that the Orlovs have your sisters now should be proof enough of just how dangerous.”
“Then why didn’t you kill them?” The bluntness of his question momentarily silences me. “You’re not exactly a peacemaker, Roman. From what I’ve seen and heard, you’ve never hesitated to put a bullet through anyone who gets in your way. So why are the Orlovs still alive? If they killed your parents, don’t you want them dead? Surely you’ve had the resources for years now to get rid of them, if you wanted to?”
I’m squirming in my seat. Not a metaphor. I’m twisting around like a fucking pretzel, and to be honest, I’ve never wanted out of a conversation more.
Christ, this kid. He knows how to ask the hard questions, the little prick.
“You’re worse than a goddamn therapist, you know that?” I shoot him a slightly resentful look.
Mickey almost smiles. “I’ve been sent to enough of them over the years. I know the drill.” His smile fades. “Is it because you want whatever is in that vault your father built? Is it true that it’s full of Fabergé eggs and other Russian imperial treasures?”
I close my eyes briefly. For a moment I’m back in Switzerland, my heart thudding with fear and trepidation, waiting for the safety deposit box to open. Hoping against hope that what I find there will lead me to my mother.
Instead I find myself staring at a glittering jeweled egg.
Priceless, definitely. Useful, certainly.
But utterly fucking meaningless in any way that truly mattered to me, then or now.
“It’s not about the fucking treasure.” Even I hear the bitter note in my voice. “That vault has cost more lives than I care to count. I don’t give a fuck what’s inside it; I never did.”
That was Sergei Petrovsky’s obsession, not mine. But I’m not saying any of that to Mickey.
I clear my throat. “It’s complicated. I have a lot of unanswered questions, about both of my parents. I guess I’d like those questions answered before I start taking out the only people who might know something.”
“Then why haven’t you spoken to Deda Juan—Sergei?” he quickly corrects himself. “Darya’s father. Wouldn’t he have some of those answers?”
“Maybe.” I keep my eyes carefully on the road ahead.
He shakes his head. “I don’t understand you.”
I snort. “If I had a dollar for every time a woman has said that to me.”
“Yeah, well.” My humor clearly missed the mark. “Most people would leave no stone unturned to find out their own story. Especially when that story results in children being kidnapped.”
That hits me like a gut punch. “I’ll get your sisters back, Mickey. I fucking swear it.” I hate how inadequate that promise sounds.
“You’d better.” I don’t miss the lethal note in his voice. Again, I’m reminded that he’s not a kid. Not after this. “Don’t you mean you’ll get your daughter back?” He folds his arms and raises his eyebrows at me. “And my little sister. Who just happens to be the daughter of your worst enemy.”
“They’re both my daughters, Mickey, just like you’re my son. You’ll always have your real father, but today, and for all the days to come, we’re a family. I don’t care whose DNA is whose.”
“Are you sure about that?” He’s watching me closely. “Because that’s the next item on my agenda. You said you didn’t know Ofelia is your daughter. But I imagine you do remember sleeping with my mother?”
I wince. “Jesus, Mickey.” This car ride is worse than open heart fucking surgery.
“So? What’s the story there? How long were you together?”
“Maybe you should talk to your mother about this.”
“I don’t ever want to talk to my mother again.” His voice is chilling enough to freeze fire. “Inger took my sisters. She kidnapped them and put them in danger. I won’t forgive her for that. Not ever.”
I don’t bother trying to argue with him. I know that kind of anger. It settles in your bones, deep and painful, and calcifies there. It isn’t the kind of anger that is fixed by a cozy conversation over a kitchen counter. Inger has endangered the two people Mickey cares about most in the world, taken the only true family he’s ever known, and held them hostage.
When he says he won’t forgive her, I believe him. I also don’t blame him. Fuck knows, I won’t ever forgive Inger myself.
“They’re my sisters.” His voice is low, slightly unsteady. “They were my responsibility, Roman. My job to look after. I should have seen what Inger was up to. I was so stupid. It was right in front of my face. I knew something wasn’t right about those pictures Nikolai took on the yacht, and there was something weird about the way Inger suddenly wanted us all to go to that ball. She’s never wanted us around when she’s attending those kinds of things. I knew there was something wrong, and I just—I didn’t—” His voice breaks, and he buries his head in his hands.
I pull the car into the gravel and am out of it in an instant. I pull his door open and haul the lanky length of him into a hard embrace. For once he doesn’t argue. He stands stiffly for a moment, then his head falls onto my shoulder. His sobs are not the hiccups of the child he was, but the broken, rasping tears of the man he is becoming.
“It’s not your fault, Mickey.” I hold his head, my voice fierce against his ear. “You hear me? None of this is your fault. It was me who failed. It’s my job to protect you all, and I dropped the fucking ball. Don’t you ever blame yourself for this.”
His head twists against my shoulder, his whole body tense and shuddering. “I should have seen it.” His voice is muffled, but the self-recrimination in it hurts me inside.
“You listen to me.” I pull away and put my hands on his face, making him meet my eyes. “You hear this, once and forever. You. Did. Nothing. Wrong. This is all on me. I run the security in my organization. I do the risk assessment, and I take care of business. There’s only one person who fucked up here, and it was me. You know me by now, Mickey. Do you honestly think I wouldn’t tell you if I thought you’d messed up?”
I hold his eyes until he finally gives a slight shake of his head.
“Right. Do you think Pavel and his team would want to work with you if they blamed you for the girls being taken?”
This time his shake is a little firmer.
“Exactly. They all know, Dimitry included, that this is my fuckup.”
I step back slightly and grip his shoulders, still holding his eyes.
“They also know there’s no point talking about whose fucking fault this is. There’s only one thing that matters now: getting the girls back. There isn’t anything I won’t do to make that happen. My people know that.
“I will fix this, Mickey. No matter if I have to get a whole army to Miami. I’ll get the girls back. That much I swear to you.”
He nods slowly. “Will you promise to let me help? Not keep me on the outside?”
I nod. “I promise I won’t keep a single thing from you, Mickey. From now on, we do this as a team.” I pull him into a rough hug.
Eventually he pulls away, and I let him go. I give him a half smile as I open the passenger door. “Does this mean you’ll stop grilling me in the fucking car? I don’t know if I can take another hundred miles of this shit.”
Mickey gives a shaky laugh and wipes his arm across his face. “Truce,” he says. “For now, at least.”
I roll my eyes. “I suppose I should give thanks for small mercies.” I pull the door closed and give his shoulder a final squeeze.
“Come on, then. Let’s go and bring Darya home.”