Chapter Twenty-Six
In which betrayal cuts deepest when it's close.
Dmitri…
It's not a long wait. The crowd watching the game clears out as it ends and he has no one else to drink with, so he pays his tab and heads out, whistling.
I knew he'd moved from The McManus in the last couple of months.
I could find his address but my demon wants this, my SUV trailing his town car, stalking him through town.
He's settled in a shiny new building in Little Italy, all blinding glass and steel.
"I'm taking the stairs," I say, watching him saunter into the lobby. "Roman, you follow him. Text me when you see what floor he gets off and meet us there."
"On it," he says, circling around the doorman as Kir engages the poor man with a raging litany about the terrible state of his non-existent apartment.
"There's no pizza oven!" Kir shouts. "I was promised the masons would add-" Roman puts his hands in his pockets, whistling and watching the elevator numbers climb.
My demon runs with me, purring as I stretch my legs, taking the steps two at a time, checking my phone on every landing.
I open the stairway door just as he disappears into his apartment.
I examine the lock. It's a good one, complicated. The door itself, though, is flimsy.
"Demid, we'll kick it in on the hinge side. Three… two… one." We both slam our feet into the door and it splinters and sags. I go through first, shoving the torn wood apart.
There's a girl standing in the hallway, holding a tray. She couldn't be more than eighteen. He's dressed her even younger in a little blue jumper and her hair up in a ponytail, barefoot.
There's a metal collar around her neck.
Her eyes flood with tears and she drops the tray with a crash, taking a step towards us and then a step back. I understand. Just because we're here, doesn't mean that we're here to save her.
"What the hell is that noise? Did you drop something again?" He walks out of the bedroom, pulling on a t-shirt, freezing with it halfway over his head when he sees us.
"Oh, shit," Ilya says.
At a Morozov warehouse…
"What the fuck."
Roman's watching a sweaty, shaken Ilya through the one-way mirror. The room has two chairs, bolted to the floor and nothing else. Plain concrete walls. "His family. The Zaitsevs… they're our people."
"No one's been in there, correct?" I say.
"Not since we brought him in," Roman nods.
My demon is dancing again. Ready to tear and rend as we walk into the room. "You're going to give us everything you know," I tell Ilya. "Your family can't protect you here. The only way to get out of here alive is to tell us every name. Every location. Every fucking transaction."
"I don't know anything!" Ilya screams. "I just got a text telling me about the auctions. You don't know who you can buy until it opens."
My jaw tightens. This motherfucker talks about buying a woman - a girl - as casually as he would pull out his credit card to purchase a car.
"The auction, your funds verification. It was all handled online?" Roman asks.
"Yeah," Ilya says. "I never saw anybody.
You just bid and send your money. It goes through five or six different transactions before it gets cleared.
I got the keys and the paperwork via courier.
I can't believe they put another apartment on the same floor as mine!
" He's looking between us, outraged. "Didn't they realize that would double our risk? "
Ilya is younger than me, more around Alexey's age.
Still, being Adam's best friend, I'd grown up with him around.
He was never as bright as Adam or as driven, but he seemed like a cheerful, slightly oblivious rich boy.
Not a piece of shit who could buy a human being and hold her captive for over six months.
"How did you find out about the auction?" Roman leans in close. Ilya must see the madness dancing in his eyes, and now, he panics.
"I want to talk to my dad! Or- or to Adam. They can act as my intermediaries. We can work through them," he bleats. "We can lower the temperature here."
Knocking him off the chair with a single punch, I enjoy the pain radiating from my knuckles. I put my foot on his chest when he tries to sit up, enjoying his little choking noises as I lean down hard on his ribs.
"Everything you were before and the friendship we had with your family is gone now.
You know our stance on human trafficking.
" He makes a snuffling noise, face already covered with tears and snot.
"You bought a human being, you piece of shit!
" I flatten his nose with my fist and it feels good.
"You bought a teenager. We'll treat you like we do any other useless fuck who goes against our people. Your people."
He stares up at me, eyes red and watering. "Adam will never forgive you for hurting me," he croaks. It's probably true. As useless as Ilya is, I know Adam loves him. I lean more of my weight on his chest.
"You have one way of coming out of this alive, and that is telling us everything you know. How did you find out about the auction?"
"I don't know," he wails. "Just, you know, around." He gives me a sickly smile. "I think I heard about it at your club, K- King's Rest. Some of the members were talking at the bar next to me."
My fucking club?
Ilya doesn't have a membership, but Adam does. I'm sure security would have allowed Ilya in. The guards there know how close our families are.
I push my foot down hard enough that one of his ribs creaks ominously, and he bats at my leg, wheezing. He has soft hands. Well groomed. He must go to a salon to get his fingernails buffed. "Who gave you the information?" I rasp, my voice thin and sharp.
"You have to understand!" He coughs violently. "It's by text, man. Everything's handled by text and online!"
"Who. Told. You?" My demon laughs as I kick Ilya in the stomach, the force of it rolls him twice and he hits the wall.
Cowering, he gasps, "I don't know his name! I'd seen him at the club before. He gave me a number to text."
"You don't have a fucking name? Bullshit."
"He was a doctor, he was bragging to one of his friends about some surgery he'd done. That's all I know about him." He looks up at us pleadingly, still blubbering.
Roman puts a hand on my shoulder, grounding me. "You should go take a break." He sees the tremor in my fingers and he knows I'm hanging on to the last of my self-control.
Striding out of the room, I find Kolya, setting up a mobile workstation. "You got all that?"
"Of course," he says, fingers already racing across his keyboard. "I'm cross-referencing members and guests at King's Rest, with any connection to the medical profession. We can pull up the pictures and have him identify them."
"My fucking club."
Kolya winces, but his gaze never leaves his monitors. "Yeah, man. That really sucks. You put a bunch of rich bastards together in a room, though, and something fucked up is always going to happen. And everyone's bitching about organized crime? Please."
Demid is standing by the entrance, he hands me a dress shirt. "You've got a mess there." He nods at my sleeve. There’s blood sprayed across the fabric from punching Ilya. Pulling off my shirt, I wipe my hands clean.
"Taking a member of an allied family, killing him… This has serious consequences," he says softly, looking through the one-way mirror. Roman has Ilya pinned up against the wall, arms and legs waving spasmodically.
"I know," I say.
"If Adam and his father find out what Ilya's done, and then what's happened here..." Demid watches me. "If Ilya's actions don't break them, this could."
Ilya's screaming again. Roman just dislocated his shoulder.
"Are you trying to make a point here, moy Vtoroy?" I'm enjoying Ilya's suffering. It's difficult to concentrate.
"Only outlining the potential repercussions," he says.
"He is the only concrete lead we have." I button up the clean dress shirt. "I would peel the flesh from his bones if it gave us the men in charge of this ring."
"Understood."
"How's the girl we pulled from the apartment?"
"Dr. Morozova says she's in good health," he says. "He fed her, at least. No serious injuries. Her family's been contacted, they're in Georgia. She's lucky, unlike some of the families we've reunited, they were ecstatic to hear from us. They've been searching for her since she disappeared."
"At least there is one piece of good news," I sigh.
Roman comes out of the room, Ilya's loud wailing follows until the door shuts and the sound cuts off abruptly.
"Do you believe him when he says that's all he knows?
" Roman asks me. "He's willing to invest millions of dollars to buy a girl and an apartment without face-to-face contact? Surely even Ilya isn't that stupid."
"He knows more than he's telling us," I say.
"He's banking on the family connection to stop us from beating the shit out of him.
Kolya is compiling images of all the guests and the members of the club in the last year with any medical connection.
Alexsey knows him best. Have him be the one to go through the pictures with him, let him play good cop, then you can come in to break a few bones, maybe take a finger or two to properly motivate him. "
Roman looks as happy as if I just offered him the keys to my Bugatti Chiron. "I love you, man." His smile fades. "When are you going to tell Adam?"
When am I going to tell my best friend that I'm torturing his brother? "When we have everything we need to know. Everything he's capable of giving us."
***
I find Ava outside on the terrace, pacing the stream one way, crossing over the little foot bridge, and circling back again. Round and round like a mouse on a wheel. Her face is blank but when she sees me, her chin trembles.
"Was it him?" she asks.
"Yes."
"I'm sorry," she says, stepping over carefully as if she's not sure if I'll welcome her touch. I open my arms for her. "I didn't- I almost wanted to be wrong. I didn't want it to be somebody you knew. Was he able to tell you anything helpful?"
"We're close," I say.
"Dmitri?"
"Hmm?"
"Do you get all monosyllabic when you're sad?" She snakes her arms around my waist, soothingly rubs my back under my jacket.
"So it seems." I kiss the top of her head.
"Do you think…" she pauses for a moment.
"What?"
She's looking up at me, her midnight blue eyes are so sad. "Is it possible that Adam and his family's company is behind this?"
I step back from her, shocked. I've been trained to examine every angle, every possible outcome, but this? It was never a consideration.
Father would have examined this possibility, I think bitterly. He wouldn't allow emotion to cloud his judgement.
"I…" I shake my head firmly. "No, of course not. Ilya has always been a weak and entitled little prick. He lives off an allowance from his father. But Adam's a good man. No."
"Of course," she says hesitantly. "You've known him your entire life."
What she isn't saying is that I've known Ilya just as long.
***
moy Vtoroy - Russian for "my second" a bratva rank designation