40. Lev
I’m angry at myself.
No, I’m fucking furious at myself.
Brooke told me she didn’t tell the FBI anything, and I didn’t believe her. If I’m really honest, I didn’t want to believe her, because believing her would require me to trust her, and I have a hard time doing that.
Trust people and you give them the chance to hurt you. I learned that lesson early, and it’s done a good job of keeping me alive.
Not that Brooke is a threat to my life. Just that wild, beating mass of muscle and blood vessels pounding in the middle of my chest. It was easier to build a wall around it when I thought she had betrayed me than it was to let her in, and for the first time in my life, I took the easy option.
Dammit, I’ve made a fucking mess of this.
“You know this is going to require some serious groveling,” says Feliks as he drives.
He’s right. I’m going to have to think of something pretty special to make it up to her. And something tells me that my little bunny isn’t going to make it easy on me. And she shouldn’t. I’ve been a fucking ass.
Deciding to send her a text, I pull out my phone, but it starts ringing. It’s an unknown number. My shoulders go tense. A burner phone. In my world, they mean trouble.
I answer it, and I don’t recognize the voice on the other end because it’s been distorted. “You want to find Vlad, then come to the corner of Eagle and Albion in Brooklyn.”
Two seconds after the caller hangs up, my phone beeps with a message. He has sent me a picture of Vlad. He’s sitting in a chair. And he is very, very dead.
Feliks spins the car around and takes off in the direction of the address the mysterious caller gave us.
“It could be a trap,” he warns.
“It probably is, but I’ll organize some men to meet us there.”
It takes us twelve minutes to get there. The address is an old canning factory on the waterfront that’s been abandoned for years. Some developer bought it but hasn’t done anything with it yet.
We should wait for my men to get there before we go in, but they are still five minutes away, and I’m an impatient fuck, so we enter the building and make our way through the empty factory.
We find Vlad in the old administration office. He’s sitting in the chair with a bullet in his forehead.
“Well fuck,” Feliks says, kicking a broken waste basket on the ground next to the door.
I’m seething. “Who the fuck got to him before I did?”
I hear someone behind us and swing around.
Vadim steps out from the shadows. “Hello, Nephew. I think we need to talk.”