Chapter 5
I understand where Michael Myers was coming from.
— Shasha’s secret thoughts
SHASHA
The woman was a slob.
I’d watched in rapt fascination as she’d stripped the moment she’d gotten in the door.
A good man would’ve looked away.
Then again, a good man wouldn’t have been in her apartment in the first place. Though…
I shouldn’t be at her place.
Fuck, but I shouldn’t be in her place.
Yet, there I was, watching her fall asleep, like some fuckin’ creeper in the corner of the room, after watching her eat her dinner, strip practically naked, and brush her teeth.
I waited until she was well and truly under before I peeled myself away from the wall and continued my walkthrough of her place.
Her place was a disaster.
It looked like someone walked in and blew everything over with an industrial-strength leaf blower.
Mail scattered on the floor.
Plates, forks, and cups scattered over every available surface.
Clean laundry piled up high on her recliner.
She had good security, that was a given.
The apartment complex that she lived in was gated. She was on the third floor. She had a great dead bolt on said door. What she didn’t have was good balcony security.
Either she hadn’t expected anyone to ever be able to get onto a third-floor balcony, or she forgot to lock the door.
Either way, I slipped out the same way I slipped into her place, then scaled the metal balcony to the one below it, dropping straight to the ground once I was at a good distance to do so.
The moment my feet found purchase, I stood out of my crouch and slid my phone from my pocket.
“Lev,” I said the moment he answered the phone. “You get anything?”
Lev, my resident computer genius and hacker extraordinaire, answered despite it being a late hour.
“Sure did,” he said, sounding distracted. “Sent it to your email an hour ago.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Anything I need to pay any attention to?”
“No, not with her.” He paused. “The brothers, though, are the ones that secured your house.”
I blinked. “They are?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You don’t recognize the company name?”
To be quite truthful, though I’d done the hiring of the job, that’d been six years ago now. A lot of things had happened since then.
“Nope,” I answered.
“That’s acceptable since they changed the name when their last brother got out of the military and joined them,” he said. “But other than her brothers being badass construction workers…nothing. She’s clean as a whistle.”
“Good,” I said. “Keep a psychic eye on her, though, just in case.”
“Will do,” Lev said and rang off.
Lev was a good guy.
I liked him a lot.
But he was also extremely introverted, and only talked on the phone with me, because I didn’t give him any other option.
Out of all my employees, he was the one that gave me the most trouble.
With anyone else it wouldn’t fly.
But Lev was blood. Distant blood, but still blood.
I’d give him a little more leeway than others because of that title alone.
My next call was to Alexi.
“Boss,” he said distractedly. “What can I do for you?”
“The Irish give you anything?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “But I’m showing them the error of their ways right now. They might give me something by the end of the night.”
“Don’t ruin any relationships,” I said. “Just rough ’em up a bit.”
“You don’t think kidnapping one of his soldiers isn’t going to piss him off?” Alexi asked.
I didn’t give a flying fuck what pissed him off. I wanted to find out who’d killed Paulo, Joaquin, and Cameron.
“No,” I said. “Now, stop asking questions you already know the answers to and get this done.”
Cayden McCloud and I had an understanding. You could almost say we were partners, in a way.
We weren’t “friends” per se, but we were associates. Known and trusted associates. We’d been bouncing ideas off of each other since we were both young and dumb. Our fathers had been the same way.
Now we were both running our own empires, both of our fathers having fallen and handed the reins to us way earlier than either one of us wanted.
We weren’t friends.
We were respected and trusted adversaries.
Sometimes his ideals aligned with mine. Other times they didn’t.
But he damn well knew why we were in Houston.
He wasn’t a part of it.
That I knew.
But he also wouldn’t help me find out who was unless it helped him in some way to do so.
“If you say so, boss,” Alexi drawled. “Thanks for dealing with Roslyn earlier.”
I grinned then, being reminded of Brecken.
“Let me know if you have any issues with your ex,” I said, hoping to have another reason to head to the school. “I’ll get her sorted out.”
Alexi laughed at that.
“Oh, I’m sure that you will,” he drawled. “I’ll also never hear the end of it if you have anything to do with handling her in any way.”
Alexi’s ex-wife, Kira, was once one of our friend group.
Alexi, Kira, and I had grown up together.
We’d been best friends.
When Alexi and Kira had gotten together, I hadn’t been surprised.
What I had been surprised about was how she’d changed after I’d given them my blessing.
It was only years later that we would find out exactly why Kira had changed so completely.
She hadn’t wanted Alexi at all. She’d wanted me. And she’d started dating Alexi to make me jealous.
The only problem was, I hadn’t been jealous. I’d never seen Kira that way, and never would. She’d only ever been Alexi’s in my eyes.
One would think that Kira’s behavior in the end would’ve affected Alexi and my relationship with each other, but it hadn’t. It’d only made us stronger.
When Alexi finally pulled his head out of his ass when it came to Kira and scraped her off, we’d grown even more solid.
Then my dad had died and left me as the Pakhan of the US arm of the Russian Bratva at the age of twenty-six, and I’d been faced with the reality of being the youngest Pakhan in history.
Truthfully, there were days when I asked myself why I did what I did.
Then I have a good laugh and remind myself that I never had a choice.
My father hadn’t given me one.
On the surface, my dad was a good dad. He was doting. Went to soccer games. Football practices. Violin recitals.
He spent the majority of my life being the perfect attentive parent. I also remember my dad having two faces.
The one that he put on in public—the one my sisters saw—and the one that he put on in private. Which just so happened to be the face that Dima and I saw, along with the rest of the criminal underworld.
My dad was devoted to my mother.
He was, in all reality, the best man that she could ever ask for.
He played the part really well.
Truthfully, when he died, I wasn’t sure how to feel.
There were two sides to every coin, and I unfortunately got to see both sides of that coin.
My dad was a hard man.
A killer.
An abuser.
But he was also fair and just. He expected perfection, but didn’t punish us if we didn’t give him that perfectness. But the silent warfare he would aim at you if you did wrong…
If I was being honest, my father had always struck me as having an undiagnosed mental illness.
The complete and utter disregard for life should’ve been my first clue.
My dad would kill anyone anywhere for any reason and expect everyone else to clean up his mess—i.e., me when I was old enough to do that and get away with it.
When my little sister, Maven, had gone missing while we were on a family vacation—we weren’t on a vacation, Dad had a business meeting that he disguised as a family vacation—he’d turned into this raging psychopath that couldn’t focus on anything but fixing a mistake that he’d inadvertently made.
Sure, my mom had been distraught and begged him to find her—we’d all been distraught—but Dad’s motivations were again two-sided.
Someone had pulled one over on the Pakhan of the Russian Bratva. That was a slight that he couldn’t allow to ever pass.
He’d spent the next twenty-five years of his life ‘searching.’
In reality, he’d been killing everyone and anyone that might or might not have an answer to his questions.
My phone rang, pulling me out of the contemplation of my father, and I stopped next to Brecken’s car.
I pulled the phone out of one pocket and placed it to my ear as I went into the other pocket with my free hand and pulled out a GPS tracker.
“Yes?” I said distractedly.
“Your boy is in my territory.”
I sighed. “Cayden.”
“Why is he here?” he drawled.
“You know why he’s there.” I sighed. “Three dead, all in your territory. You should be happy that I’m only nosing around asking questions and not beating the hell out of you for allowing that to happen to my men.”
“Your men shouldn’t be in Houston, Semyonov,” he stated carefully. Too carefully. “You have any way to get them home safely tonight?”
I frowned as I bent down and placed the tracker onto Brecken’s car.
“What’s good to eat there, Cayden?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t answer how I somehow expected him to answer. “I’m thinking about heading down there to give my friend a ride home.”
Years and years ago, during a closed-door meeting between our fathers, Cayden and I had made a childhood promise to always take care of the other.
We’d bonded over our psychopath fathers.
On our first visit as young children, we’d of course thought that we would be good friends. Then we’d both been informed separately that we should never trust the other.
Over time, that distrust had formed a bond of trust, and even still, as adults, we’d never called what we had together friendship.
Acknowledging our friendship would be seen as hostile.
We were powerful on our own. Together, we’d be seen as threats and be neutralized. So we maintained our distance, helped out where we could without appearing that we were, and ultimately pretended like we weren’t as good of friends as we were to protect ourselves and our family.
But during that closed-door meeting with our fathers when we were perhaps fourteen or fifteen, we’d realized that just because we weren’t allowed to be friends openly didn’t mean that we couldn’t be friends in private.
That day, we’d come up with a plan to always offer help when the other needed it.
“How will I know if you ever need anything?” I asked my childhood friend who I wasn’t actually allowed to be friends with.
“If you call, or I call, and ask you…” Cayden hesitated. “If I ask you if there’s anything good to eat, and you answer with, there’s never anything good to eat, we’ll know that the other is in trouble and needs help.”
There’d been times over the years that we’d said the phrase to each other, and the other had always answered in a way that we knew the other was all right. But somehow I knew this time would be different.
There’s never anything good to eat.
“There’s never anything good to eat,” Cayden said, confirming my fears.
I stood up slowly and stretched my arms up high over my head.
“Okay, well if that’s the case, I’ll talk to you later,” I said.
“Get your men out of Houston, Semyonov,” Cayden said and hung up.
I immediately placed another call.
Ivan, the man that took care of things logistically when Alexi wasn’t around to do it, answered on the second ring.
He was panting, and I wondered if I’d interrupted him in the middle of sex, or a workout session.
At this time of night, it could be either one.
Ivan didn’t have the same sleeping and waking hours of normal people.
It didn’t matter if it was one in the morning or nine at night, he could be sleeping, or he could be having breakfast. Ivan had no predictability, and that was why I liked him so much.
“Pakhan,” he answered breathlessly.
“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything,” I drawled.
There was a murmur of voices, and then I heard shuffling.
“Nothing,” Ivan lied.
I grinned and explained what I needed him to do.
“Get with Lev and get him working on getting eyes in Houston on Cayden McCloud,” I instructed. “Something is going down, and I want to know what. More than what’s already going on.”
Ivan knew about Paulo, Joaquin, and Cameron. They all did.
The three men had been down in Houston at the shipping yards picking up a package—Cayden and I had an understanding that we could use the shipping yard as needed, making it neutral territory—when they’d been taken en route.
The package was gone, my men had been taken, and no answers had been forthcoming for weeks now.
Had Cayden been having issues he hadn’t shared with me?
“I’ll get right on it,” Ivan said. “I’ll head over to Lev’s now.”
I had to send Ivan to Lev because Lev was a bit…unconventional.
He didn’t like answering the phone for anyone but me and Ivan—his brother. But after a certain time of night, he refused to answer it at all.
Lev was different. Not in a bad way, but in a way that most people would look at him and think he was a freak.
Lev was different enough that people didn’t do well around him. He freaked them out.
After seeing enough people treat you like you were a leper, you tended to become somewhat of a recluse.
Only Ivan and I were allowed to go to Lev’s place, and only Ivan would get him to be functional at this time of night.
That’s why I didn’t bother going over.
Lev would only stall until morning when he felt like working.
No one pushed Lev to do anything he didn’t want to do, or he’d shut down.
But Ivan knew how to coax his brother into doing things he wouldn’t normally want to do.
Pulling up my phone, I made sure that the GPS tracker was tracking on my phone, then shoved the phone into my pocket and headed to my truck.
A truck wasn’t my first choice of vehicles—I liked my cars fast, loud, and old, preferably something that the government couldn’t hack into and turn off or manipulate in any way. I had a 1969 Chevy Camaro that was my baby. But my baby tended to catch attention that I didn’t otherwise want on me.
So I got a basic bitch Ford F-250 with slightly oversized tires in boring gray upon moving to Dallas permanently after finding my sister.
One thing I could say about it, it had really comfortable seats, even if the truck was so basic that sometimes I had trouble telling mine from other people’s.
The truck started up with a throaty purr—just because it was a basic bitch on the outside, didn’t mean that I didn’t get Ivan to modify it on the inside—and headed home.
I was pulling into my drive, the front gate opening as I pulled up to it, when I got a call back from Ivan.
“Boss,” Ivan said carefully. “Lev found a name. Casmere Ferriday. How do you feel about bass fishing?”
Bass fishing? I’d actually never given it a single thought.
I frowned. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It means this man, Casmere, popped up a few times in a search on Lev’s end. He’s going to be at a fishing tournament tomorrow morning with a few of his important friends, up from Houston for the day only. What better way to ask him questions than to be in the tournament with him?”
What better way to kill him, and have a very good, plausible cause of death, than at a lake in the middle of winter where I can ask questions and get rid of the body quickly without dirtying my hands too much?
“What do I need to do?” I asked.
“Learn how to fish.” He laughed.
I rolled my eyes.
I couldn’t say that learning how to bass fish had been my priority over the years.
I had the concept down, of course. I’d watched videos.
How hard could it be?