Chapter 7
Pulled up my sleeve and accidentally punched myself in the face. It’s okay, I had it coming for some time now.
— Shasha to Nastya
SHASHA
“Do you know how to use that?” Artur asked my sister, Nastya.
Nastya shrugged. “Not really, no. How hard could it be?”
Artur said something under his breath and reached for a different pole. “This one is likely more your style. If you try to cast this one, you’re gonna backlash the fuck out of it, then we’ll have to spend the next twenty minutes undoing it for you. And this is supposed to be a competition, not a lesson in patience.”
Nastya rolled her eyes but accepted the exchange of fishing poles.
I helped her tie her lure on for her, then went back to putting mine on.
She examined the white bait. “Why don’t I get a pretty worm like you?”
“Because I said so,” Artur answered for me. “That’s easier to cast, easier to catch stuff on. You’re gonna need all the help you can get.”
Nastya muttered something under her breath that had me laughing, and I snipped off the excess line with a pair of nail clippers and deposited them into my pocket.
I casted the line, and the movement made a wave of homesickness rush through me.
I missed being in the mountains.
I missed even more going out and fly-fishing, spending time in nature, and ultimately being unknown to the world.
Here, everyone knew me. There were no mountains or wildlife. No rivers that were overflowing with fish.
There the rivers were crystal clear and so freakin’ pretty.
Here they were the color of mud, and you couldn’t even see your line in the water, let alone the fish.
“This is gonna be fun, I can tell.” Nastya glared at Artur.
Artur, Lev, Alexi, Daniil, Bogdan, and Ivan had been in my life for years now. But Artur was the newest.
But ever since Artur had showed up, he and Nastya hadn’t gotten along all that well.
But more in a way that siblings would bicker than in a romantic way—at least from what I saw and experienced when I was around them.
Nastya depressed the button on the pole and threw her line out. It went all of six feet in front of her.
“Now what?” Nastya asked.
“Now reel it in.” I shrugged.
“Slowly. You can reel it all the way in, slow. Or you can give it a little jerk, and it’ll look like a dying fish,” Artur suggested. “Whatever you feel like doing. But you’re gonna have to get it farther near the bank. You’re not going to catch shit in deeper water. Bass are gonna be lookin’ for that sun and warmer water.”
I threw my own bait out.
Over and over and over again.
I’d learned the art of patience when I was a youngster learning how to fly fish. But this? You couldn’t even see the damn fish you were trying to catch.
“Why does your eye look black?” Nastya asked after a while.
I shot a grin at her, knowing that I’d never hear the end of it if I told her exactly how it happened.
Yet, I found myself telling her the truth anyway.
“I was pulling my sleeves up this morning as I waited to leave, and my hand slipped on the sleeve, and I accidentally punched myself in the face,” I answered honestly.
Nastya blinked for a few seconds before she said, “I feel like you might’ve had it coming for some time now.”
“I did,” I snorted. “You have to cast the bait out there to catch anything.”
“Whatever,” she grumbled. “Your annoying face deserved that bruise.”
A flash of blonde hair caught my eye, and I couldn’t stop myself from looking toward the boat a few feet down the shore from me.
Brecken.
God, she was beautiful.
She was standing on the nose of her boat. She was wearing so many jackets that she looked like the marshmallow man in The Ghostbusters movie from the eighties.
Even her legs were puffy from what looked to be her brother’s hunting coveralls.
Her hair was blowing in the wind, and the cute little fuckin’ crocheted duck hat she was wearing was really cracking me up. The flaps hung well past her ears, and the orange bill of the duck hung across her forehead.
“Are you even listening to me?” Nastya asked angrily, casting her bait so far it landed in the trees.
Artur helped her get it out, and the bait fell into the water right beneath it.
She started to reel it in, and a fish came out of nowhere and swallowed her bait.
She squealed and reacted, yanking her pole backward in surprise, inadvertently setting the hook while she did.
“Reel it, Nasty!” I yelled, laughter in my voice.
Nastya reeled it in, her eyes huge as saucers, and started to jump in excitement as Artur used the net to get it out of the water.
Eyes huge at the tiny little bass she caught, she said, “I win!”
“You didn’t win.” Artur laughed. “But I’m just fuckin’ happy we landed a fish. We can go home now.”
I discreetly turned to look at the woman a couple hundred feet from me.
Again, she was casting, but this time she was doing it with a donut in her mouth.
“What exactly does that mean?” Nastya asked. “We can’t win a bass fishing tournament off of only one fish.”
“Artur has a rule that you have to catch a fish before you can leave. Even if you’re not catching shit,” I said as I cast my own bait out there again.
Artur moved us along, and I casted, reeled. Casted. Reeled.
But while I did this, I kept an eye on the woman to the left of me.
I memorized her every facial expression.
In fact, I was watching her when I felt my pole jerk in my hands.
I cursed when it nearly slipped right out of my fingers and yanked it backward.
A cry from the woman in the next boat over had me glancing her way as I reeled my own pole in.
She was leaned way back, and her pole was bent much the same as mine was.
She got her fish into the boat by reaching down and lifting it up, and I had to laugh at the contradiction that she and my sister made.
Nastya wouldn’t touch her fish if she was forced. Meanwhile, there was Brecken, uncaring that the fish was slimy and cold.
“Holy fuck,” I heard Artur say.
I looked back to my own fish to find that Artur was holding up a massive fish in his net, his eyes huge.
“Is that good?” Nastya asked. “It looks so gross.”
“It’s fuckin’ great,” Artur said.
Artur quickly removed the bait from the fish’s mouth and said, “You want it?”
“No.” I shrugged, looking around now. “Have you seen Falliday yet?”
“Not yet,” Artur said. “I’ve been keeping an eye out for him, but there are a fuck ton of people out here. I know he checked in.”
“He’s in a purple boat,” Nastya said out of the blue. “I noticed because it was so bright and sparkly.”
“Jesus,” I grumbled. “You would notice that.”
“How did you know it’s his boat? Did you see him?” Artur asked.
“I saw his girl in the bathroom. She was talking about ‘Cazzy’ and how ‘she had to get up at the ass crack of dawn’ when she was peeing and talking on the phone,” she answered as she pitifully threw the bait out into the water again. “I followed her out, and she got into a pretty sparkly purple boat.”
I wouldn’t normally bring my sister into Bratva business.
It was best to leave women and children out of it for the betterment of the world.
Once you brought them in, it was hard to keep them out.
Plus, my sisters were nosy as hell and sometimes couldn’t stop themselves from having gut reactions, whether those gut reactions would get them hurt or not.
Since Casmere Falliday was, according to Lev, a small-time player in the disappearance of my men—he was the one that allowed his warehouse to be rented for events—I didn’t see any harm in allowing Nastya to help me by being the female we needed for the tournament.
Past this day, she wouldn’t be helping anymore.
I didn’t trust my sisters’ safety to anyone—not after Maven was taken from us—and I wouldn’t put them in danger of any kind.
The first sign of this going south and I would definitely be pulling out of the tournament and finding out how to talk to Falliday about his warehouse rentals a different way. This way might not raise as many suspicions, but I didn’t care if I had to fucking kill him as long as I got my answers. Easy or hard. It didn’t matter as long as the end results were the same.
“I think hers is bigger than yours.”
I looked at my sister to see that she was staring at the boat next to us.
I glanced over myself and found Brecken posing with her fish. One of her brothers was taking a photo of her practically kissing it.
“We’ll see,” Artur said. “Catch another one and we’ll take these in since we didn’t get a second boat to do that.”
I shrugged and kept fishing and fuck if my gaze didn’t keep straying to the woman beside me.
Hours later, I’d shed my jacket, and we were all standing next to the platform waiting for our fish to be weighed in.
My gaze was on the coffee truck where I’d spotted Falliday.
I moved toward it, my gaze downcast.
When I arrived it was to hear Falliday and another man talking business.
“…kind of rentals do you do?”
“Cars. Boats. Motorhomes.” He shrugged. “I just started renting out my first warehouse, too.”
“How do you get into the business of renting out a warehouse?” another man asked just before taking a sip of coffee.
“It was something that sort of fell into my lap,” he answered, his eyes gleaming. “I started with just renting out my cars to traveling people. Some big wig that comes to Houston isn’t gonna want to get a shit car from a car rental agency. They want something exclusive.” He rambled on and on, talking about how he’d gone from one car to ten cars. From ten cars to seventeen boats and cars.
“Did you buy the warehouse with the profits off of the other rentals?” the coffee drinker asked.
I raised my hand up at the lady behind the truck’s window and said, “One hot chocolate, please.”
I would’ve done a coffee, but I was all coffee’d out. I wanted a steak with some tea.
But I knew that Nastya would love the hot chocolate, and I’d do anything to see my sister’s smile.
“Well, that literally just fell into my lap. Someone tipped me off that the taxes weren’t being paid on it, and I swooped in and paid them off. Worked with the bank, and by the end of that year, I was able to evict them from their place. From there, I rented out to the guy that tipped me off about the back taxes, of all people.”
I rolled my eyes at the man’s obliviousness.
Surely he wasn’t that na?ve.
But as I listened to more and more of his conversation with the two men, I realized that he was.
He was just that stupid that he had no clue how he’d been played. He also had no clue that his warehouse wasn’t being used for the ‘seed production for nursery plants.’
From what Alexi told me, the only thing that’d been found in that building was a block of cells, bread, water and a bathroom in the fuckin’ corner for the guards.
Hearing everything I needed to hear, I placed the phone to my ear and called Lev.
“You get anything on this guy’s phone records?” I asked.
He knew who I was talking about because he’d been listening to everything that was said via a small wire that I was wearing.
I made it to Nastya, who grinned excitedly when I handed her the hot chocolate.
“No,” Lev grumbled. “This guy is meticulous about his phone. He’s using a burner, and it’s not even a smartphone, because he doesn’t trust the government. The man doesn’t even have a bank account. According to what I’ve been able to dig up, the dude mistrusts the government so much that any money he makes he asks for in cash. He has a vault in his living room that houses all his cash.”
“Keep looking. Maybe he’ll slip up,” I instructed.
“Will do,” Lev said distractedly.
Hanging up the phone, I slipped it into my pocket, then said, “We can go now.”
A cheer rent the air behind us and there were a group of people who were crowded around the judge’s stand—Brecken included.
She had a huge smile on her face, and she was holding up a plastic bag with her fish in it.
After a few moments of excitement, she walked to the water with the fish and released it.
I watched her go, wishing I could see more of her body, but the camo coveralls covered every inch of her.
“You have it bad, don’t you?”
I looked at my sister, Nastya, and said, “No idea what you’re talking about.”
She rolled her eyes and hooked her arm in mine. “You keep telling yourself that, Shasha.”