Chapter 35
LEKS
As soon as I saw Natalia’s half-completed notes on the paintings, and compared them with Ponytail’s assessment, I had to see it for myself. Because my dumbass heart was starting to pound with hope.
Her notes were so fucking meticulous, in her pretty cursive handwriting, but everything could be a lie. According to her, only one painting in that vault is real.
If that’s true, this is worse than we thought. Maksim Bryusov is selling the real paintings to the highest bidder and shipping them out through the luxury yachts of his cronies that keep docking at the marina. The forged paintings will be all that’s left.
If we can prove it to the Pakhan, that Bratva Council seat is mine. But if I’m honest with myself, that’s not the reason I’m speeding towards New York as fast as I can.
Natalia is.
If she’s spying for him, why would she raise the alarm like this? It would make more sense for her to say the paintings were real and stick to her previous assessment.
The notes have given me a sliver of hope. I need to pour water on that fire before my weakness for her takes over.
I already let my control slip when I fucked her last night, unable to keep my body from believing that she was mine. Calling her by a tender fucking pet name when I shouldn’t even be keeping her alive.
Just because I can’t figure out what her endgame is, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I’ve made the mistake of trusting her before. I need solid proof before I’m going to do it again.
On the way to the port, I make a stop at the Met. I shove my way past the queue gathered around the desk. I can’t remember Ponytail’s name, but I describe his appearance to the receptionist. “Skinny. Glasses. Looks kinda like a rat. Long ponytail.”
She shakes her head apologetically. “I’m sorry, sir. We can’t put members of the public in contact with our curatorial staff.”
“Actually, I think you can.” She frowns in polite confusion, until I open my jacket to show the handgun inside.
I smile at her as she gets the message. Her face goes white, but she doesn’t make a fuss. Good move.
“You want to speak to Gareth Menton.” She picks up the phone and dials a number. “What should I tell him?”
“Tell him I can show him something that’s missing. And that it’s urgent.”
She nods quickly, her eyes fixed on me, repeating the message into the phone.
I lean against the desk, tapping my foot as I wait for him to arrive. The receptionist doesn’t take her eyes off me the entire time, releasing a relieved breath when Ponytail appears from a side entrance.
He rushes out, lanyard around his neck, pulling his jacket on and looking just as excited as he did the last time I saw him.
“Much appreciated,” I nod at the receptionist, who looks like she’s about to faint.
I grab Ponytail’s jacket and drag him out the door.
“Let’s go, buddy.”
I don’t even have to hold a gun to his head this time.
He chatters away in the car about the paintings. Last time he did it, it was irritating and fucking boring.
This time, it reminds me of Natalia, which is even fucking worse. An ache throbs in my chest every time I think about her.
“If you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m taking you back to the Met and finding some other asshole who can do this.”
The rest of the car ride passes in blissful silence. I try not to let hope consume me, but it does anyway.
I pull up to a screeching halt outside the vault. The code still works, the heavy door swinging open, so Maksim can’t be too paranoid about it.
As I pull the door shut behind us, closing us in the small, temperature-controlled space, the vault feels more crowded than the last time I was here. The walls are now lined with layers of sandbags.
I kick one and it gives a rustling noise.
“Do you know what these are?”
Ponytail frowns. “No idea.”
Not some kind of fancy art storage technology, then. Whatever. I need him to focus on the paintings.
“You know the drill. Same as last time, but try to speed it up.”
He rolls a set of two paintings out and starts his review. I pace around the vault while he stares at the art.
After what feels like an eternity, he tuts his tongue.
“Obviously forged,” he mutters. “Not even good forgeries, the technique is all wrong for the era.”
It’s what I want to hear, but if that’s how long it takes to look at two paintings, we’re going to be here all day. Natalia was much faster at this. I want to know right now whether she betrayed me.
I point my gun at him with an exasperated sigh. “Could you go any fucking slower?”
“I’m working as fast as I can,” he whines, frozen in fear.
Just as I’m weighing up whether a bullet through his kneecap would help him think faster, a speaker crackles to life somewhere.
The clipped tone on the other end of the line is straight out of all my nightmares and revenge fantasies.
“Aleksandr, how nice to see you.”
Maksim Bryusov.
Ponytail shoots me a confused look, but I gesture at him to keep going.
I scan the space. There must be cameras somewhere.
Good. He should watch as we take him down.
“Say goodbye to that Bratva Council seat. You’re fucked, Maksim,” I say in greeting.
He gives a tittering laugh that pisses me off. “No, I don’t think I am.”
A clanging metallic sound comes from outside the vault, followed by a hissing sound.
The door is locked. The handle won’t budge. The code doesn’t open the door.
The space suddenly seems tiny, the walls closing in around me. I’ve been locked in enough rooms at the Ivanov Center to know that nothing good happens behind a locked door.
I fire a bullet at the door, but it barely makes a dent in the thick metal. Ponytail yelps in surprise.
“Keep going, asshole,” I growl at him.
Maksim’s voice blares out of the speaker again.
“I wouldn’t try that. This vault is rather flammable.”
Right, so the sandbags are fire starters or something explosive. I take a switchblade from my pocket and slash one open. Crystalline grey powder spills onto the floor in a rush.
Fuck.
If I get out of this alive, Yuri is going to answer for this. Head of security, my ass. Maksim Bryusov has got in here and rigged the whole vault with explosives.
He speaks through the speaker again, but I turn to Ponytail. If I’m gonna die here, I need to know whether Natalia’s been working against me.
“How many? How many are forged?”
I point the gun at him again. He looks back at me, terrified.
“If I had to say, at this point—”
I gesture my gun at him from across the vault. “You do have to say, asshole. Tell me right fucking now or that painting is the last thing you see.”
One second I’m looking at Ponytail’s scared eyes behind his thick glasses. The next, I’m staring at the ceiling of the vault.
The corner where he was standing exploded with a force that knocks me off my feet.
Fuck.
The sandbags are explosive and Maksim is in control of their detonation.
“Shame to kill a man of culture like myself. Interesting that you don’t trust my daughter, after all,” Maksim says, sounding smug about something. “I thought you were in love. Now you know that she’s been lying to you. You found out about the listening devices, I expect.”
I cough the smoke out of my lungs. “She’s as untrustworthy as you are.”
I’m gonna die without knowing whether that’s true. The one man who could have told me is lying dead in the corner of the room.
“And yet you came here on the basis of her notes. Still hoping my daughter is telling you the truth?”
If Maksim was here, I’d be pummeling his face until her name flies out of his mouth. I hate the way he talks about Natalia like she’s his property.
“I thought you disowned her. As soon as she wasn’t your perfect little asset to sell off to the highest bidder, she wasn’t good enough for you.”
“You know, I really thought you would have better security arrangements in your own home.”
A recording starts playing. Even over the hissing connection, it’s familiar. It’s a conversation about the paintings. One which Natalia and I had in the depths of last week, when I was explaining what the plan was, which paintings she should analyze.
No one else was in the room, I’m sure of it.
Fuck. She really was spying on me.
Smoke is filling the confined space, the acrid smell of gunpowder making it hard to breathe.
Panic crawls up my throat. Maybe this was a trap. Maybe that’s why Natalia flagged the paintings as fakes. So that I would come here, investigate them, and her father could kill me.
The shortness of breath is making me light-headed. Every movement feels like an effort.
Maybe I should just accept it. That my fatal flaw was a Bratva heiress who looks like an angel and talks like a boarding school teacher, who can talk about one painting for a whole day, who made me think maybe I wasn’t such a monster.
She might be my downfall, but at least I had a month where it felt real.
Where we had something I thought I’d never get.
Maybe I can die pretending that it was real.
“Does it hurt, Aleksandr? Knowing that she was never on your side, after all…that must sting.”
His smugness turns my stomach. I can’t die without taking him with me.
Another boom sounds from the corner where Ponytail was blown to smithereens, making my ears ring.
I call out, wondering if Maksim’s still on the line, or if I’m going to die alone surrounded by fake paintings.
“You’re really gonna blow this sky-high?” I choke out. Speaking is getting hard now, and I can barely see the paintings through the smoke. “This is your own business. There are enough explosives in here to destroy the whole port.”
Talking feels like swallowing a bunch of nails.
“A small section of it, Aleksandr. It’s a simple mathematical calculation. Blowing up this vault will do far, far less damage to my business than you spreading your false rumors about the paintings and their authenticity.”
Another explosion knocks me to the ground, the pain clearing my head for a second.
“Besides,” he adds. “There’s no one else in the room right now. And you have a reputation as quite the arsonist now, Aleksandr. Who do you think’s going to get the blame for this?”
Something about this doesn’t make sense.
If Natalia was lying, Ponytail would have confirmed it. Maksim wouldn’t have blown him up before he could tell me.
Maksim is full of shit.
I gasp in a mouthful of burning air. It might be the lack of oxygen in this vault. Or the head injury.
But as flames start to close in on me, I’m certain that Natalia didn’t betray me.
“I know it wasn’t her,” I cough. “How did you get that recording?”
The smoke is getting thicker now. I can smell the acrid scent of burning gunpowder. I need to find a way out, now, or I’m going to burn to death along with all evidence of Maksim’s forgeries.
He gives that obnoxious laugh again. “I suppose it won’t leave this room, will it? That first visit, when Natalia came home, I swapped out her cat’s collar.”
The fucking cat? If I had the oxygen to do it, I would groan.
I commando crawl my way into the grey haze of smoke.
Bangs rock the floor of the vault, echoing in my ears for too long. The noise becomes a constant ringing in my ears.
I keep going.
The corner where Ponytail died, where the first explosion was powerful enough to knock me to the floor, that corner of the vault is my one hope. I crawl frantically in what I think is the right direction as the heat feels inescapable.
This is my only way back to Natalia.
My throat burns. My vision blurs. I can’t taste anything except the acidic burning that’s filling the vault.
Then, I might be imagining it, but I think I taste the salt of the sea air.
The next explosion sends me flying forward until I’m on the concrete, just at the edge of the water. I taste blood and burning and then nothing but cold, cold, darkness as another bang rocks the whole world.
As I float into an abyss, my ears ringing, the taste of smoke on my tongue, I know three things.
One: I always knew that cat was trouble.
Two: I owe moya zolotse the biggest fucking apology in the world.
Three: that apology will have to be monumental enough to make up for the fact that I’m going to kill her father in the most painful way possible.
If I survive this, Maksim Bryusov is a dead man.