Chapter 2Vasily #2
My equipment, but her job is to keep it running. Keep tabs on what we’re printing too, no doubt tracking it all to make sure we fall below whatever threshold the ATF wants us under, and we’re all happy right now. I have to take her threat of pulling out seriously.
She unwraps a pre-filled syringe and slams it on my desk, letting it roll back and forth as I bare my teeth at her one last time before she spins away and exits my office swiftly, Janson’s eyes following her.
The door slams, Janson and I both wait a beat, and then we flop down in the chairs on opposite sides of the desk.
“You two are going to end up either killing each other or marrying each other,” Janson chuckles as he nudges the syringe my way, babysitting me every bit as much as Benedetti does.
Joke’s on them, though; I’ve had babysitters my entire life.
The only difference now is that I’m the one paying them.
I pull up the untucked side of my dress shirt, not just a fashion but a convenience for me, and stick myself in the abdomen with the syringe.
Janson flinches more than I do, which is funny because I’ve watched him sit for several of his stick and poke tattoos, including the ones on his skull that I’m sure he got with the intention he’d grow his hair back out one day.
He’s maintained his shaved head since LA, though, and I think he just owns them now.
He’s not a skinhead; never was. But it gives him the credentials he needs to do his job.
“Feel better now?” he asks with a quirked brow as I dump the used syringe into the sharps container I keep in the drawer below.
“It doesn’t work like that,” I growl as I pop a lorazepam to actually take the edge off, but his grin tells me he knows that.
“We do need to talk about Flagstaff.”
“Fuuuuuuuck. Can you at least sit on my dick when you say that, like Benedetti does?”
“Bro, I don’t want to go back there any more than you do.”
Bro. In his own weird way, he took that spot the night Artyom died, the night I massacred the Flagstaff IRA, taking over as avtoritet and attracting the attention of the pakhan .
And I’ll never tell a soul, but I saw Janson take a life that night.
I saw an FBI agent take a life in cold blood, a life he didn’t have to, a life that if he’d spared, his cover wouldn’t have been blown.
We stare each other down. These demons we share.
That hell of our own personal design. When he doesn’t back down, just continues to glare with those dark gray eyes of his, haunted to their very core in a way that validates that shaved head and those shit tattoos, I exhale and sink back in my chair.
“We can send someone. Where the fuck is Dima these days?”
“Baltimore.”
“The fuck is in Baltimore?”
Janson shrugs. “You know Dima.”
Not anymore. He was my best friend once upon a time, and I guess I never realized he wanted out of the Bratva as much as I did.
The moment I told him I needed him mobile, he used it as an excuse to fuck off to the East Coast. Talking was never our thing, but now I’m wishing we’d had a relationship that didn’t require sitting silently next to each other for hours on end.
“This isn’t a job for Dima,” Janson tells me. “You need to go to Flagstaff.”
“You know what yesterday was.”
His Adam’s apple bobs heavily in his throat, his tone softening to the man who was straight As in high school, an Eagle Scout who went to church every single week and had dreams of saving the world.
“Artyom was a good man. He didn’t deserve that death.
And I know you’re going to hate me saying this, but he loved Flagstaff.
He was King of Flagstaff. Don’t let it fall to those assholes. ”
I nod.
But then I say, “I’ll send Dima. He missed that night.”
“You need to go.”
“Or I’ll send no one,” I scoff. “Let Flagstaff fall. The new print is set to go in Santa Clarita. I’m going out there Tuesday to check it while Benedetti’s on that trip to El Paso.
” An ultra-lightweight auto-loader that’s under a centimeter thick, constructed from a polymer that hasn’t been detected on any of the scanners we’ve attempted it on.
Definitely the sort of thing the ATF can’t know about. Sorry, Benedetti.
Janson snaps out, “Grow a pair. Fuck, if nothing else, you’ve got a niece you’ve never seen. Go to Flagstaff. See Kseniya. See her baby. Spray some IRA blood. You know you want to.”
“Or Kseniya can move here and—” I start before getting cut off by my phone vibrating insistently from where it landed on the floor when Benedetti knocked everything off my desk.
I’m impressed it’s vibrating at all. Not just because it gets thrown so much either.
My right-hand man, Kostya, put some new security app on it last week, and the settings had it rejecting everything.
He fixed them, but it’s been frustrating.
Janson scoops it up and even looks at the screen before handing it to me, but whatever name is there has him shaking his head in confusion.
I feel the same way once I look at it.
Sasha.
That’s a blast from the past. An old friend, but never a close one.
Just a kid who emigrated from Russia in the same purge I got caught up in, another son of a Bratva man who chose a wife from a foreign land— he looked south, though, to Kenya— before the Russian organization had a regime change and went all in on eugenics.
His family ended up in the Vegas Bratva, but he dipped when he finished high school, enlisting and taking a couple tours in Afghanistan, honing his sharpshooting skills before going mercenary.
Last time I talked to him, his base of operations was in Orlando, and he was thanking me for the wedding gift of a crate of ghost guns while also politely turning down a proposed business contract.
I get it. His little band of mercenaries try to be good guys. I’m the villain, albeit a useful one for them to parlay with.
“You’re on speakerphone,” I greet him with after getting a look from Janson that tells me he’s going to be a bitch if I answer in Russian.
Sasha pauses at that before saying, “I have someone I think belongs to you.”
There’s the hint of laugh in his voice, or at least amusement. I’m in no mood for games. “Who?” I growl, already planning on telling Sasha he can keep Dima if that’s who it is.
“Well now, that’s the question of the hour. No one knows.”
“I cannot stress enough that I’m not in the mood for whatever shit you’re pulling. Save it for your husband.”
Seriously, if I ever have to spend more than ten minutes with Gio, I’ll kill the guy myself and save Sasha the inner demon he’ll get from killing his own husband. It’ll be a mercy killing.
“No, believe me, Gigi has nothing to do with th—oh, you were the one who rescued her?” he says, his voice distant, telling me Gio is in the room with him and is involved.
All stupidity with Sasha leads right back to Gio, so it makes sense.
“Anyway, I’m sending you a picture. Let me know if she’s yours. ”
“She?” I don’t typically keep women on my team, Benedetti being a notable exception because she forced her way onto it with all the tenacity and nearsightedness of an undercover ATF agent.
“Yeah, poor thing got snagged by a sex trafficking ring. She hit her head pretty good, doesn’t know who she is, but she has your mark on her.”
“My mark? I don’t put my mark on—”
But the words die out as it hits me that there’s been exactly one woman who has my insignia on her, and it’s impossible that anyone would ever see that mark unless something truly horrible happened to her.
Something like a sex trafficking ring.
I feel the urge to sit down, but I already am sitting down. I stand up, stare down at my phone as Janson leans forward to see the screen.
It vibrates. A notification pops up on my screen, letting me know I have a new image.
I stare at the notification as my brain begins to pulse again, as every fucking demon I’ve struggled to bury the last six years with only minimal success rear their ugly heads.
As the curse sings through my blood.
As the entire glass citadel I’ve built around me shatters because this one thing— this one thing — was my only salvation in my unavoidable death.
Janson looks up to me, waiting for me to do something. When I don’t, he reaches out.
He taps my screen.
And there, in full color, looking pale and more frustrated than scared but confused and uncomfortable if nothing else, is Analiese Lombardo in a hospital gown .
Fuck me.
Fuck.
Me.
“Holy shit,” Janson whistles.
On the other end of the line, Sasha says, “So you do know her, then?”
I hate planes. It’s just one of those things.
the first one I was ever on flew me halfway around the world, to an unknown blazing inferno where nothing made sense, not even the words spoken.
Oh, I’d learned a little English, but the English I thought I knew couldn’t keep pace with my classmates, so I couldn’t even make friends.
I had my little Russian community, and everything beyond was a scary, incomprehensible hell.
Planes give me that feeling to this day.
It’s one of the reasons I sequester myself into my corporate building, wheeling and dealing from the office three floors below my apartment, barricading myself like I’m protecting myself when really, I just don’t want people thinking I’ll get on a plane— or go to Flagstaff by plane, train, or automobile— and it’s easier to hide that fact when I rarely go across the street.
Analiese Lombardo got me on a plane, though.
Analiese and a handful of Xanax. It’s a well-appointed jet with more crew than passengers, a world away from the crowded double-decker that stank of sweat and ethnic cuisines better suited to open air, but still a plane.
And still carrying me to what I can only assume is another scary, incomprehensible hell.
Orlando .
“Lacey Lombardo,” Kostya says several times with a shake of his head, and each time, an old anger boils up within me again, but I don’t correct him. I hated Lacey— the name, not the person. It sounds as much like a whore’s name now as it did then.
I don’t know why I wasn’t honest with Sasha about my relationship with Ana, why I didn’t just tell Benedetti to have Tony go pick up his sister, why I did this to myself now.
The only explanation is I’m every bit as self-destructive now as I was six years ago, twelve years ago, my entire adult life.
I just thought I was past it because I had this notion of a clock that ticked unremittingly down to zero but could not stop at another point, and so I was invincible.
Until now.
I don’t know what I’m doing here except plunging headfirst into my inevitable death.
It’s nearing midnight when we land in Orlando, but Sasha is waiting for us, lurking in the shadows, dressed in black from head to toe, his very complexion blending him into the night. I see him, though. Always have. It’s Kostya who curses when he calls for us from his hiding place.
We load into a luxury sedan and cruise through the streets, still alive with weekend revelers and families staying up too late on their Disney vacations, the interior silent because Kostya and Sasha never got along and my nerves are getting the better of me.
I fish a tin from my pocket and pop it open, selecting a hydroxyzine for balance.
Sasha quietly passes me a bottle of water, not that I really need it.
I swallow the pill and go back to staring out the window, my thoughts a mash.
Perhaps I don’t even need to go to Flagstaff to die. Perhaps Analiese Lombardo is going to bring Flagstaff to me .
The building we’re taken to looks like it was once a corporate campus that’s been repurposed, although nothing around it has the same nine-to-five vibe.
At this late hour, it’s just as alive as the city around it is, with loud voices coming from various rooms and plenty of people in civilian, militia, and medical garb scurrying by us.
The wing Sasha leads us into is fairly quiet, though, and there’s an intrinsically homier feeling to it.
Doors have handmade signs on them and doormats with clever phrases welcoming people and warning them off.
A rainbow of curtains covers the sidelights, some with smeared handprints down low. People live here. Families. Children.
Not at the door Sasha stops at, though. It’s a simple mat, a white curtain, and an official plaque with only a room number and a small block reading GUEST below it.
He knocks gently, and there are several long seconds before I hear one, two, three locks— a chain, a deadbolt, and a switch— and the door cracks open.
My breath stops.
Black curls. Dark chocolate eyes. Petite, upturned nose.
Fuck.
Me.
“Ana,” I whisper.