6. Mat
MAT
SIX WEEKS LATER
I’ve had six weeks to forget about the girl.
For the most part, I’ve been successful.
I’m sitting across the conference table from a man named Gregory Gordon. Every few minutes, there’s a wet plop as a drop of sweat from Gregory’s forehead lands on the sheaf of papers I just set in front of him.
If I was a better person or a worse lawyer, I might’ve started to feel bad for Gregory here. Things are not looking so good for him.
He’s the CFO of a mid-cap tech company being sued by my client, a hedge fund, for misrepresenting earnings right before filing for an IPO.
I just passed him the printout of an email that proves beyond any doubt that he knew he was doing some underhanded bullshit, and made him read it out loud into the deposition record.
This spells the end of his career in Times New Roman 12pt font—and, if he’s been scheming with shady underworld types like I know for a fucking fact he has been, it might mean the end of his life, as well.
“I don’t think the camera quite heard that,” I say pleasantly. “Read it again from the top.”
Gregory breaks into tears.
So, yeah. A good person would care. And a shit lawyer would never have gotten this far. But since I’m neither a good person nor a shit lawyer, it’s easy for me to look Greg dead in the eye and feel not an ounce of remorse.
The thing is, this stuff is easy for me. When you grow up the way I did, with one foot in New York’s criminal underbelly and the other in the real world, you’re basically handed a passport that grants you free entry between the two.
I know the moves. I speak the language.
Gregory Gordon is nothing but a fucking tourist here.
Greg’s lawyer clears his throat. “Can we take five? Please?”
I check my watch and decide to grant him mercy. “Make it ten. I could use a coffee.”
I push back from the table and walk out into the hall. The door shuts behind me like a coffin lid, sealing Greg’s fate that much more. I find a window and look out at the grey city below.
And, like clockwork, my mind goes to her.
It’s been six weeks since I woke up after surgery to find her gone, and she still shows up whenever my brain has a second to wander. All those sense memories, fragmented and distorted.
The ring in her palm.
Her mouth an inch from mine.
I never got her last name. I woke up in that hospital bed alone, with a nurse telling me the woman I came in with had ran out hours ago. She left behind no note and no phone number. Nothing to prove she was ever even real.
Whatever she was, whatever she wasn’t, it’s over now. I’ve got a dying man in the next room to finish killing.
Back to work.
The deposition wraps an hour later. Greg signs what he has to sign.
His lawyer won’t meet my eyes, because he knows I just destroyed him.
My clients will get their massive settlement, and Greg will get a tiny studio apartment somewhere in Queens.
That is, if his friends in low places let him live that long.
Not my problem either way.
I grab my coat and head out. The speakeasy on East 4th is a fifteen-minute cab ride from my offices. Kir is already there when I walk in, tucked into our usual booth in the back. There’s a glass of our normal drink, Clase Azul, waiting for me on the table.
“You’re late,” Kir says as I slide into the seat.
“I was busy ruining a man’s life.”
“Did he deserve it?”
I smirk. “They always do.”
Kir lifts his glass. “Don’t tell me this one pissed in your chair like the last guy?”
I shake my head and sip at my drink. “No, thank fuck. I had to throw the whole thing out. Stank like hell.”
“But he cried?”
He grins, and we both chorus the obvious answer at the same time: “They always do.”
Chuckling, I settle back and loosen my tie.
This stupid fabric has been burning my throat lately, though I don’t know why that’s happening all of the sudden.
I’ve been wearing a tie damn near every day of my life since I started my first job, filing papers and filling coffees, back when I was just a suddenly orphaned fifteen-year-old boy paying my own way through the world.
But suddenly, this Hermès silk feels like a noose.
“Long day?” Kir asks.
“Long six weeks is more like it,” I mutter.
“Still?”
I grunt and shrug. “Nothing has popped up about those bodies, yeah?”
“Don’t be paranoid,” Kir says, waving off my concerns.
“You know damn well that our guys are pros. They had that alley so clean that you could eat off the bricks if you wanted. No one’s ever gonna find those guys, and they weren’t connected in any way.
Just some lowdown shitheads looking for an easy smash-and-grab. ”
“They got it,” I say grimly. I look down at my knuckles, flexing my hand open and closed. It still stings sometimes, usually randomly in the middle of the night, like I’m breaking that thick-necked fuck’s face open all over again.
If Cassandra hadn’t been there, I would’ve done far worse than what I did do. I haven’t felt rage like that in years. I’d almost convinced myself that I’d left that shadow part of me behind for good.
Then I came up on that ugly, snarling trio menacing her, and I lost my goddamn mind.
How dare they lay a hand on her? She was a feisty, stubborn fool, but she was not theirs to touch.
So I reminded them of that little fact.
Violently.
Now, I’ve got this sporadic pain in my hand as a reminder. My ribs where that coward stabbed me have been bothering me, too. It’s almost crippling sometimes, like half my body is trying to curl up and die.
As a matter of fact, I’ve got an appointment tonight to go see a specialist at the hospital.
He’s supposed to know all about this kind of thing, nerve damage or whatever you call it when a rust-edged oyster shucking blade gets abruptly shoved between the bones of your rib cage and fucks up your internal shit. We’ll see if he can make it go away.
I top off my drink and look up to see Kir watching me. “So,” he says.
“Uh-oh.”
“Hear me out.”
“I’d prefer not to.”
“You owe me that much.”
“I’d say I owe you ‘not shit,’ actually.”
“What about the?—”
“I assure you, my friend, that you will lose this game if you want to start tallying favors.”
Kir insists, though. He crosses his arms in front of him and leans forward. “But there was the time when?—”
“I swear to God, I will beat you like a rented mule.”
“Do you even know what that means?”
“I’d be more than happy to find out.”
“You’re an asshole, you know that?”
“Likewise.”
He scowls. “I have to do this, you know.”
“You do not.” I look elsewhere, staring up at the dim red-hued lamp overhead until I start to see hazy spots dancing in my vision. “We can talk about anything else. How’s Jillian? How’s business? How’s your dad? How ‘bout them Yankees?”
He rolls his eyes but indulges me. “Jillian is good. The first trimester nausea is mostly gone and now, she’s eating like a horse.
And before you ask, yes, she loves it when I describe her eating habits that way.
That’s why I slept on the couch last night, because she loves it so much.
Business is booming, as you know. My dad is smitten with Rae, as you also know.
And the Yankees, as we both know, fucking suck.
” He plucks my drink out of my hands so I can’t keep ignoring him.
“So there you have it. Now that we’re out of other shit to talk about, we can get back to the main subject. ”
I grimace and snatch up the bottle of Clase Azul instead so I can drink directly from that, since Kir seems intent on keeping my glass out of reach. “You’re the worst best friend on the fucking planet, mate.”
But Kir has his serious face on now and refuses to be deterred. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need you on this, Mat.”
I snort derisively. “If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard you say that, I would buy Lazarev Global and fire you.”
He just shakes his head sadly. “I mean it. I do. We’ve tried all the other ways, and the clock’s ticking. So it’s you, or we all get swallowed up.”
Fuck him.
Fuck this.
Just, fuck.
“Fuck you,” I say out loud, just in case Kir can’t read the expression on my face. “I can’t believe you’re roping me into this bullshit.”
This bullshit. That’s what we’ve been calling it for weeks now, ever since Kir first filled me in on the topic the night I met Cassandra.
The short version is that there’s a new player in the New York criminal scene. Someone well-organized and well-funded, with unclear leadership and unclear goals. All we know is a name.
The Vainakh Syndicate.
Kir and his father, Lukas Lazarev, have been the kingpins of the Lazarev Bratva for a long time.
As such, they’re the obvious target if you’re a foreign power looking to make a name for yourself Stateside.
The Lazarevs have the most cash, the most power, the most territory, the most to lose.
And given their instability over the course of this year as Kir and Lukas navigated the fallout after the circumstances around Kir’s mother’s death were publicly revealed, thanks to Kir’s now-fiancée, New York Times reporter Jillian Pierce—yeah, it’s a long fucking story—it seems like now is a ripe time to dethrone them.
But, as I told Kir when he first explained the Vainakh issue to me a month and a half ago, none of that has shit to do with me.
Or so I thought.
The issue is that none of Kir and Lukas’s normal methods have worked. They’ve unleashed the full might of the Lazarev Bratva on the city and come up with a grand total of… not a damn thing.
No one is willing to talk about Vainakh, no matter whether they’re being persuaded with money, torture, or both. It’s a ghost town, with a new boogeyman lurking in the shadows.
And they want me to go monster hunting.
I couldn’t believe my ears when they first told me. Have they not been listening for the last decade and a half? I want out of the Bratva, not deeper in. I saw what it did to my father and I said no fucking thank you.
But that’s the thing about being born in the pits, like I was: Getting out is hard fucking work.
They think that I’m the perfect choice—which I know is code for “the only choice”—to figure out who is legitimately protecting the Vainakh Syndicate and letting them wedge their bloody foot into Lazarev Bratva territory.
At first, that just meant lurking around bars and seeing who I could get to talk to me. That’s the reason I was at Khaza at all on the night I met Cassandra: information gathering.
I got distracted and came up empty, for obvious reasons.
Stupid me, I thought that would be the end of it.
But now, as time burns away and the Vainakh Syndicate has begun nibbling at the edges of Lazarev territory and Lazarev revenue streams, the ante is being upped.
Suddenly, I’m supposed to be a spy, a tracker, a hitman, and an executioner all in one.
I’m supposed to find the head of the snake and cut it off, all by my lonesome.
This is not what I want. Not in the least.
But it’s also the only way I get a clean slate.
For myself, and for the one person I cannot afford to leave behind. The one person to whom I owe everything: my freedom, my life.
Brooding on that subject is the last thing I feel like doing tonight, so I close my eyes and breathe until my heart settles into its usual glacial crawl.
“Mat.” Kir’s voice pulls me back to the present moment. “You in there?”
“Unfortunately.”
“So what’s it gonna be? Can we count on you?”
I take another pull from the neck of the bottle and wince when it burns me hard enough from the inside that my still-healing ribs issue a warning spasm. “You know what it’s gonna be, motherfucker. You wouldn’t be sitting here if you didn’t.”
Looks like I’m working for the Bratva again.
Fuck.
The doctor’s appointment is useless. “What do you mean, ‘things like this happen’?” I snarl at him.
The man shrugs placidly and pushes his glasses up his nose. “The human nervous system is a strange creature,” he says. “Physically, your wound looks to be healing on a normal timeline. Exceptionally fast, actually, I should say. But sometimes… Well, sometimes, nerves do as they please.”
I regret not punching Kir in the face when I had the chance at the speakeasy earlier. It would’ve helped relieve some of the desire I feel to slug this pompous, unhelpful mudak right now.
“Did you not hear me when I came in?” I growl. “I fell over in my fucking living room last week out of nowhere because it felt like I was being stabbed all over again.”
“I heard you, sir, and I’d ask you to please mind your profanity when you’re—” He must see the bloodlust written on my face, because he pales and turns away to pretend to rinse his hands at the sink.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you, Mr. Satyrin.
My professional assessment is that you’ve suffered intercostal neuralgia as a result of penetrating trauma from sharp force injury.
In time, your nerves may heal to their prior condition, but nothing is guaranteed. If you’d like, I can prescribe you?—”
I swat the prescription pad out of his hands as I stand upright, my open shirt flapping around my ribs. “I don’t want your fucking pills. Christ. This was a waste of my goddamn time.”
Then I storm out.
The hospital hallway is dark at this hour. I had to call in a favor to get this specialist to see me late at night, because work requires my full attention during the day.
I march down, buttoning my shirt as I go, shrugging my jacket back into place, smoothing down my hair with both hands.
I’m deep in my own thoughts, scarcely noticing the world around me. I have work to do. A mystery syndicate to hunt down. A fifteen-year-old debt to fulfill.
I might’ve stayed mired in those thoughts all the way home if I didn’t get stopped with a hand in my chest when I’m almost outside of the hospital doors. I look down at the offending appendage, ready to rip it straight off its owner, when I see that it’s gloved.
It belongs to an EMT, a tall, strapping Black man with a shaved head and no-nonsense eyes. “Gurney coming through,” he explains when he sees the furious question in my eyes.
We both stand aside to make room as two other paramedics come pushing a stretcher through the doors. “Excuse us,” mumbles one of them as he backs up at the head of the stretcher. When he pivots to help tug it across the bump in the entryway, I get a glimpse of the stretcher’s occupant.
There, lying on the gurney, is Cassandra.
Half of her face is bruised almost black.