11. Mat
MAT
“You’re gonna want to sit down for this one, plemyannik. ”
I look up from my laptop. When I see who just spoke to me, I frown.
It’s the ass-crack of dawn on Monday morning and the last person on the planet I feel like talking to just strolled into my office without preamble or permission.
“Morning to you, too, Uncle,” I say through gritted teeth to Afon Satyrin, my father’s brother and the right-hand man to Lukas Lazarev, pakhan of the Lazarev Bratva. “To what do I owe the displeasure?”
Afon sprawls in the leather chair across from my desk. He sets a manila folder on the edge of my desk and pats it once, twice, like a man showing off a dog he’s proud of.
I don’t look at it.
“I’m working,” I tell him instead.
“This is work.” He nods at the half-empty espresso cup by my elbow. “How many of those have you had this morning?”
“Not enough to deal with you, that’s for fucking sure.”
Afon smiles. It’s that slow, crooked smile he gets when he’s about to ruin someone’s week. Usually, it’s not mine on the chopping block.
Today, I’m starting to suspect otherwise.
I close the laptop halfway. “Afon. It’s barely six in the morning. My assistant isn’t even in yet. For God’s sake, you shouldn’t have even been able to get past security without an employee badge.”
“Please do not disrespect me like that.” He wrinkles his nose and waves a hand. “I’ve been getting past front desks since before you were shitting yellow into a diaper.”
“Lovely image. Thank you for that.”
He still hasn’t moved the folder. He’s letting it sit there between us, ominous and patient. I know this game. I’ve played it from both sides of the desk. Put the file down. Don’t say what’s in it. Make the other guy ask.
I’m sure as fuck not going to ask.
Instead, I sip my espresso and stare him down.
Afon folds his hands in his lap and stares right back.
He’s got a scruffy beard that hides a square jaw and a strong neck.
His wardrobe consists of either one or one hundred sets of the same black jeans, black boots, and black sweater, because that’s all I’ve ever seen him wear, and it’s been that way for as long as I can remember.
His hair is more salt than pepper now, cropped close to the scalp. The tattoo on the side of his throat—a star with eight points, faded blue-black—peeks above his collar. His nose has been broken enough times that it can’t decide which way it wants to lean.
His eyes are my father’s eyes. That’s the worst part.
Maybe second-worst. The worst, at least as far as I’m concerned right now, is that he knows exactly how long I can hold a stare before I cave.
“Fine,” I sigh after a minute. “I’ll bite. What’s in the folder?”
“Open it.”
“Can you spare me the theatrics and just tell me?”
He simply waits.
Grimacing, I open the folder.
The top page is a surveillance photo. Grainy, long lens, taken from across a street I don’t recognize. In it, a man is getting out of the back of a town car. The man’s back is to me, so I can’t see his face, but I’m already getting an uneasy prickle of recognition in my stomach.
More to the point, I don’t need to see the face just yet. I’m more focused on what’s in the background.
I know that building. I walk into it every single weekday. I’m sitting in it right now.
“That’s the lobby of my firm,” I say slowly.
Afon nods. “Mhmm.”
“Why do you have a surveillance photo of the lobby of my firm?”
“Keep going.”
I flip the page.
The next one’s the same man, pictured again from the back—a.k.a., no face—but from a different angle on a different day. He’s shaking hands with a gruff-faced stranger who might as well have the word CRIMINAL tattooed on his forehead.
It doesn’t take anything more than that for the pieces to come together.
“Oh, goddammit.”
“I told you you were going to want to sit down,” chuckles Afon.
“Raymond Snyder,” I say.
“Raymond Snyder,” he confirms.
“The head of my firm.”
“The head of your firm.”
“… is the head of the Vainakh Syndicate.”
“Head. Founder. Moneyman. Puppeteer. Pick your word.” Afon tips his palm side to side. “He’s the one at the top. We’re sure.”
“How sure is ‘sure’?”
“Sure enough that Lukas is already planning the funeral.”
My office suddenly feels like it’s shrunk two sizes and fucking hell, this tie is killing me. It’s the same one that I not-so-long-ago threaded through Cassandra’s teeth before I?—
Well, best not to go there right now. I’ve got enough shit to think about without dragging her into the mix.
I rub my hand down my face. My stubble’s longer than I like it, since I didn’t shave yesterday.
Didn’t sleep much, either. I’ve been up half the night for two weeks running, working and not-working, which is what I call it when I sit at a desk and pretend to parse through legal documents while I think about a woman in a hospital gown instead.
I shake that thought loose. Not now. Not with Afon in the room. He can smell a distraction on me from across a city block.
“Walk me through it,” I say.
Afon explains quickly how they puzzled it all out, though I’m not really listening. I only asked him the question to buy myself time to think, to process this awful churning feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I knew the price of getting out of the Bratva for good would be steep. After all, look at what my father paid.
But this is a shitshow of epic proportions. A fucking disaster in the making, really. I guess I should’ve expected it. When you’re born into a den of vipers like I was, there are tangled tails and venom aplenty everywhere you look. Working my way free was never going to be easy.
My rib gives a sudden pang, an internal punch vicious enough to rip the breath out of my lungs. It’s like a saw-toothed hook sinking into my nerves and yanking hard as fuck. I keep my face still, but only barely.
Afon notices. “Your side?” he asks.
“It’s nothing. Keep talking.”
He frowns, but he does. By the time he’s finished, the ocean of coffee in my stomach has turned to battery acid and my rib is on fire. “So turns out my boss is a bad dude, in bed with bad people, and Lukas wants him dead.”
“As dead as you can get him,” he agrees. “And as soon as possible, too.”
“You sure I’m the right kind of trigger man?”
Afon inclines his head. “Who else?”
“Anyone,” I suggest. “Literally anyone. You know that I…” I swing an arm around to encompass the whole building and all that it contains.
“I can’t just walk into that man’s office and put a bullet in him.
It’s his fucking firm, Afon. I work here.
Every case I’ve touched for six years is tied to his.
If he turns up dead in his office, I am high on the list of guys that every single cop in this city is going to want to talk to. ”
“Yes. Which is why we’re not going to do it in the office.”
“Where, then?” I ask, even though I know I’m walking blindly into something I won’t like.
“At home. In his home. In his bed, if possible. With his wife sleeping next to him, preferably.”
“Dare I ask why?”
He leans. His elbows go on the edge of my desk. His face is in that same patient, fond configuration he’s used on me since I was fifteen years old, when he first had to tell me something I was going to hate.
“Because the wife,” he begins, “is the coup de grace. She’s a walking bruise, the poor thing.
The concierge at their building told one of our guys that paramedics have been to their penthouse four times in the last year.
Everyone on the block knows Raymond Snyder plays rough with his toys, but nobody says anything, because he donates to the right people and sits on the right boards and his lawyers are very, very good. ”
My rib is strangling me from the inside now. I press the heel of my hand against it under the desk, out of sight, and keep my face flat. “Okay,” I say. “And?”
“So she’s the perfect frame, plemyannik. ”
The acid in my stomach intensifies. “You want to frame her? Why?”
“C’mon, nephew, think. Use that big, legal brain of yours!
” he crows. “She has motive and opportunity. A battered woman with a rich, nasty husband and a prenup full of landmines is catnip. She’s been living in that house for four years with a man who puts her in the emergency room every few months.
The jury will reach a verdict before they even get out of the bleachers. ”
“Afon…”
“It’s clean, nephew , ” he insists. “Cleaner than clean. We go in after they’ve both gone to sleep.
We put the gun in her hand. We put the residue on her fingers.
Then she wakes up in a bedroom with a dead husband, the murder weapon, and a lifetime of reasons to have pulled the trigger.
No matter what she says, it’s open-and-shut. And then you’ll be free. We both will.”
The hum in my rib turns into a stab. I take a slow breath and let it out slower. I keep my hand where it is under the desk.
Afon is watching me, as always, but he doesn’t push. He, better than anyone alive, understands the currency of debts owed and debts repaid. Given what happened fifteen years ago, he considers my pain, in some twisted way, his responsibility.
I hate him a little for that.
I love him a lot for it, too.
“So then what happens to her?”
Afon’s head tilts. Just a fraction. “You know the answer to that, Matvei.”
I meet his eyes and say nothing.
He sighs. “She goes to prison . That’s what happens to her.
Twenty-five to life, probably. Maybe less if her lawyer is decent and leans hard on the abuse angle.
” He shrugs one shoulder. “She might do ten and get parole. She might do the whole thing. That’s not our problem.
” His frown deepens. “Is there a reason you’re asking? ”
“I like to know what I’m signing up for. That’s all.”
“Mm.”
Afon remains skeptical, but he eventually sits back and the weight of his attention lifts off me by about half a degree. Not all the way, though. Never, ever all the way. Not once in fifteen years.
“Nephew , ” he says, “this is the job Lukas gave you. This is the path out. You find the Vainakh head, you cut it off, then you hand in your Bratva card, such as it is, and your life is your own again.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He holds my eyes for a long, unsmiling beat. Then he pushes himself up out of the chair with the quiet grunt of a man whose knees are not what they used to be. “The wife is not a person. Not for this. For this, she is a door we walk through. Do you understand what I am telling you?”
“Yeah. I got it.”
“Good man.”
He lets himself out the way he let himself in, soundless on the carpet, and the door shuts behind him.
I sit there for a long minute with my hand pressed against my side and the folder sitting open on my desk where my uncle left it.
The last page is another photo of Raymond, this time helping a woman out of the car.
Her face is still hidden in the shadows, but the ring on her finger is gaudy and obvious.
Under the photo, in Afon’s blocky blue pen, is a single line.
wife: Cassandra Snyder (née Madden), 29, no priors, multiple hospital admissions.
My hand goes tight on the arm of my chair.
Cassandra.
Cassandra Madden.
Cassandra Snyder.
Oh, fucking hell.
Afon was right: I really did need to sit down for this one.