18. Alexei #2
I’m unable to soften the roughness in my voice. “I remember making them like it was yesterday. I know every place my knife marked your body. I remember the fear in your eyes when you first saw the blade, and the terror in Masha’s, even though we told her it was all just a game.”
I lower her arms and place my hands on her thighs. Gently, holding her eyes, I part her knees.
She shivers, a tremor I feel in every nerve.
“But there are other things I remember, too.”
Ofelia goes very still, her eyes locked on mine.
“Like the day I made these marks with my knife.” My thumbs trace the silver lines in the crease of each thigh.
“The ones right here. I remember that day because it was the first time—the only time—that I nearly lost myself in that cell. Not because of what Vilnus was forcing me to do; I’d learned, long ago, to dull myself to that.
“I nearly lost myself because of you, Ofelia. Because when I looked down at you that day, I couldn’t take myself out of that room.
I couldn’t disassociate myself from your body underneath my own.
” I grimace with disgust. “Not because I got some kind of sick thrill from what he was forcing me to do to you,” I say roughly.
“Not that, Ofelia. It was never that. What I mean is—”
But that’s just the problem. I don’t know how to say what I mean in any way that makes sense. Not even to myself.
“I know.”
I don’t know how I expected her to react, but this—her quiet, steady voice—isn’t it.
“You know?” I frown, staring at her. “What do you mean, you know? I tortured you, Ofelia. Sliced your flesh with my knife and fucking exposed you to a roomful of watching men. I did that to you. Me. And now I’m trying to tell you that some fucked-up part of me actually wanted you—”
I shake my head, rubbing a hand over my face. “You can’t know,” I say dully. “And I don’t know that I can ever forgive myself for it.”
I steel myself to meet her eyes again. “But I had to tell you.” I force myself to get the words out. “Because after what you just played, I understand how it’s been. What you must have thought all these years. But it wasn’t that I didn’t want you, Ofelia.”
I take a deep breath.
“It was that I wanted you too fucking much.”
Her hand touches my face, her long fingers caressing the crisscrossed scars marking it.
“Do you think I didn’t know that?” Her lips curl in the secret smile that I never quite know how to read.
“That’s why I was so lonely, Alexei.” Her voice is barely more than a whisper.
“It wasn’t just me who was tortured in that room.
I knew what it did to you, having to use your blade on me.
It killed me that you wouldn’t talk to me about it.
Or to anyone else. Because I knew you didn’t. And I knew why you didn’t.”
She brings her other hand up, cupping my face, forcing me to look at her.
“Do you think I didn’t feel it too, that day? That I didn’t see it in your face, the moment it changed between us?”
Her head goes back and she draws a deep, shuddering breath.
“Do you know how many times I’ve replayed those moments in my mind, wondering if I really saw what I did, or of it was just some kind of childish fantasy?
Or that I’ve thought there must be something fucking wrong with me, for getting turned on by what you were doing to me? ”
I can barely breathe, acutely aware of her every word and touch.
“Only it wasn’t just sexual, Alexei.” Her voice shakes. “It was something else. Something I didn’t even know how to make sense of—”
I take her mouth, ending the words before she can finish them.
“It was this,” I murmur against her mouth. “That’s what you felt. It was never a lie, Ofelia.”
“And just because that was the way we met,” she says fiercely, “doesn’t make this wrong. Tell me you understand that, Alexei.”
But instead of answering, I kiss her, deep and hard, until we’re both gasping and words no longer matter.
Because deep inside, I know that no words can ever truly remove the scars that bind us both to the past.
“Boss.”
Andrew’s grim expression makes me pause in the act of spinning Ofelia around in the pool.
“What is it?” I say, still holding her close, her arms entwined about my neck.
“Call.” He pauses. “In the secure room.”
Fuck.
Only a few people place unscheduled calls to that room, and none of them are likely to call with good news.
I nod, and Andrew leaves. I turn to Ofelia, automatically searching for excuses. But she just smiles wryly and kisses me. “Go,” she says, turning to swim to the pool edge. “I’ll practice.”
I forget sometimes that she grew up amid the darkness and secrecy that is our world.
Then she strips off her bikini and steps under the outdoor shower, and for a moment I debate telling that world to just go to hell. Seeing me watching her, Ofelia giggles. “Go,” she says, waving me away. “Very life-and-death bratva things, remember?”
My eyes run over the long, slender lines of her body. “Barely,” I mutter, tearing myself away with an effort.
It’s not a lie.
Ofelia has been on the Quantum Drift for a week, but my world has shifted so profoundly in that time that it may as well have been a year.
Unfortunately, something tells me that our sybaritic existence is about to be rudely disrupted.
I towel off and head into the secure room, waiting until the lock clicks closed before waking the screen in front of me.
“We’ve got a problem,” Dima greets me.
“I figured.” I pause in the act of tightening a towel around my waist as Lars’s face suddenly appears in a separate box onscreen beside Dima’s. “What the fuck,” I say blankly, looking between them. “Since when do we do group calls?”
I’m diligent about maintaining separation between Andersson Technologies and the Petrovsky bratva.
Even if the paparazzi might occasionally capture Lars and me together, partying on a yacht or out in a nightclub, for a hundred very good reasons we never, ever make the mistake of blurring the lines between the businesses.
“Shut up and open your second screen,” Lars says, not remotely cowed by my reaction. “I’m sending you a picture.”
A man’s face appears on the screen to my left. Mid-fifties, good-looking, olive skinned with a vaguely European feel. He’s familiar in a way I can’t quite place.
“What am I looking at?”
“John Owens,” answers Lars promptly.
“No, it isn’t.” I frown. “I sat across the table from Owens, Lars. This isn’t him.”
“Oh, but it is. So is this.” Another image appears, this one a bland-faced Caucasian. “And this.” Another photo, this time of a squat-faced redhead.
Lars gives me one of the loose, slightly insane grins that means he’s just discovered something important.
“John Owens is an AI creation. One identity, used by multiple people, some real, most fictional. We couldn’t find him because he literally doesn’t exist. While hiring the Paris team who hunted you down, he was simultaneously attending a fundraiser for Marty Hunter Jr. in Miami and a college campus debate in Louisiana. ”
“How did you track this down?” I shift my eye to Dima. “And why are you both calling me with this? I thought I’d made it clear this is Mak’s party.”
“Answer to your first question,” Lars says, “is bitch, please.” He gives me an arch look.
“When it comes to intelligence in the field, Mak is the best there is. But one of the reasons he’s the best is because when it comes to the tech end, he’s smart enough to work with guys like me.
And when I say guys like me, I’m being modest. Because we both know there’s nobody actually better than me.
” He tilts his head. “Okay. Maybe you. And Mickey. But you take my point.”
I’m laughing, despite myself. Sometimes I think that one of the reasons our friendship survived the horror of the Orlov years is because somehow, even at the very darkest moments, he always found a way to make me laugh.
“And you?” I turn to Dima.
“I understand this is Mak’s party,” he says, “but it’s still our town, and we’ve hit some problems I wanted you to be aware of before I brief him, so I contacted Lars.”
Good thinking.
I nod. “Go ahead.”
“Whoever is running the team of John Owenses isn’t content with just running you out of town.
They’re coming after our turf, Lex, and they’re coming hard.
Fifty percent of our games have been shut down in the last couple of weeks: all of the floating casinos and half our private back rooms. Three of our nightclubs are temporarily closed, held up on fire safety technicalities or some other bullshit.
But the real kicker is how they’re coming at the Cardenases’ business.
The cartel has lost two narco-subs in the past two weeks, each carrying five thousand kilos of product.
We’re talking over three hundred million in lost revenue.
The Cardenases are rightly accusing us of failing to protect them and their pipeline.
That favor you gave Mak is hitting our bottom line. Hard.”
Christ.
I slump back in my chair, reeling. I can almost feel the swamp creeping inexorably across the ocean, determined to reclaim me.
“Is it the Novikovs?”
“No.” Dima answers immediately. “It was definitely Kiril who took down the Luccheses, but not without some serious help smuggling him into the city. Since then, though, he’s stayed out of sight.
I’ve got a girl inside Kiril Novikov’s Atlanta strip club, and he’s been there every night.
He hasn’t put a foot this side of the border again.
” He gives me a cold smile. “The fucker would be dead by now if he had.”
I don’t doubt it for a minute.
“You said that whoever is trying to take us down is the same person behind the Owens aliases.” I look between Dima and Lars. “What makes you so sure there’s a connection?”
“It’s not a person, exactly.” Lars starts tapping, and social media images from a range of platforms appear on the second screen. “Checked out social media lately?”
“Of course not.” I glare at him. “You know I hate that shit.”