32. Alexei #2
The ring that I put there.
The one that says she’s mine, now and forever.
And if I truly mean that—if my word is ever to mean anything at all—then Mak was right in what he said during his visit weeks ago: “If you are serious about having any kind of future with Ofelia Borovsky, I suggest you rethink your career choices, not to mention your commitment to the swamp.”
On my laptop screen, the tangled links between me, dirty money, and dead bodies glare accusingly across the deck.
Fuck you, I think with a surge of anger.
I’ll work out what murk in the swamp is trying to suck me down. I’m close enough that I can almost taste the rotten mess on my tongue.
And the minute that’s done, I think with a thrill of determination, so am I.
Every minute after that will be spent on building Phantom—and a future for Ofelia and me that is as far from those muddy waters as day is from night.
I’m going to create a life for us that the gators can’t ever touch.
I settle back in with renewed determination to search the next name on the list, suddenly impatient to get this done.
Then my eyes meet the dead ones waiting for me, and I feel a sudden shock of recognition—followed by a rush of memories.
Renata curled up on my bed, battered and bleeding, her rapist’s foul stench still clinging to her body.
Her pale, determined face as she took the brown paper pharmacy bag from my hands.
Her silent tears of pain and humiliation as she conducted her own rape kit.
We’d both known that a hospital emergency room meant questions. And questions would only complicate matters when I put the bastard who did this to her into the swamp.
You have to promise me nobody will find out, she whispered as she handed me the DNA sample. Not my family, not anyone.
They won’t, I reassured her. We’ll make it look like you were in a hit-and-run. There’s a guy in a lab who owes me a favor. He’ll get me an ID, then erase any trace of the test. You have my word.
What will you do after you find him? Her eyes searched mine, flaring when she saw the answer I knew better than to verbalize. Just him, Lex, she whispered. Just the one who . . . did it. I don’t want you to get in trouble for this.
After hours of scrolling through faces that mean little or nothing to me, it’s oddly therapeutic to remember the cold fury I felt that night, to stare into the eyes of a man who actually deserved my wrath.
Carter Thorne.
I remember the name from the DNA printout. Normally I wouldn’t have needed anything so clinical as a test to find him, but as the Orlovs’ prisoner, I was supposed to be confined to the compound, so showing my face anywhere in Miami to ask questions wasn’t an option.
Dima covered for me for a night, and I used the secret tunnels known only to my family to slip out of the compound.
The lab tech was a guy I’d caught several months ago, manufacturing pills that had been dealt in the Orlov clubs.
The pills were incredibly high-quality, far better than the shit the Orlovs were buying, so instead of turning him in, I brokered a deal for him with the Lucchese family.
Once he was under their protection, not even the Orlovs could touch him, which meant I not only saved him from certain death—probably at my own hands—but also gave him a very lucrative income stream. He was more than happy to help.
Armed with the name he gave me, it took little more than my hacking skills and ten minutes on the lab computer to find Carter and his boys. I waited in the hotel room closet until Carter finally stumbled in, then took him.
I drove away in a car stolen from the hotel parking lot and went deep into the Everglades, where nobody could hear him scream. I used my knife to inflict enough pain to make him feel at least a fraction of the agony Renata would have to live with for the rest of her life.
Then I fed him, still screaming, to the gators and watched until their frenzy tore him limb from limb.
I torched the car on the outskirts of the city.
By dawn I was back in my room at the compound like nothing had happened.
Carter’s disappearance was big news for several days—right up until the media began to report leaked details of drug-fueled rampages that painted Carter and his friends in a less than flattering light, at which point their parents intervened, throwing around enough money to ensure the entire incident disappeared as completely as Carter had.
In a city with one of the highest missing person counts in the entire US, the case was forgotten soon enough, as I’d known it would be.
Until now.
I look at the donation amount to Hunter’s campaign associated with Carter Thorne.
What kind of college kid makes million-dollar donations to political campaigns?
It takes a little more digging, and then, just like that, the tangled money trail opens like swamp saw grass when an airboat cuts through it.
The donation wasn’t made by Carter Thorne. It was made in his memory—by a company called Meridian Network.
I stare at the Meridian Network logo on the screen, my pulse racing.
I go into the cabin and open the drawer by Ofelia’s sleeping head, fishing around in it for the business card I put there weeks ago.
She stirs in her sleep. I drop a kiss on her naked shoulder, and she settles again, her mouth curving in the sleeping smile that always makes my heart twist. I stare down at her for a moment, at the face that has haunted my dreams for so long, at the body that still feels like it was made for my own, then close the glass door behind me.
I want Ofelia nowhere near any of this.
Back at my laptop, I rapidly click through a series of websites, glancing from the logo on the business card to the screen, my mind working in a thousand directions at once as the pieces begin to settle into place.
No wonder Mak wanted to deal with Owens himself.
As the first pale hint of dawn threads over the distant horizon, I go into the cyber room and punch out Mak’s number.
“Good morning, Mr Petrovsky.” To my surprise, an assistant answers, sounding remarkably composed given the fact that it’s currently three thirty a.m. in London.
“I was expecting Mak.”
“And I know he’d take your call immediately, but something sensitive has come up that requires his attention. He checks in once a day, so if you leave a message, he will have it by the end of the day.”
I grin at the very British diplomacy. Something sensitive undoubtedly means bullets in dangerous places. “Tell him I’ve got an update on the Owens file.”
“Update on the Owens file.” The assistant repeats my sentence word for word, military-style.
“That’s correct.”
“I’ll ensure he gets the message.” His assistant ends the call.
Too restless to sleep, I send a message to Lars. To my surprise, he calls back on the secure line immediately.
“Motherfucker,” he greets me over what is clearly an extremely raucous party in the background.
“If I were you, I’d steer clear of Mickey for a while.
He was pissed off about you and Ofelia before Roman spent nearly an hour reading him the riot act.
That party you can hear is my attempt to cheer him up. ”
If Mickey is pissed off now, just wait until he sees the ring on his sister’s finger.
Now, however, is definitely not the time for that particular news flash.
“I’ve been waiting for you to call,” Lars goes on. “I broke through the wall of that disinformation campaign, or at least, through one layer of it. Traced back the bots and news reports to a single source. Ever heard of the Meridian Network?”
“Funny you should mention that.” I feel the adrenalin fuelled excitement of threads coming together.
“I found a donation in the report you sent me that led me to that same company. It took me a while to connect a name, but I found it. I’m sending you a diagram now.
I want to know what you think before I take it to Mak, just to be sure I’m not putting a tin foil hat on. ”
“Oooh, diagrams and tin foil hats,” he says in his most camp voice. “So analog and Gen X of you, darling.”
“Fuck off.” I hit send and wait.
Less than a minute later, Lars gives a low whistle down the line. “Holy shit.”
“You see it, then?”
“Oh, I see it.” He pauses. “But I wouldn’t have, Lex. No wonder Mak wanted your eye on this. There’s no chance I’d have found this without you. No chance anyone would have.”
“Yeah, well, no chance I’d have tracked those bots back to Meridian without you.”
“Ah, stop sucking my dick, you big tease.”
I grin. This is where Lars and I just work, a symbiotic harmony that’s as close to magic as two people can get without being lovers.
“Silas Thorne is Meridian’s CEO.” I hear Lars’s fingers rattling the keys in the background. “He’s definitely our boy, but that labyrinth of shell companies is as good a corporate front as I’ve ever seen. This fucker does not want to be found.”
“No. I’m guessing that one donation was an oversight, a mistake. It’s the only time Meridian is directly linked to any of this, so be careful looking into it, until we’ve spoken to Mak. If Thorne and these Meridian pricks can cover their tracks this well, don’t go leaving one for them to follow.”
“Oh, fuck off.” Lars sounds almost insulted. “This is a puzzle, friend.” I can hear the excitement in his voice. “One that you and I will solve soon enough. But if you’re right—and motherfucker, I know you are—there’s still a piece or two missing here. I think it’s time I paid you a visit.”
“After what happened in Granada, I don’t want you in that kind of danger.” I think rapidly. “But I could possibly come to you, depending on where you are.”
“By air, less than an hour away from your current position,” he says promptly.
“From my secret location, you mean?” I say dryly.
“Bitch, please.”
I grin, feeling a rush of almost passionate relief at the thought of seeing my oldest friend.
The one person who has always managed, somehow, to chase the darkness and dead faces away.
“Send me the details,” I say. “I’m on my way, motherfucker.”