Chapter 24 Sera
SERA
There’s rage in his voice, but heartbreak too.
I shift so I can get a view of the photo.
A woman stares up at me. She’s young, around my age if I had to guess, with blonde hair and light blue eyes.
It’s a candid photo, her bright smile caught in the moment she turns around and realizes she’s on camera. “Who is she?”
“Katerina Varvara Valentin.” Alik’s voice hold a wealth of love and pain. He caresses his thumb across the woman’s face before placing the frame back on his desk.
Valentin. She shares Alik’s last name and it’s clear he loves her deeply. Cold trepidation blankets me. I don’t want to ask, but I have to. “Is she your wife?”
“Rina?” Alik startles. “No, definitely not my wife. She’s my baby sister.”
“Your sister?” He’s not married or widowed. I wait for the relief to come but it doesn’t. Instead, that trepidation twists harder. Whatever happened to this woman, my family is involved. “Where is she?”
Alik sighs and all the life drains out of him. He drops into his desk chair, his eyes fixed blankly on the other side of the room. “Honestly, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, she vanished two years ago and while I’m next to certain she’s dead, I haven’t been able to find her body.”
Alik sounds so lost. I want to hug him, offer some sort of comfort. My arms are already outstretched when I stop, pull back. That’s not what our relationship is. Touching during frantic sex, sure. But where deep emotions are concerned, there’s a chasm between us that feels impossible to cross.
I retreat to one of the leather chairs on the opposite side of the desk, folding myself into it and well out of reach of temptation. “Rina is why you came to Chicago?”
Alik pulls a bottle of vodka and a glass from one of the desk drawers, pouring a shot and downing it quickly. He offers me one, but I decline.
“Yes,” he eventually answers. “I came here to find the people who took her, who murdered her. I came here to destroy them, but not before I find out where they left her body.”
In some cavernous corner of the house, a clock strikes the hour. Four echoing gongs that confirm we’re not getting any sleep tonight. “Tell me what happened.”
Alik releases another heavy sigh. “Rina was going to college in Boston. She’s much younger than me and my brother, Ruri.
The only child from our dad’s second marriage.
She wanted to come to the US to study, free from the family’s influence and restrictions, and the pakhan never says—never said—no to her.
So, despite all my objections, Rina comes, is studying in Boston, partying with friends, and then, one day, she’s just… gone.”
I watch Alik down another shot. His throat strains with the effort to swallow, memories trying to fight their way past the alcohol. “Do you know what happened? What did the police say?”
“The police…” His laugh is flat. “They were one step past useless. They were able to track down her last known location, a heavily trafficked bar popular with university kids. The kind where every surface is damp with some sort of fluid. The cops, her friends, the asshole she was dating at the time—they all confirmed the same thing. Rina went out with a group of friends. They remember that she was dancing and drinking one minute, then gone the next. That was all the cops could give me before their leads went cold.”
I shiver, all too aware of how easy it is to make a young woman disappear. “If Rina disappeared in Boston, how did you end up in Chicago?”
“I picked up the interrogation where the cops left off. I don’t have the same kind of constraints they do when it comes to questioning suspects.
As soon as Rina’s friends reported her missing, I flew over from Novosibirsk.
While the cops sat on their thumbs, plodding through their rule book and looking for clues, I took a more direct approach.
Turns out one of the bartenders was on a local thug’s payroll, doping drinks and handing unconscious women over to a guy on the bottom of a very, very long food chain. ”
Agitated, Alik slams down another shot of vodka before pushing back from his chair.
His bare feet make heavy steps as he starts to tread a hole in the carpet.
“I moved as fast as I could, Sera. Ripped apart lowlife after lowlife, barely leaving enough time in between to wash their blood off my hands. Weeks went by, then months. My father was working every back-channel connection we have from Russia while I was on the ground here, literally tearing information out of people’s mouths, and we still couldn’t find her. ”
He paces close to where I’m sitting and I want to reach out and squeeze his hand, but don’t. “When did you realize Rina was here, in Chicago?”
“It was more that we realized she wasn’t in Boston.
All trace of her was gone. No cell phone use.
No debit or credit card transactions. Rina wasn’t showing up in classes, or on campus, or at her apartment.
Her name wasn’t on any plane manifests. She hadn’t booked tickets on any trains or buses out of the city.
I have more than enough hackers on my payroll to get through every frame of security footage a city like Boston has, and Rina wasn’t on any of it.
So, she was either dead or had been taken.
Two horrible options, but I was praying like hell for the second one because then at least she might still be alive.
After months of picking my way through the rank-and-file scum of New England, I finally found the lead that brought me to Chicago. ”
“And to my uncle.” If one of us is going to say it, it’s going to be me.
Alik pauses. The desk is between us again. Over it, he locks eyes with me and for a heartbeat it feels like we’re back in Rocco’s basement, where everything is dank and dark and cruel.
“He locked her in one of his cells, didn’t he?”
“For several months. Da.”
I start to stand, propelled to touch him, to help him in some way, but Alik turns, blocking me from the turmoil tearing up his face. “Oh, Alik. I’m so sorry.”
“No, don’t.” A tremor tugs the muscles in his back. “Don’t apologize for anything that monster did. You’re not to blame.”
“I’m not trying to take any of Rocco’s blame, trust me.
He deserves every bad thing that’s coming to him for what he’s done to Rina, to me, to all the women before us.
I’m just…” I move to him slowly but not silently.
He’s hunched, curled around his pain, an apex predator even more dangerous when wounded.
When I lay a hand on his back, the muscles beneath his sweater feel like newly forged iron, hard and scalding.
“I’m sorry for what she went through. For what you and your family went through.
For the pain you’re still feeling. I’m just sorry. ”
Alik doesn’t move, doesn’t say a word. I hold my breath, waiting for him to push me away.
I give a startled squeak when, instead, he whips around and pulls me into a crushing hug.
Alik tucks his face against my neck, and I wrap my arms around his waist. We hang on to each other, keeping the other upright as we grapple with all the damage my family has caused.
When Alik lifts his head, his eyes are more focused, clearer.
There’s a dangerous glint to the blue as he starts to unwind my hair from the top of my head.
“From the time she vanished, it took me almost a year to tie my sister’s disappearance to Rocco Pagano.
Several more months to figure out how to infiltrate his organization.
The entire time, I was hunting for evidence that Rina might still be alive.
But the more time that passed, the more honest I needed to be with myself, with my family.
We have too many contacts, too many ways of finding people for me to avoid the truth.
Rina is dead. I know it in my head and in my heart.
Rocco Pagano trafficked her, sold her, and the person who bought her killed her once they were done with her. ”
A deadly calm has fallen over him, his attention fixed on the rope of hair he’s uncoiling.
It hits my waist when it finishes unraveling.
It’s still damp from the shower and Alik becomes transfixed with running his fingers through the thick strands.
“You confirmed all that after you started working for Rocco?”
“Da.” He nods. “I would’ve killed him as soon as I learned he was tied to my sister’s disappearance.
Should’ve killed him. But Rina’s life didn’t end by Rocco’s hands.
I needed to find out from Rocco who bought her, who held her, who killed her.
And I needed to get the information in a way that wouldn’t send the fucker deep into hiding.
Joining the ranks of Rocco’s thugs and working my way into his inner circle was the best chance I had for getting the information I needed.
For making sure I could make them pay for what they did to my sister. ”
“But—” I grip one of Alik’s hands where it’s hovering by my side, twisted deep into my hair. “Did you have all the intel you needed when you took me from my uncle?”
Alik doesn’t flinch when he says, “No.”
“What you said that day when I woke up in your apartment, about having to deal with the consequences of taking me from Rocco’s—did you save me at the expense of the information you needed?”
“Yes.”
Cazzo. I want to squirm out of his grip, but Alik has me good and captured. “But Rocco didn’t die that night. You’ve been interrogating him. Have you gotten the answers you were looking for?”
He’s watching me, eyes electric as he twirls my hair and nods. “With some persuasion, Rocco was kind enough to tip me off about the club and the men I might find there.”
The uneasy feeling that’s been swimming through my stomach does a few somersaults, churning up a fresh wave of dread. “And tonight—did you find what you were looking for before, um…”
“Before I had to shoot our way out and reveal that I wasn’t there to buy a virgin plaything like rest of those fuckers?”
“Oh, no.” I bury my face in my hands, overcome with guilt. “I fucked it up, didn’t I? Tell me—how much did I fuck it up?”
“On a scale of one to ten? I’d say a solid fifty.”