Chapter 21 Tati
TATI
The only clue I had to finding Viktor was what he said about meeting up with Teddy.
I knew Teddy through Nicki, and while I’ve never actually been to any of their parties or been more than just casually acquainted with him, I’ve always known who he was.
And more importantly, I know where his gang meets up.
My first stop, then, was to the clubhouse, which sits only a few minutes away from my father’s house.
I got there in record time, flooring it all the way.
The moment I walked through the doors, I felt out of my element.
Several members of the gang looked up at me casually from their places around the bar and in the back at the pool table.
The bartender was the first to ask, “You lost, honey?”
“I’m looking for Viktor?” I swallowed hard. My throat was as dry as the desert. “Viktor Morozov? He’s supposed to be meeting with Teddy.”
The bartender smiled as snickers from the others meandering around the bar rose up. “Sorry, but he’s not here. Maybe I can take a message.” The one closest to him sitting at the bar spat out a short laugh.
I stiffened my stance and said, “Tell him Tatiana’s looking for him.” Then I added, “Aronin? As in Nikolai Aronin?”
Just like that, the tone changed around the room and the bartender’s smile dropped. “Right.” He cleared his throat and his face flushed. “Last I heard, Teddy was going to meet him at his place.”
Viktor’s apartment. A place I’ve only been once. “Thank you.” I pause for just a second, then I realize that the last thing I should be doing in my addled state is relying in my memory to find his apartment. “You wouldn’t happen to have an address, would you?”
He gave it to me, and now I’m on my way there. This whole way, I’ve been looking in the rearview, wondering how long it’s going to take Yanov and my father to get together and start looking for me.
I hope beyond hope that he doesn’t suspect me and Viktor. If he does, then his apartment is going to be the first place he looks.
Maybe I can convince Viktor to leave with me. I don’t know where the fuck we’ll go from there, but he’s got to have some better ideas than I do at the moment.
I get to his apartment and park Yanov’s car on the street. Then I grab the journal and dart across the street to the door of the apartment building.
The bartender said that he lived in on the fifth floor. I hope he’s here. I didn’t see his car, but there was a motorcycle out in front of the building. Maybe it’s Teddy’s. Maybe… maybe…
The elevator door slides open, and as I step out into the hallway, a dreadful feeling that I’m being watched suddenly surrounds me. Paranoia, maybe? Or maybe my instincts are trying to warn me.
I knock on the door and wait. Suddenly, I realize that my hands are shaking… and my legs… My eyes are starting to burn. If he doesn’t answer the door…
It opens, and he’s standing before me. A wash of relief comes over me the second I see him and a sob rises in my chest. I manage to get out, “I got it. I got the journal,” before the tears come.
He reaches out to me and pulls me inside, looking out into the hallway before closing the door behind me.
“He had it,” I tell him, trying to get the sobs under control.
“Yanov had it in his car. I thought about it and I figured he would have it with him if he was going to talk to my father about me. I mean, just accusing me would be hard to do if he didn’t have evidence, so…
” I stop my babbling the second I see Teddy standing in the living room.
Viktor just looks at him and says, “I’ll call you.”
Teddy nods and walks up to me. “Nice to see you, Tati.” Then he passes us by and leaves. I’m just standing there stunned for a second, my hands sweating. It’s not until Viktor takes me by the shoulders and leads me to the couch that I start to come back to myself.
“Did he hurt you?” he asks me, and it sounds like a ridiculous question in this moment. Didn’t he hear everything else I just said?
“Viktor, I got the journal,” I say, holding it up. “Who cares about that right now?”
“I do,” he says, his face hardening. “Did he hurt you?”
The coolness in his eyes sends a wave of calm over me. He’s just grabbed my focus with his voice.
I shake my head. “H–He tried, but… but I got away from him. I stole his car.”
His eyes widen slightly. “Okay,” he says. “Why don’t you go into the bathroom, wash your face, and get yourself together? Then we’ll talk about what’s next.”
“My father is going to be furious, Viktor,” I say, and the sobs bubble up again. “If he finds me here—”
“Let me worry about that,” he says. “Go on and get yourself together.”
I stand up and walk away, down the hallway to the bathroom at the end.
I get behind the closed door and take a breath.
The moment I do, I break out in shivers and goosebumps from the top of my scalp to the soles of my feet.
We’re in so deep. We’ll have to run. But where?
I don’t have any money and we have no plan. Shit…
I take in another breath, then another, and the shivers start to subside. Get yourself together. Viktor’s right. We’re going to have to have cool heads if we’re going to get out of this mess.
I go to the sink and set the book down on the edge while I run the water to wash my face.
I pause and look at myself in the mirror.
My mascara has run, making me look like a racoon.
My hair is falling out of the neat little bun I had it in.
And one of my cheeks is red and a little sore.
Did he hit me? I don’t remember in all the madness.
Just looking at myself makes me start to cry again.
What a fucking mess this is. I’m so upset and scared, and I legitimately don’t know what we’re going to do.
I hope Viktor has a plan of action. Or, at least, that he has been working on one.
I go to reach for the tissue box sitting on top of the toilet when the journal falls off the edge of the sink and lands just under the toilet tank.
“Dammit,” I whisper to myself as I kneel down to retrieve it. I grab the book and my eye catches something shiny. I look over to see something peeking out from behind a loose tile. It occurs to me that I should leave it… but something tells me to get a better look at it.
I reach out and pull the tile free from the wall. A key tumbles out and clinks on the floor. I pick it up, turning it over in my hand. It’s strange looking, brass with a rounded top and a flat, blocky tang. It almost looks like a fake key.
Oh, wait. I’ve seen one of these before. I think this is to a safety deposit box.
At least that’s what it looks like. I stand up and hold it up to the light. That’s definitely what this looks like…
The feeling that I’m intruding comes over me and I go to put it back, then I stop.
Marla was walking out of a bank when she was shot. At least that’s what witnesses said. I turn the key around in the light again and spot little speckles of brown along the edge.
Blood?
My heart drops. It can’t be Marla’s… can it? Why would Viktor have it?
I look at the door and slowly, it all clicks into place. The raw fact of it is that he works for my father. His entire job involves hurting and killing people who threaten my father’s interests.
“I’m thinking about going to the Feds with this.” That day we had lunch, she’d said it. If anyone from my father’s camp knew about it… If Yanov found out and told my father…
Fuck me.
I turn off the water in the sink with shaking hands. How could he do this? After everything, after…
I’m moving before I even finish the thought. He’s walking from the kitchen with a glass of water for me, but I don’t let him speak. I hold up the key.
“Tell me this isn’t Marla’s,” I say to him. “Please tell me this isn’t hers.”
He looks at the key, then at me. “It’s hers.”
A sharp pain hits me in my chest and a sob catches in my throat. I cover my mouth and turn away from him.
“It’s not what you think, Tati.”
“It’s not…” My voice sounds twisted with rage and sorrow.
I have to stop and take a breath. “He told you to kill her, didn’t he?
All this time, you’ve been walking around pretending like you didn’t have anything to do with her death, and now here I find out that you were in league with him all along. ”
He stands as still as a statue, his eyes tracking me as I start to pace the floor.
“God, I can’t believe I fell for your bullshit. I should have known better than to trust you. That’s the Bratva way, right? Trust no one.”
“It’s not as simple as you think.”
“It’s not? Please enlighten me. Because she was my best fucking friend, Viktor. You knew that. She was the love of my brother’s life—”
“Which is why you have to believe me when I say that I would never betray him like that,” he says to me. “I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, Tati. You have to believe me.”
“Then who was it? You’re my father’s enforcer.”
“I don’t know who was responsible.”
I stare at him, trying to read his stone-faced expression to find the truth. “Did my father send you to do it?”
“He did. I didn’t go through with it, though.”
“I find it very hard to believe that my father would just let you slide after disobeying a direct order, Viktor.”
“If you would just stop and listen to me, I can explain.” He stops himself as his anger starts to rise. He pinches the bridge of his nose and takes a breath. “He assigned me to a hit, but he didn’t tell me who it was. He just gave me a description, a time, and a location. That’s all.”
“And when he told you a woman with rainbow hair, that didn’t trigger any alarms?”
“That’s not how he described her. Tati, I promise you, I did not know it was her until I saw her there. And when I did, I tried to warn her, but someone else got to her first.”
I just shake my head. That’s got to be the weakest story I’ve ever heard in my life. I walk back into the bathroom and grab the journal.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m leaving,” I tell him when I come back out. I throw the key at him and he catches it, yanking it out of the air like it’s nothing. “I’m not going to stay here and wait for you to turn me in to my father.”
He reaches out for me and I yank my arm away. “Leave me alone.”
“Tati, your father is looking for you,” he says as he follows me to the door. “You can’t leave.”
“Fuck off—” I open the door and take a step out. Sparks and dust from the walls suddenly shower me as a sound like firecrackers goes off around me. I’m yanked back inside before I know what’s happening.
Viktor’s standing with the door closed, pulling out his gun. “Stay back,” is all he says to me as he opens the door a crack and looks out.
I stand there shaking in the hallway as my mind wraps itself around what just happened. Those… those were gunshots. Someone just tried to kill me.
I hear a voice echoing through the hallway, calm and almost soothing with a hint of a Russian accent.
“This isn’t your problem, Viktor,” Yanov says. “Stand down.”
“Not a chance,” he says through the door.
“I realize you have an affection for the girl, but she is a traitor to the brotherhood. We both know it. If you hand her over now, Nikolai has promised to show you mercy. After all, you have always been like a son to him.”
“That doesn’t mean shit to me coming from a man who’s sent you to kill his daughter.” With that, he opens the door wider and sticks his arm out, shooting his gun three times. Sparks answer him back and he ducks back behind the door.
“So, you’ll probably get what’s coming for you,” he says.
“And as for his daughter, a bullet to the head is a more dignified end for her than what I would have proposed. If I were Pakhan, I would have her die as she lived and thrown her naked into a pit and let our brothers have their way with her until she was dead.” Then a little louder, he adds, “Maybe you’d prefer that end instead, Tati?
To have all your orifices filled as you choke to death on the cocks of my brothers. Once a whore, always—”
Viktor pulls the door open again and fires again. The sparks light up the hallway. When he stops, I hear Yanov again, this time, grunting in pain. “I’ll kill you before I let you touch her, Yanov,” Viktor says. “You looking to die tonight?”
Another yelp of pain in response. After a few seconds, footsteps moving away from us echo through the hallway. Viktor closes the door and looks back at me.
“He’ll be back,” he says. “And next time, he won’t be alone. We need to leave now.”
I stand gaping at him, shellshocked. He walks up to me, wraps his arms around my waist, and kisses me. I fall against him, the taste of his lips and feel of his tongue against mine waking me up.
“I’ll die before I let them hurt you,” he says, his breath in my face. “You understand me? I will never let anyone get away with hurting you.”
If I weren’t so frightened, I’d cry. But for now, all I can do is nod.
“Give me a minute to grab a few things, then we’re out of here.”