Haunted Bratva Daddy (Wicked Bratva Daddies #11)

1. Grisha

GRISHA

The compound went quiet at midnight the way it always did, the kind of quiet that had texture to it if you knew how to listen. I'd walked this perimeter for twenty years and I still listened to it every night like it might tell me something new.

Two nights from now would mark eight years.

I hadn't said the number out loud to anyone.

I didn't need to. My body had already started keeping the count on its own, the way it did every year around this time, tightening something behind my sternum a full week before the date arrived, like a bruise that ached before you remembered how you got it.

I was on the east side of the gallery wing, gravel crunching soft under my boots, when I heard it. It was not a sound so much as an absence of one. The motion light over the loading door hadn't kicked on, and it should have.

I stopped walking. I listened.

There was a shape at the base of the wall, low and controlled, moving along the mortar line like it was reading the stone.

I didn't call out. Calling out is for men who want to be heard coming.

I closed the distance at a jog, quiet on the balls of my feet.

I was fifteen feet away when the shape straightened and turned.

In the half second before it moved, I understood I was not dealing with some kid off the boardwalk looking for something to pawn.

The build was wrong for that. He was compact and balanced, his weight already shifted onto the back foot before I'd even finished closing the gap.

"Stop," I said.

The figure didn't stop. It came at me low and fast, and I caught an elbow across my forearm hard enough to numb it before I got a grip on a jacket sleeve.

The material was cheap synthetic, slick, and it slid through my fingers like water.

I drove forward and we hit the wall together, my shoulder into something that grunted but didn't go down.

A knee came up toward my ribs, and I twisted enough that it caught my hip instead.

"Ты кто?" I said, low. Who are you?

There was no answer, only breath moving controlled and measured through the nose, disciplined enough that even mid-fight he wasted no air on noise.

I got a hand on a wrist and nearly had it locked when a second hand drove up into my jaw, glancing, not the solid hit it was aimed to be.

In the half second I lost my balance, the shape twisted free and threw a low sweeping kick at my planted ankle.

I caught most of it on the shin instead of going down, and even off balance, the figure didn't scramble or flail the way a frightened body does.

It reset its footing first, then ran. That single choice snagged in my mind even as I was moving.

He fought like someone who thought about the next three seconds instead of just the last one.

I went after it anyway. Gravel sprayed under my boots and my lungs already burned cold, and I was three strides behind when the figure hit the top of the east wall in one clean motion, no hesitation, no scrabble for a handhold, and dropped down the far side into the dark that led toward the water.

I hit the wall a second later and looked over.

There was nothing there, only the slope of grass going down toward the shoreline, the bay flat and black under a moon that gave up almost nothing, and no sound of footsteps, no splash, no shape against the water.

It was gone, like it had never been there at all.

I stood with both hands braced on the top of the wall, breathing hard, my forearm already swelling where the elbow had caught it, and I made myself stand still and listen for a full minute before I turned back.

That was when I saw the glove.

It was lying on the gravel near the base of the wall, black, thin leather, the kind made for grip and dexterity rather than warmth.

I crouched and didn't touch it yet. Two feet beyond it, half in the shadow of the drainpipe, something else caught what little light there was.

A phone lay there, face up, its screen still lit.

I picked it up with two fingers along the edge.

The screen hadn't locked yet. One photo filled the whole display, open and waiting.

It showed a painting, photographed close and deliberate, framed tight enough that I could see the brushwork and the corner of a gilt frame and nothing else.

No wall showed in the shot, no room, no other canvas beside it.

Someone had wanted to remember exactly what they were looking at, and that single piece was all they'd cared to capture.

I knew the painting. I'd walked past it a thousand times without really seeing it, the way you stop seeing anything you pass every day.

Nothing had been taken. I checked the loading door, still sealed, still alarmed and unbreached.

I checked the side entrance nearest where the fight had started, and it hadn't been touched either.

Whoever this was hadn't gotten inside at all.

They'd been stopped at the wall, at the edge, before they'd so much as touched the building.

That made less sense than if they had actually gotten in.

I walked the length of the gallery wing myself, slow, boots quiet on the polished floor, past canvases dim under their small brass lamps.

I stopped in front of the Rurikov landscape first, the one from the phone, and studied the surface for a long moment, the craquelure fine as hairline cracks in old ice, the frame's gilt worn pale at the corners where generations of hands had straightened it.

Nothing there had been disturbed. I moved on past a small bronze of a horse rearing, its base still sitting square in the dust-free ring worn into the pedestal cloth, and past the marble busts Sasha's grandfather had shipped over from Leningrad decades before anyone called it something else.

I counted the pieces without meaning to, an old habit, Russian numbers moving under my breath the way they did when my hands needed something to do and my mind needed somewhere safe to go.

Один, два, три. I reached the far end, turned, and walked it again, slower this time, checking each frame for the faint shadow line that would mean it had been lifted and rehung even a fraction off true.

Everything was exactly where it should be. Every frame was level. Every lock was intact.

That was the part that wouldn't sit right in my chest.

The house was dark when I came in through the side door off the kitchen.

It wasn't the wall's silence anymore. It was a fuller kind, a house asleep, full of breathing I couldn't hear but knew was happening behind a dozen closed doors.

Somewhere a pipe ticked as it cooled. A clock in the hall marked seconds I could feel more than hear, a small mechanical patience that only made the rest of the house feel more unwatched.

I stood in the hallway a moment, glove and phone bagged in my jacket pocket, and let that unease work through me.

A family slept upstairs without knowing how close the wall had come to being tested and getting past, and I didn't like carrying that alone through rooms full of people who trusted me to carry it. I did it anyway. That was the job.

Sasha's study light was on. It usually was, no matter the hour.

He looked up when I came in, reading glasses low on his nose, a folder of papers spread across the desk in front of him. He took one look at my face and set the pen down.

"Tell me," he said.

"Intruder. East wall. Professional, not opportunistic." I set the bagged glove and phone on the desk between us. "Got past me. Went over the wall toward the water before I could hold him."

Sasha didn't reach for either item right away. He looked at them the way he looked at everything, unhurried, like haste was something that happened to other people. "Nothing missing."

"Confirmed. Nothing damaged either. Didn't even breach the building." I nodded at the phone, still lit, still open to that photograph. "Left this behind. One picture. The Rurikov landscape, the one in the east alcove. Nothing else in frame."

He picked up the bagged phone then and studied the screen for a long moment, and something in his face went very still, very focused, the look he got when a piece of information landed somewhere he hadn't expected it to.

"He wasn't stealing," Sasha said.

"No."

"That should worry you more than if he had been." He set the phone down. "A thief takes what he can carry and runs. This was reconnaissance. Somebody wanted to know exactly what that painting looks like, up close, before they decide what to do about it."

"That occurred to me too."

"Working alone?"

"Didn't fight like it." I turned that over again, the reset footing, the discipline of the breathing, the clean vault over the wall like the route had been walked before tonight.

"Moved like someone used to having backup nearby even when he doesn't. I couldn't tell you who put him up to it. Not yet."

"Find out." He said it without urgency, which was somehow worse than if he'd raised his voice. "Whoever wants that good a look at the painting is telling us something. Have an answer for me before the gala, not after."

"I know."

"You don't sound like you know." There was no heat in it, just an observation, the kind he'd been making about me since we were both boys running the same six blocks of Brighton Beach. "You're using fewer words than usual, Grisha. You do that when something's actually gotten to you."

I didn't answer that right away. My thumb had found the old scar along my jaw, tracing the line of it without my telling it to, and I made myself stop.

"Long week," I said.

Sasha didn't push on it. He knew the date same as I did, had known it every year for eight years, and had long since worked out exactly how much room to give me around it, never once asking what I did with the hours before dawn. "Two days," he said, not a question.

"That's right."

"You should sleep."

"I should walk the perimeter again in an hour."

He almost smiled at that, the corner of his mouth moving without committing to the whole expression.

"There's something else," he said, and reached for the folder on his desk, sliding a single page across to me.

A resume lay on top, a photograph clipped to its corner above a name I didn't recognize.

"Art consultant. Independent, comes recommended by people whose recommendations matter for something like this.

She's cataloguing the whole collection ahead of the gala, provenance, condition, insurance value, all of it.

Full access to the gallery wing starting tomorrow. "

"Tonight someone tried to breach that wing and you want a stranger walking through it with full access?"

"I want the collection catalogued properly before three hundred people stand in front of it with champagne in their hands," Sasha said.

"The timing's inconvenient. It's also already arranged.

" He closed the folder. "She's thorough.

That's what I was told. You'll want to keep an eye on her regardless, given tonight. "

"After tonight, I don't want one more thing inside these walls I have to account for."

"Then account for her." It came out simply, the way most things did with him, an order shaped like a suggestion because we both knew after this many years it didn't need to be anything harder than that. "Get some rest, Grisha. Even an hour."

I took the folder and left him to his papers and his lamp and whatever else kept him awake past two in the morning.

I walked back through the dark house toward the front of it, past the tall windows that looked out over the circular drive.

My mind kept turning over that photograph, one painting chosen and framed with a care that had nothing to do with theft.

Everything about tonight sat wrong in a way I couldn't yet name.

I stood at the window, going over the wall's blind spots in my head, one more thing this week meant to unsettle me before I'd caught my breath from the first. Then headlights swept across the gravel outside, early sun barely gray at the horizon behind them.

A car I didn't recognize turned into the drive.

No one was expected this early, except her.

I watched the headlights slow, watched them come to rest in front of the house, and felt something settle low and cold in my chest that had nothing to do with the intruder or the wall or the eight years I'd spent trying not to feel much of anything at all.

She was early. I didn't know one other thing about her yet, and already I didn't like it.