Chapter 28
Varvara
“That bitch,” I hiss under my breath as Lev gives me a curious stare. “What is she doing here?”
“Var?” Lev’s voice cuts through my internal rage that my ex-best-friend-slash-step-mum is inside this club, her long brown hair swinging from a high ponytail as she weaves through the crowd and stops at a man who looks like he chewed on a wasp and was then surprised that it stung him.
“Noooo,” I murmur, my gaze going to Lev’s. “No.”
He grips my upper arm tightly. “No, what, Varvara? What is going on?”
“Marika,” I spit out. “She is down there with Popov!”
His eyes widen fractionally for a brief second, and I think it’s the only time in his life he has been stunned by a piece of news. “Marika as in your dad’s wife?”
“The one and only.” My lip curls in disgust.
He frowns and looks back at the group congregating by the bar. “She’s the handler,” he says slowly. “I saw her on the cams. She looks like you.”
“Pah. She wishes, the suka! She is an ugly bitch.” I shoot him a glare that is just daring him to refute it.
He doesn’t.
Smart man.
“Okay. This has shifted the board slightly,” he says, pulling me back from the railing and into the cover of darkness. “Marika is working with Nikolai Popov to get inside the Voronov network. What are the fucking odds?”
“What are the odds? What are the fucking odds? This is now the third time I’m caught up in your shit!”
He ignores my impending hysteria and focuses on the group we can just see from a place in the darkened corner. “Your stepmother has just turned up in my kill zone. This complicates things.”
“No, it doesn’t. Shoot her.” I cross my arms defiantly.
He blinks once and shakes his head in disbelief rather than denying me. “It has merit, but we need to think this through.”
“She shot at me,” I point out. “What more do you need to know? She knew it was me. Of course she did, and she shot at me to get that drive back.”
“True. Do you think your dad is involved?”
That stops my ranting dead in its tracks. “I don’t know,” I say slowly. “I’d like to think he isn’t, but I also wanted to think he wouldn’t marry my best friend three months after my mother died. I don’t know him at all.”
“He is an accountant.”
“So?”
“So that’s a very nice job for a man willing to compromise his morals.”
“Right,” I mutter. “You think he’s working for Popov as well?”
He narrows his eyes and moves forward a step. I follow him, looking where he is and freeze.
“That your dad?” he asks blandly.
My mouth drops open as a man steps up next to Popov and glances around, hand in his pocket as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. “Yes.”
Popov nods to him, stepping back slightly.
“Then I would say that Popov works for your dad.”
“Jesus,” I snap. “Is everyone involved in the Bratva except for me?”
Lev gives me a vicious glare and claps his hand over my mouth, “Careful, Var. Not everyone in here is Bratva.”
“You sure about that?” I mumble, peeling his palm away from my mouth.
“Sure enough,” he says.
Inhaling sharply, I let it out slowly. “This is insane.”
“It’s rather unusual,” he admits, still staring at the group.
“I’m going to kill him. And her.”
“Don’t do anything rash.”
“Rash? They are involved in a plot that nearly got me killed.”
“I’m aware. I was there, remember?”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
He turns to me. “What do you want me to do? Start shooting and ask questions later?”
“Isn’t that what you’d normally do?”
He makes a face. “Okay, that’s fair. But this is your dad. From what I’m seeing and what I know about dynamics, your dad isn’t some accountant with dodgy values. He’s a boss, a pakhan.”
I stare at him. “No.”
His eyes don’t soften. “Yes.”
My laugh comes out wrong. Thin. Unsteady. “My father does spreadsheets. He complains about parking. He buys terrible red wine and thinks coriander is adventurous. He is not some underworld king.”
“Varvara.” Lev steps closer, lowering his voice. “Look at the room.”
I do. Really look.
Men shift when my father shifts. Popov doesn’t command the space. He defers to it. My father barely moves, yet everyone around him adjusts. Marika stands half a step behind him, chin high, smug as ever, but even she keeps checking his face before she speaks.
Ice slides down my spine.
“Oh, my God. He looks like Baron.”
Lev watches me, alert and still. “You see it.”
“I see…” I swallow hard. “I see that I don’t know a single fucking thing about my own life.”
Below us, my father says something to Popov.
Popov bobs his head like some Victorian servant.
My stomach turns. “When did this happen? He wasn’t always like this.
” I frown fiercely, trying to remember him.
It’s been four years since I cut off all contact with him.
Surely this hasn’t all happened in four years?
“I did a dive on your life before the morning in the park. This never came up. Admittedly, it wasn’t a dive on your dad, but nothing pinged. At all.”
“What does that mean?” I whisper.
“It means he is very good at keeping his legit life front and centre. Whatever this is, he hides it well.”
“Wonderful. And she’s part of it. How smug is she? She must laugh at me behind my back all the fucking time! Thinking I’m so na?ve and completely blind! God, I hate her!”
“Hey,” Lev says, taking my hand. “You’re spiralling.”
“I’m not spiralling. I’m raging. Big difference.”
Lev studies my face for a beat, then squeezes my hand hard enough to ground me. “Good. Rage is useful. Panic isn’t.”
“I’m not panicking.”
“You’re about three seconds from marching downstairs and glassing your stepmother.”
I glance towards the bar again. “Don’t tempt me.”
He breathes in through his nose and back out the same way.
Then he turns to me. “Right. This is the play. This was about Popov, not your dad and unfortunately not Marika. We deal with Popov and go back to Baron about your dad and Marika’s involvement.
We aren’t shooting him or Marika tonight,” he says before I can suggest it.
“Spoilsport,” I mutter.
He smiles, slow, sexy, and it makes my still sensitive clit twitch. “This is going to be a clean shot, and then things will get ugly. Be ready to move when I move.”
“Ugly, how?” I ask as Lev strides up to the railing, hand inside his jacket.
I move next to him as he pulls out a gun. My breath catches as he aims it and fires.
I follow the trajectory and see Popov’s head explode as the bullet crashes into the middle of his forehead. “Fuck!”
Music keeps pounding for half a second after the shot, like the club itself hasn’t caught up yet.
Then, things get ugly.
Screaming tears through the room.
People scatter. Glass smashes. Someone falls into a table and drags two others down with him. Popov’s body drops out of sight behind the crowd, and blood sprays the men nearest him. My father doesn’t duck. He turns.
Staring straight up to the mezzanine.
My heart slams so hard it hurts.
“He knows we’re here,” I say.
“No shit.” Lev grabs my hand and yanks me backwards just as gunfire erupts from below.
The railing beside us explodes in a shower of glass and metal.
I cry out and stumble after him as he drags me into the corridor behind the private booths.
Men are shouting downstairs. More shots crack through the bass and the screaming.
Security floods the floor from somewhere behind the bar, presumably on our side, seeing as this is a Voronov club.
Some people aren’t freaking out; they’re getting their shots in a free-for-all that scares the crap out of me.
I’m starting to think everyone in London belongs to some violent little club I never got invited to.
“Move,” Lev snaps.
“I am moving.”
“Faster.”
He fires twice down the corridor without slowing.
I don’t look to see who he hit. I don’t want to know.
My pulse is in my throat, my ears, my fingertips.
We hit the stairs at the back and thunder down them.
The club is a maze now. Bodies shove past us.
A woman in sequins crashes into me, sobbing, and Lev tears her off me so hard she spins into the wall and drops to the floor.
Guilt flashes, then dies. If she stays on the floor, she lives.
Another volley rips through the club. Plaster bursts from the wall by my head. I duck on instinct, my hand clamped in Lev’s while he hauls me through a service door and into a narrow passage.
“Where are we going?” I shout.
“Out.”
Helpful.
A man barrels through the far end of the passage with a gun in his hand. Lev shoves me behind him and fires once. The man drops instantly, skidding on the black-and-white tile. I stare at the body for half a second too long.
“Eyes on me, Var.”
I drag my gaze up. Lev’s face is cold, focused, terrifyingly calm.
We push through the kitchens. One of the chefs has a knife in his hand and looks ready to stab anyone who comes near him. Lev barks something in Russian, and the man lowers it at once.
That should probably bother me more than it does.
We cut through swinging doors into an alley behind the club.
“My father—”
“Gets dealt with later.”
“I need to know if he saw me,” I finish.
“He saw us.”
“No. He saw me.”
Lev swears under his breath. “This is not the time.”
The club door behind us bursts open, and three men pour into the alley. Lev’s men open fire before I even process the movement. The alley lights up with muzzle flashes and thunder. I drop into a crouch, my hands over my ears.
I choke back a scream. The rage has dissipated, and now my hands are shaking.
Not now. Not fucking now.
“Up and moving,” Lev’s calm, controlled voice clips through the haze. “Now, Var.”
There is something about it that makes me obey.
I get to my feet so fast my knees nearly buckle. Lev catches my elbow and drags me down the alley and towards the Ferrari parked outside the club.
Lev shoves me at the passenger side. He rips the door open and all but throws me inside.
“Seatbelt.”
My fingers fumble. I’m shaking too hard. He swears, reaches across me and yanks it into place himself before slamming the door. Gunfire cracks behind us. He slides over the bonnet and gets in, then the engine roars to life.
We shoot away from the kerb so hard my head knocks the seat.
I twist in panic and look back through the rear window. Men spill out of the club. Some are ours. Some clearly aren’t. I don’t know how I know. I just do. It’s in the way they move, in who they’re shooting at, in the fact that nobody looks confused anymore.
London is full of secrets.
And apparently, my father is one of the biggest ones.
“Don’t look back,” Lev says.
“Too late for that,” I mutter, but stare out of the windscreen, wondering where it all went wrong.