Married Till Death

PROLOGUE

vera

The house was full of piano music and the heavy drive of rain on the windows. The old man kept his balcony door unlocked.

The poor fool.

No sign of anyone watching. The house was hidden away from its neighbors, tall cypress trees keeping watch. I checked either direction before I unlatched the door and stepped inside.

Quietly. I crept over soft carpet. The sound of the piano was leading me right to him. I brushed my fingers over the cold steel of my handgun, silencer already fitted on.

Petrov was one of only a few obstacles left between us and the Horizon transit plant.

He’d been working with us for years now, always trying to cheat us, always hard-nosed.

A moneyed old womanizer who lived a lavish life of excess, he’d finally crossed the line when he made a backdoor deal and got in between us and the harbor freight deals.

Ready for us to pay out the nose to get them back.

What he didn’t know, of course, was that his deal would fall through if he died before the deed could actually be transferred. His friends in hell would be waiting for him with open arms.

I snuck to the ground floor and pressed up against the wall next to the conservatory door. The grand piano inside was old, a little tinny on the high end, and the low notes had a deep, soft resonance as he played. Dvorak’s piano quintet, opus 81. So he had some taste.

And he had some sense, too. The piano music was to cover up the other noise.

Not enough, though—pressed up against the wall, I could hear them.

Three other people. Bodyguards. Trained.

They shifted slightly, but not a step forward or back, rigid.

Two on the right, one on the left. A whispered comment from one of them to another, in Russian, asking if there was any update from another person on their team.

Russian implied these were handpicked loyalists, not bargain-store bodyguards. Long-time protection who had been working together for years. And that meant blind spots.

I planted a small charge on the wall, setting a timer, and I dusted off my suit before I opened the door and stepped into the conservatory.

Three guns pointed at me the second I opened the door. Across the room, sitting at the piano, Petrov let the notes trickle out as he stopped playing.

“So,” he said. “The Blackbirds send their regards. Have a seat, Vera.”

I smiled at him. “You cheated us, Petrov, old friend,” I said. “Do you know what happens to people who betray the Blackbirds?”

“This is business.”

“This is blood.”

“All business is blood, Vera.” He played the A Minor chord the song had just been rolling in. “And now that you’ve come here, I wanted to make you a deal. Your business… or your blood?”

“I don’t make deals, Petrov. I enforce them.”

He smiled darkly. “Then you have an answer.”

“I have four answers. And an extra two in the chamber just in case any of you are still moving after the first.” I fingered the trigger, gun still pointed at the floor, and I heard the cocking of three guns pointed at me. “Time’s counting down, Petrov,” I said. “Make your decision. Five…”

I timed it perfectly, because I timed it wrong. I’d just hit three when the charge went, a deafening bang from the next room, and the bodyguards flinched, one split second where their attention all went to the side of the room.

One split second. Three pulls of the trigger.

One of them managed to fire a shot at least, the bullet striking off the wall and cracking the wood of a perfectly good cello, but the other two didn’t even make it that far.

All three dropped hard, blood spreading across the conservatory floor, their guns clattering on the wood, and I lowered my handgun to half position, striding across the room towards Petrov.

He stood up, terror in his eyes. A scared, weak old man with nothing.

He reached to the side, and I squeezed out another shot, hitting the gun at the side of the piano and sending it across the floor away from the old man.

I kept the gun trained on him as I spoke.

“Sit down, Petrov. I was enjoying the music.”

“Wait. We don’t have to do this. Let’s… let’s talk business. You want the harbor deals? I can still walk them back. I’ll give them to you. All of them! No cost. No questions asked. I’ve fronted all the labor for you. Merona’s yours, the whole region. Just say the word.”

“You’re a fast talker. I see it’s gotten you far. You make promises you can’t keep, and once you’re caught out in a lie, you follow it up with the next.” I gestured with the gun. “Sit back down. I hate to leave a song unfinished.”

“I’ll do anything. I’ll give the Blackbirds everything. And I’ll leave Merona. I’ll go back to Moscow.”

“A trained attack dog, whimpering with its tail between its legs. Look at yourself, Petrov. At least die with dignity.”

The poor fool made the wrong choice. He lunged for me, reaching for the gun, and I had to put him out of his misery.

A single squeeze of the trigger, and his jaw shattered from the force of the bullet, a spatter of blood and brain matter through the back of his skull.

The impact force pitched his momentum back, and he slammed back against the edge of the piano, his head jerking back so hard I heard the crack of his neck breaking too, and he dropped onto the wood floor, his blood joining that of his bodyguards.

I put the gun away, checking my tail for any pursuers. Nothing. He really did trust these men in here with his life. And he saw how that ended up for him.

He probably had others in the perimeter. They’d be concerned if they heard the music stop.

Besides. I hated to leave a song unfinished. I could still see my father’s face, contorted with anger as I sat at the piano, just a little girl trying to make her daddy proud.

Again, he’d say.

Again, and again, and again. First about the piano. Then about the money. Then about the murders.

Until I’d had to shoot him. Again. And again, and again, and again.

I sat at the piano, and I played the rest of the song.

It really was a beautiful piece.

Glenn was a crooked-nosed man with one blind eye that had a ghostly pale iris, and it focused on me while I dropped Petrov’s signet ring on the desk.

“I trust you didn’t make too much of a scene,” he said, his voice low and rough.

The office was dark, lit only by candlelight—Glenn didn’t trust electronics, not even a light bulb, in his office.

The tall, arched window at the back looked out over the gardens, dark in the cloudy night and drenched in the rainfall, and Glenn was flanked by two of his attendants when I entered, and then in eerie silence, his right-hand man, Quayle, who never spoke. Only killed.

Normally, anyone who walked into Glenn’s office without being specially invited didn’t last long before Quayle put them in a body bag. But Glenn couldn’t risk losing me.

“In and out in under fifteen minutes. His bodyguards were dealt with. All shot to death, all with guns out. Anyone looking at the scene will think it was a firefight among them. And Petrov won’t cause us a problem again.” I gestured to the signet. “Ever.”

He nodded, sliding the signet to the side. One of the attendants, the fool, misinterpreted the gesture and went to take it, and Glenn slapped his hand away, turning on him in an instant with a handgun pressed into the attendant’s chest. The attendant went deathly white as Glenn roared in anger.

“You don’t touch anything in my office without the signal. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“I—I’m sorry, Sir—”

“Give me one good reason not to pull this trigger right now and get one of any number of people to replace you.”

He struggled to swallow. “I—it won’t happen again, Sir. I swear.”

“Easy, Glenn,” I said coolly. “We’ve gone through enough bullets today.”

Glenn looked at me. The room held its breath.

Finally, he put the gun away with one last foul look at the attendant.

“You’re lucky I’m in a good mood today,” he said.

“The next time you touch something without being asked to will be your last. The Blackbirds don’t tolerate failure.

Leave. Both of you,” he said, gesturing to the other attendant too, and they left the room swiftly.

“You too, Quayle,” he said, nodding to the man with the slick black hair and hollow gaze at the side of the room, and with his coat snapping around his knees, Quayle left the room.

With just the two of us, Glenn slid me a folder.

“The Horizon project is nearly ready,” he said. “With Petrov out of the picture, there’s just one thing left.”

“The South Yard.” I took the folder, opening it to a dossier.

A woman, brown hair and eyes full of laughter, together with two people who looked like younger siblings, a brother and a sister who might have both been college-aged, the sister in a wheelchair.

Glenn spoke the words that were next to her picture on the dossier.

“Elaine Whitner. Inheritor to the South Yard. She doesn’t understand its strategic importance.

To her, it’s just a tract of land in the industrial zone.

To us, it’s the key to controlling the entire arms industry.

You’re going to leverage that informational asymmetry…

and you’re going to make her hand it over to us. ”

“I killed a man an hour ago, Glenn. I don’t get a little bit of time to relax?”

“Once this is done, you’ll have anything you want to.” He leaned over the desk, narrowing his eyes. “Remember why we’re doing this, Vera.”

“I know.” I looked past him, out the arched window, at the rain streaking on the glass. “I made a promise.”

I knew what happened to people who betrayed the Blackbirds. You didn’t betray family.

I had my misgivings about the project. But the Blackbirds were my family. The only family I had, anyway. Deeply flawed, and deeply poisonous, but wasn’t every family?

“The inheritance contract says it can’t be sold for seven years,” Glenn said. “You’ll have to find a way for her to agree it will be left to us after her death.”

“And then make it look like an accident.”

“You’ve never failed before, Vera.”

That wasn’t true. If I hadn’t failed so many times, things would have been different. I closed my eyes, and I saw his face again, half-shadowed in the dim light through the curtains, his hand curled into a fist.

Again, he said.

Again, I thought.