Chapter 9 Arkady #2
“Desperate men say stupid things. No way was he admitting he was after you. He shot at your car in the middle of London, where guns are heavily restricted, especially handguns. He wasn’t doing that for me.”
I glance at Vik. He grimaces at me, but he doesn’t look away. He is processing her words from a distance, and he can see she might have a point.
“Okay, genius,” I say, resuming eating, slowly as I think. “What has any of this got to do with who killed my father and why?”
She deflates for a second. “That I don’t know.
I’m not a fucking mastermind. I’m just telling you the thoughts that have been bouncing around my head while you locked me up.
You take it from here. I’m so done with it.
” She picks up her fork and starts shovelling food into her mouth at such a rapid rate that I fear she is going to end up with indigestion.
But she’s given me something. A crack in the frame I’ve been staring at since last night. I don’t like it. I don’t like that I missed it, and I especially don’t like that a twenty-eight-year-old party girl spotted a possibility that neither I, Vik, nor Kosta considered.
I set my fork down and push the plate away.
My appetite has fucked off, replaced by the kind of cold focus that precedes very bad decisions for other people.
If she’s right—and every instinct I have is screaming that she might be—then the man Kosta put in the ground today was a pawn, not a player.
Disposable. Sent to provoke, not to succeed.
The syringes, the gun, the theatrical chase through an alley—it was loud.
Sloppy. Designed to pull my attention in one direction while the real play happened somewhere else.
But the times don’t add up. Dad was shot hours later. So what was the distraction? What was the point of all this?
“They meant to kill you, not him. He was collateral damage. Possibly whoever in your family wanted to be pakhan and he refused to give it to them, so they shot him. I saved you, arsehole,” she states and shoves a forkful of chicken into her mouth before she sits back, happy as Larry.
I could kill Larry. Whoever the fuck he is.
“Dima, take her back upstairs. Now,” I say, standing up so abruptly, the chair topples over.
“Hey, wait!” she says as Dima looms over her. “I just figured this shit out, and you’re banishing me again?”
Bunching my fists and placing them on the table, I lean forward, close enough that I can see the flecks of silver in her eyes.
“You figured out a theory. A theory that, if correct, means someone in my inner circle tried to have me removed from the board, and when they didn’t manage it, put a bullet in my father’s head.
Which means every second you sit here testing my patience is a second I’m not finding them.
So yes, I’m banishing you. Upstairs. Now. ”
She opens her mouth to argue, but something in my expression shuts it for her. She pushes back from the table, snatches her wine glass, and steps back, intending to take it with her.
“Fine,” she says, standing. “But when I’m right—and I am right—you owe me.”
“I don’t owe anyone anything.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Dima escorts her out, and I listen to her bare feet slapping against the marble until the sound fades. Then I turn to Vik.
“Pull everything we have on every person who had access to my father’s house in the last three weeks. Staff, family, associates. Anyone who had the alarm code or could have obtained it. Cross-reference with anyone who had contact with Carter’s dead-drop network.”
Vik’s expression doesn’t change, but I see the shift behind his eyes. He’s already running the list. “That’s a short list.”
“Good. Short lists are easier to bleed.”
“You want me to include Seva?”
The question hangs in the air like smoke. Vsevolod. My cousin. The man I just trusted with organising a meeting of every brigadier in the Saranov empire.
“Include everyone,” I say. “Blood doesn’t make you safe. It makes you closer to the knife.”
Vik nods and disappears. I stare at her plate, cleaned off entirely and growl. With a swipe of my fist, I send my half-full wine glass crashing off the table. It hits the silk wallpaper, and the glass shatters, leaving a blood-red stain.
I press both palms flat on the table and breathe. One. Two. Three. That’s all I get. That’s all I ever get. It’s the time Nik used to give me to go from pain to movement on his archaic training practices that date back to the fucking Soviet era.
Three seconds.
I straighten up and inhale deeply. Alina is right, and it burns worse than the vodka I want to pour down my throat until the image of my father’s open eyes stops flickering behind mine.
Someone wanted me dead. When that failed, they pivoted.
Took the crown off Nik’s head with a nine-millimetre round and handed it to me like a poisoned chalice.
But why? If the goal was to remove me, why elevate me?
Unless the elevation is the trap. Put me in the seat, wait for the chaos of transition, and strike again when I’m exposed.
A new pakhan is a vulnerable pakhan. Everyone knows that.
The old guard is circling, the brigadiers are testing, and whoever pulled that trigger is sitting somewhere in my organisation, waiting for me to make a mistake.
That means all bets are off. The usual channels are dead. Carter is cut off. Nothing gets out of this house unless I say. It means Alina is on an even stricter lockdown than before. She is going to hate me before this is over, but at least she will be alive.