Chapter 23 #2
I’d been forbidden from going back to my house. Not because it was an active crime scene any longer, but because the house still smelled like Lainey and reminded me of Selena. The majority of my daughter’s things were in her room including fifty unopened birthday presents.
A birthday that had been interrupted by violence.
A trip to paradise turning into a nightmare.
The memories were all there. Nice. Neat. Tidy. And my entire family had labeled me too distraught to return.
Maybe I was. I laughed softly as I brought the glass to my lips, trying to make sense of anything.
Vissarian sat down opposite me on the chair, his glare as harsh as everyone else’s had been since my return.
Which I barely remembered. If it hadn’t been for Bernie, fuck, I might have walked into the goddamn ocean.
He’d picked my ass up, made arrangements with the pilot to get our jet back, and had taken pictures of everything, even dusting for fingerprints so we wouldn’t need to get the police involved.
It wasn’t their fight.
Five days had passed without a single word. Not one. No one had any idea who’d kidnapped Lainey and my daughter.
There were no notes, no threats, and after carefully going over everything there was no forensic evidence.
Not a single fingerprint. Even the gun used to kill Tony had been his own.
He’d been hit on the head, his gun ripped away, and he’d been shot between the eyes.
Evidently they hadn’t expected Bernie to return, the only reason he was alive.
It pointed to trained assassins, but certainly nothing that would pinpoint the persons responsible.
When my brother opened his mouth to say something, I bristled and held up my hand.
“Don’t say it, Viss. Don’t you dare say that we’ll find them.
What if we don’t? We don’t know a goddamn thing about what happened. ”
“That’s not entirely true,” Mikhail interrupted.
“We know your instinct about something watching you was correct. We know from Bernie finding the open window that they managed to bypass the security, get into the house, spike the open bottle of wine, your vodka, and even the milk that Nina drank. A powerful sleeping agent, but not deadly. They reengaged the system and walked away waiting for the drug to take effect.”
I lifted my head, staring at him. I’d never seen him so pale or so distraught. The blatant act had highlighted yet another weakness on his watch.
He took my silence as an opportunity to continue. “We do know there was a flight that left St. Lucia at midnight.”
This I hadn’t heard. I jerked up, sloshing the drink and loathing myself for the personal weakness. That was the moment I vowed not to touch anther drop until my girls were returned.
My girls.
Fuck.
Fuck.
“Why the fuck am I just hearing this?” I barked out the question, taking long strides toward him.
Alexsey got in my way before I could do anything rash. “Back down, Sasha. Take a breath.”
“A breath. I’m supposed to take a breath when Lainey and my daughter are somewhere in this world.
God knows where. And with all the technology at our fingertips, the sources worldwide of people, and favors that we can call in from law enforcement agencies both here in the United States and throughout the world, we can’t find a single clue.
You bet I’m upset. I’m angry. I’m enraged that my wife’s murder was never solved.
Now we have unknown assailants who were in this city, our city, harassing me and everyone in this family to push our buttons.
They took a little girl and a woman who wanted nothing to do with this world as what, collateral?
A payment for something? An old vendetta?
What the hell is going on with the O’Shaughnessys?
What? Why don’t you have them locked up somewhere so we can interrogate them? Why?”
“Because we have no proof they’re involved.” Mikhail chose to answer that one of all the shit I tossed out.
I stared at him, finally looking away. “Where did the plane go when it left St. Lucia?”
“We don’t know,” Kazimir answered. “The plane was on route to New York then suddenly disappeared out of the sky.”
Now I burst into laughter. “Of course it did. Always one step ahead of us.” I grabbed my car keys from the table, heading toward the door. The last place I wanted to be was in Mikhail’s house.
It certainly didn’t feel like home.
“Where are you going, son?” my dad asked.
Stopping short, I knew better than to lash out. They weren’t to blame, although I’d had nagging thoughts for all five days since I’d returned.
My girls’ disappearance had everything to do with the past.
I turned sharply, staring at my dad. He’d aged so much since Selena’s death.
He’d taken her murder almost as hard as I had, although he’d done his best to remain stoic, the right-hand man of the Dmitriyev Bratva.
The man who’d escaped with his brother and their wives in tow, a couple of children tagging along to start a new life. A better life.
Only bloodshed and violence had followed us and why? Because that’s all my father and uncle had known.
Maybe we’d cleaned up our act, but deep down inside, we were still the same.
Monsters.
“Istoriya boli i skorbi—eto ne konets. Eto tol’ko nachalo. Rukoy krovi budut napisany novyye glavy.” When I repeated the exact same thing to my father, his eyes opened wide and for a split second, I could swear he was embarrassed or ashamed.
Or guilty.
“Isn’t that what you said to me all those years ago, Pops? The story of pain and sorrow isn’t the end. It’s just the beginning. There are additional chapters to be written by the hand of blood. Is that right? I am remembering your words correctly. Yes?”
What I found disturbing was that not only did my father remain silent, but so did my uncle, the man who’d spearheaded the move to America.
The man who’d taken control, beaten down the various enemies we’d had over the years, both men building a company from nothing.
Rags to riches. We’d gone from murder, drug running, extortion, and blackmail to highly respected members of society, wealthy beyond our means. And completely legit.
But maybe another Russian saying should be that you could take the gangster out of the man, but not the need for retaliation.
When the two men looked at each other, I broke out in a cold sweat. They knew something. I pulled out my phone, scrolling to the picture I’d taken of the emblem on the bastard Lainey should have beaten to death. “What is this?”
I shifted the screen back and forth between my father and uncle.
Neither one of them offered a single word. But dear God, I’d bet my life that there was recognition in their eyes.
“Come on. I know you’ve seen this before. From where? The crazy thing is that I have too. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out from where. When. How. But you know. Don’t you?”
“I don’t recognize it, son.”
My father had once told me and my brother than one of the greatest attributes was knowing when someone was telling a lie.
For the first time in my life, my father had lied to me.
Or maybe it wasn’t the first.
Maybe it was just one of a string of them.
“Then answer me this. Why does our uncle Yuri hate us so much? You told us very little months ago.”
Mikhail narrowed his eyes and I dared him with mine to intervene. We’d never gotten the answer. At least not one that had sat well with us.
We’d heard there’d been a falling out with the three brothers and that once they’d been close. We’d heard that Uncle Yuri, although I used that term loosely, had blamed them for something that had occurred long before I was born.
Maybe I hadn’t been listening clearly or paying enough attention because I was born in the United States and had shied away from the family business for as long as possible.
Although even that was a lie. I’d been a part of the troublemaking team as a teenager, using our status and dropping my father’s name like a get out of jail free card.
“Yuri blamed us for losing someone he cared about.” My father’s admittance didn’t hit me nearly as hard as it had Mikhail and Vissarian. I could tell by the looks on their faces they were surprised.
“What does that mean exactly?” Mikhail asked.
“He blamed us for the death of a woman he loved.”
Sighing, I could tell there was more to the story, but I wasn’t certain what if anything it had to do with my wife’s death or this incident.
“That was a long time ago, Sasha,” Uncle Boris said in such a way I knew he was attempting to shut down the conversation.
We weren’t getting anywhere just standing here speculating.
“I’m going to get them back. Whether with your help or without it.
I don’t plan on losing someone else I love because of dark secrets held within this family.
I love Lainey just like I loved Selena and she was taken from me with no answer as to why.
Including from my own family, two men I’ve looked up to my entire life.
Now, my little girl who never knew her mother and barely had a father decent enough to be called that is gone.
You know what’s worse than that? Just the other night that brave little girl felt close enough to a woman who’d convinced me through her love and her actions that I could shed my guilt and live again to call her Mommy.
Do you have any idea what that took for my little girl to feel as if her world wouldn’t be rocked again? ”
The silence in the room was now just unnerving as fuck.
“Do you? Mommy. She called Lainey Mommy. You should have seen how happy she was on that trip. Happy. I’ve never seen her smile like that in my life and why?
Because her father, her fucking useless broken-down father couldn’t protect her mother so she had a chance to get to know her.
History will not repeat itself. Not as long as I live. Do you hear me? Do you?”
I didn’t give them time to answer.
I was finished with playing this dirty, dangerous game.
The bastards responsible would have a come to Jesus experience that they’d never forget.
One they would remember as they rotted in the fires of hell.