16. Finn
FINN
Aiden eyes up me and then Connor when he walks into his boardroom and closes the door behind him. He’s thirty minutes late. His PA, Brenda, said that he’d been held up when we arrived and told us to help ourselves to coffee and water while we waited.
Two cups of coffee later, and neither of us has spoken, and the air in the room could be cut with a carving knife.
Now, from the frown lines creasing Aiden’s forehead, I’m guessing either his previous meeting didn’t go well, or he deliberately kept us waiting in the hopes that we’d resolve our disagreement.
“I’ve asked Brenda to acquire a couple of antique pistols and clear us a spot outside Cloud Gate at dawn tomorrow.” Aiden fills a cup with black coffee and carries it to his seat at the head of the table. “We’ll settle this the old-fashioned way.”
Aye, option two.
“You know, duel at dawn,” he continues. “Of course, you’ll have to forfeit seconds unless you want to drag a couple of unsuspecting witnesses in off the street while they’re posing with the Bean.”
“Funny.” Connor isn’t smiling though. “Or you could just give my brother a pistol and ask him to put a hole in my other hand.” Connor waves his left hand in the air.
His right hand is covered by a splint. The surgeons fused the tendons together after Tamara shot him and warned him that the recovery period could take up to twelve weeks, but there’s no guarantee that he will get the full use of his hand back when it heals.
Or if he does, it will be a long slow process.
“It can be arranged,” I say.
I don’t like fighting with my brother, but I’m standing by Tamara on this one.
She gave him the opportunity to let her pass.
As did I. I asked him to trust me, and he didn’t, and it’s that lack of trust that is making me stand my ground.
We’ve been in this together since I was old enough to leave home without the authorities coming looking for me, and I took Connor with me because there was no way our pa deserved any more of our time or energy.
The first time I ask for anything in return, and he threatens to kill the woman I love.
“You know what my pa would do,” Aiden says. “He’d give you both a pair of boxing gloves and stick you in a locked room until one of you submits.”
“Fine by me.” I shrug and drain the dregs of coffee in my cup.
“Or you could hand him a golf club,” Connor suggests, “and ask him to play nine holes with me.”
I smile. “I’m up for that too.”
“Of course you are. If all else fails, you can always pick it up and beat me with it.”
“Jesus, fuck!” I crack my knuckles, a gesture that doesn’t go unnoticed by Aiden.
“You were more of a fucking adult when I snuck you out of our house and told you to never look back. At least then you weren’t wearing those privileged fucking blinkers that you picked up from Walmart with your first paycheck. ”
“And you were still playing fucking God even then.”
Aiden watches the insults hurling back and forth like he’s in the audience at Wimbledon’s Center Court, then slams his hand on the table making the cups and glasses rattle.
“Tell me what happened.” He raises his hand, palm facing outward, at Connor and addresses me.
“I already told you.”
Connor and I agreed on a story before I tracked Tamara to the dock and took her home on the back of my motorcycle.
I half-expected him to spill his version of events to Aiden when he came out of surgery, but he didn’t.
Because he knows that the longer we persist with the lie, the harder Aiden will come down on me when the truth comes out.
But I refuse to tell Aiden what really happened until I have Tamara’s consent and I know that it won’t cause trouble between her and her Pakhan. And I haven’t seen her since she spent the night at my apartment almost three weeks ago.
I haven’t seen her at the docks. There’s been no communication between Aiden and the Ivanovs since the meeting that got cut short, or at least none that he has shared with us, and there’s been no sighting of Tamara’s twin sister or the blonde woman that she was so determined to track down.
It’s almost as if I imagined her into existence in some alternate reality, and now I’m back in the real world, with an ache in my chest and vivid dreams that wake me up with a raging hard-on every morning.
“We got too close to the Russians quayside. One snuck up on us from behind and got a lucky hit before I took a couple of them down.”
Aiden sits back in his seat and watches me coolly, his expression completely neutral. Then, “Aye, that’s what I thought you said. So, why is it that I’m hearing stories about a Russian woman turning psycho on the Bratva assholes?”
Fuck! When the truth grew legs and walked away for the first few days, I convinced myself that the Russians would never admit to being slaughtered by a woman.
Especially not a woman who barely stands five feet tall in her black Doc Martens and looks as if she could be blown over by a strong gust of wind.
Guess I was wrong.
They’re putting the story out there because they’re looking for revenge.
“There have been sightings of a Russian woman fighting with the traffickers. She hasn’t been seen since that night, so maybe they got what they wanted and shut her up.”
Aiden stands up, walks to the drinks cabinet in the corner of the room, and half-fills a glass tumbler with whiskey. When he resumes his seat, his eyes drift lazily between me and my brother as if he’s choosing the right moment to drop the bombshell.
“Would this be the same Russian woman who accompanied Leonid Ivanov to a casino resort in Joliet that night?” He studies the amber liquid in his glass.
“How long do you think it would take to get from Joliet, Illinois to the Port of Chicago? Approximately. I don’t expect you to use Google Maps to get the answer. ”
“An hour?” I shrug. “Depending on traffic.”
Connor remains silent.
I don’t know where he’s going with this, but he learned from a master of misdirection—his pa could’ve been a thriller writer—and his timing is always impeccable. So, I sense that he isn’t ready to play his ace card yet.
Sure enough, he raises his glass to his lips and downs his drink in one mouthful, releasing a satisfied sigh as it goes down. “It’s doable then. What do you think, Connor?”
My brother avoids eye contact with me, but I see the tic on the side of his jaw and know that he’s battling between choosing his loyalty to me over his allegiance to the Kavanagh boss. “Outside of rush hour,” he says finally.
Aiden’s expression doesn’t falter. “Leonid Ivanov must be biding his time then.”
Connor and I both wait for him to elaborate.
“I heard that his enforcers are like sisters to him. If the Petrovs have taken one down, I’m surprised the shit hasn’t hit the fan at full speed and spread that muck all over the fucking city.”
My pulse skitters. What does he know? Did the Petrovs follow Tamara to my apartment and get to her the following morning?
She told me not to follow her when she got dressed and walked away from me before the sun had even made an appearance.
She said that she would come to me, and I respected her wishes because of course I fucking did.
Now, I wonder if she has been dead the whole time I’ve been waiting for her to knock on my door, and it’s hard to breathe with my heart banging a gong inside my chest.
“Where did you hear that?” I ask.
“I have eyes and ears everywhere.” His eyes bore into mine. “I hope it wasn’t the same enforcer who attended the meeting at the golf resort. She was—”
I don’t wait to hear the rest. I’m out of my seat and yanking open the door, dizziness crashing through me in waves as I hear Connor mutter, “Must be something he ate.”
There are cameras installed around the women’s refuge, but gaining entry at the back of the building is as easy as knocking on the door and introducing myself.
The rear door opens onto a vegetable garden where two women are pulling weeds and picking ripe squash. They work in comfortable silence with their heads bowed, and don’t look around before heading back inside.
The guilt I feel doesn’t come anywhere close to overriding the fear that something bad has happened to Tamara.
Maybe I’m being irrational, I don’t know; I’ve never been in love before.
But short of gatecrashing Leonid Ivanov’s office at the golf resort and risking him blowing my brains out before answering my questions, this seemed like my best option in the heat of the moment.
Once inside, I question my sanity.
The kitchen is homely, the pine cabinets neat and clean, and the green Aga gleaming.
The pots and pans hanging from a ceiling rack were obviously chosen for their durability rather than glamor.
A woman is rinsing dishes at the sink before slotting them inside a dishwasher, singing along to a song I don’t recognize playing from an old-fashioned radio, a picture of calm and secure domesticity, something that she might never have experienced before in her life.
And I’m about to blow it to smithereens.
Before I can reverse out of the back door and wait for Gianna or Cartier to appear, she must sense my presence. Her shoulders stiffen, her hand freezes midway between the sink and the dishwasher, and she turns around slowly, her mouth a round O of shock and panic.
“I won’t hurt you.” That’s what I lead with? Seriously? Even my hands raised in a gesture of peace can’t soften the delivery, so I plough on. “I’m only here to speak to Gianna Ivanov, that’s all, then I’ll be on my way.”
I know what she’s thinking when her eyes narrow.
Why didn’t you use the front door, asshole?
But explaining that I’m an enforcer for an Irish mafia mob, and the women who run this refuge are married to members of the Russian bratva might not be what she wants to hear.
But I’ll give her credit for not screaming.
Yet.