Ruthless King (Savage Kings of New York #5)

Chapter 1

Day One…

Caracas smells like diesel, ripe mango, and the rot of too many bodies. Most of the people look like they don't belong here. Not me. I belong everywhere they tell me to go.

Grigori’s voice gnaws in my ear through the earpiece. "Report, Malishka."

"You're not gonna like this. Donna Margarita and Don Silvestre Valverde have been a couple for decades," I murmur, keeping my eyes on the villa below through the rifle scope.

Not too long ago, I watched Donna Margarita and an old friend of mine, Raffael DeSantis, board a plane at a private landing strip not far from the villa.

What was he doing there?

I tried to call him, but the call went to voicemail, and Raf didn't even reach for his phone, which in our line of business can be deadly. Interesting.

"Why would that bother me?" My brother drawls.

"Because he's the father of her three daughters," I fill him in, watching the older Valverde getting it on with the two whores he brought with him a couple of days ago. I shake my head. It doesn't look like he's too upset about Donna Margarita's departure.

"Blyad—Fuck." Grigori curses. Yeah, that.

I can almost see him pinch the bridge of his nose in Moscow or Miami or New York or wherever he is pretending not to be.

"She isn’t the problem." I shift slightly to get out of the way of a crawling scorpion coming too close to comfort. "The problem is her children."

"Agreed," Grigori hisses. "She had three heirs after her husband died, and nobody asked questions?"

"Officially two," I correct him, "she’s always insisted Isabella is the daughter of her late husband." A daughter she recently married to the new Don of La Famiglia, Edoardo Zanello. If it turns out Isabella doesn’t have the bloodline he married her for… well, shit rolls downhill.

"Don't forget who she is; she’s Donna Margarita," I push the reluctant respect I feel for her to the side. "People like to live."

Donna Margarita is also known as the Medici Black Widow of La Famiglia; whoever doesn’t fit into her plans… disappears or changes their mind pretty quickly.

I move the rifle and the scope with it; I'm not in the mood to watch a threesome.

Below the porn show is the office of the new Don of the Valverde empire; the window is open, giving me a view of Silvestre's son.

Aurelio. His fingers are flying over the keyboard while he's speaking in rapid Spanish.

Probably on speaker phone. I have him right in my crosshairs.

Looks like the Venezuelans aren't taking security very seriously.

Not that I'm a threat. Not today. Nobody told me to kill him.

"She's ruthless," he spits, going back to Donna Margarita, but I hear the same reluctant respect that lives in me. "This makes La Famiglia anything but stable. And I’m supposed to send money to Antonio DeLuna while one of the matriarchs brings bastards to the altar?"

I suppress a chuckle. Toni, Antonio DeLuna, is my brother's friend. The only friend he has. He can pretend this is about business all he wants. I know he cares about what happens in La Famiglia beyond the business deal he has going.

"Your call," I tell him, once again happy that I'm not the Pakhan. I don't need the kind of headaches my brother deals with on a regular basis. My world is easy: he points, and I kill.

"The Venezuelans want New York—" an eagle screams high up in the sky, I look up to map its flight, a little jealous of the freedom, "—they've wanted it for years. And now they have leverage over La Famiglia without New York ever knowing."

"Blyad," Grigori repeats.

In the charged silence that follows, I try to make sense of what I've learned. My brother sent me to Venezuela initially because something didn’t add up after the death of La Famiglia’s bookkeeper.

Not the death itself, but the silence afterward.

Edoardo Zanello did nothing. No retaliation.

No escalation. An absence loud enough to raise alarms. That kind of restraint only happens when someone is protecting something—or someone.

Add to that the sudden increase in chatter about old ghosts—names that should’ve stayed buried, like Viktor Voronin—the Pakhan before our father—and money trails quietly leading south, and it was enough to warrant my presence in Venezuela.

Grigori doesn’t chase rumors. He verifies them.

And then there’s Toni.

Edoardo tried to pin the fallout of his accountant’s death on him, nearly getting him killed in the process. Whatever game Edoardo thought he was playing, that move alone would have earned my brother’s attention. Grigori doesn’t forgive threats against people he considers his own.

That list is mercifully short.

Three names.

His wife.

Me.

Toni.

Further down, a woman sweeps, drawing my attention back to the present. The guard at her shoulder is carrying an Israeli carbine, making me nostalgic for the last time I shot one. Those babies are awesome.

"How?" Grigori asks, calmer now, calculating, returning to Donna Margarita. "How did nobody question the parentage when she wasn't even married?"

"Because every man in that family owes her in one way or another.

Because she turns enemies into donors. Because they were too busy counting their money to count the months.

" I edge farther into the shadows as a third guard lights a cigarette and laughs at nothing.

"And because when a woman like Margarita says the baby is holy, no one wants to be the heretic. "

He grunts his approval. "You admire her."

"I admire results."

"You admire what she did as a woman."

"I admire that she did it as herself." I let the next line out soft, the way I never do. I can admire a woman with ambition—a woman who forged her way into a man's world.

When I was ten, my father told me my only assets were between my legs and my name as a Bratva princess. I asked him, What if I prove you wrong? He laughed and said, Then we’ll see.

So I entered the training barracks with the other ten-year-olds: orphans, sons of our soldiers, or sons whose mothers prayed would do them proud. My father gave me a week to throw in the towel, but Grigori knew better.

At eighteen, I put a bullet through Sergei Baranov’s eye in church while he was kissing icons. He was my father's enforcer. A position I deserved. After that, my father stopped laughing, and I became the new enforcer like I should have been two years earlier.

Father is dead now, and Grigori is the new Pakhan. I'm no longer the enforcer; I'm Grigori's secret weapon. One he sends out on more… delicate missions. Like this. Toni can't know that Grigori is working behind his back, even though it's in his best interest.

Suddenly, I catch a name through my long-range directional mic, which is pointed toward Aurelio's office just like my scope. Nicolas Conti.

The name sounds familiar. "Nicolas Conti?" I ask my brother, "The name mean anything to you?"

"Nico Conti, yeah, why?"

"Aurelio just mentioned him."

I can feel my brother's tension through the phone, "What's he saying?"

"I don't speak Spanish," I remind him. I speak several Eastern European languages, Italian, French, and English, but not Spanish.

"You're taping it, right?" Grigori knows I am. "Get it translated. Nico is one of Gustave Conti’s sons and has been presumed dead for three years. If the Venezuelans killed him…"

He doesn’t have to finish. The Contis are one of the five major crime families in New York. The Italians would pay a lot for that information.

"Copy."

I kill the mic and phone call. I wait a few more minutes until I'm sure Aurelio is done with his phone call and not about to take another one, before I break my little camp.

It's been three days since I put it up. Glad to finally be getting off this mountain.

I don't mind roughing it, but I'm still a girl who likes a hot shower now and then.

My ATV is where I left it, camouflaged with a tarp and brush.

I make sure there is still enough gas in it, and ten miles later, I'm back where I stored the Jeep.

I torch the ATV and take the Jeep back into Caracas, where my first visit is to Yorvi, one of the few men I mostly trust in this town.

I don't fully trust anybody, but Yorvi and I have been working together now and then for years, and he's the type of guy who won't bite the hand that feeds him.

He knows that I won't let him starve, but he also realizes that I'll kill him myself if he gets any ideas.

In front of his tourist trap shop sits a girl in a pink shirt selling pirated movies off a blanket; she doesn’t look at me twice.

I've put on my black wig, sunglasses, and an oversized dress that makes me look a hundred pounds heavier. I notice one of Valverde’s lookouts at the corner, a teenage boy with a chipped tooth.

He barely spares me a glance. I shoulder past two tourists and keep moving inside.

The kid behind the counter looks up.

"Tell Yorvi I want him in my room when he comes back."

"Yes, Signorita," the kid accepts the ten-dollar note I hand him, and I walk out, making straight for my hotel and a hot shower.

The Cessna hums beneath me like a living thing, the propeller’s drone sounding like an asthmatic cough, but she’s in the air, and that’s all I need.

The sky over Tamaulipas is white-hot, too clean, too bright, too much of everything.

Sweat trickles down my spine, gluing the faux leather seat to my back.

She’s probably not the safest plane in the world, but it’s not like I had many options.

If I had options, I'd be sipping Vodka Paloma on a beach somewhere, not flying this piece of shit scrap metal.

Then again, getting her in the air had been a nice challenge.

I pride myself on being able to ride, drive, fly, and sail anything that brings me from point A to point B.

It's just a little side hobby of mine that has come in handy on occasion.

How did I end up in Mexican airspace?