Chapter Thirteen
Iwatched from beneath the cover of a coppice of pine and willow as they lowered my empty casket into the cold ground. There was just enough room between the crowd of people to make out the face of my most trusted men. Their heads were lowered respectfully as Father Michaels presented my pre-planned eulogy.
It was short and concise, and the priest was known for epigrammatic ripostes that kept the crowd from falling in too deep a melancholy. I never wanted people to cry at my funeral. Fake or not. Death was something to be celebrated and not mourned.
My gaze wandered, searching through the faces as they swept past me with an almost concerning amount of unawareness. They wouldn’t recognize me. Not with my disguise, but that didn’t make it any better. How easy it would be for someone to penetrate the unassuming crowd and open fire.
Even with the cemetery highly guarded, my gut churned. That could also be the gunshot wound that was still healing. One week was barely enough time to recover after having major surgery, but I was insistent. Maxim shifted in his spot just behind my wife, his head tilting slightly to the right as he tugged on his earlobe nonchalantly.
Everything was clear.
I took my place at the back of the receiving line, my black umbrella allowing for just enough coverage to keep me from looking suspicious as the rain dropped against it, the sound loud among the silent mourners. I kept my gaze from wandering too much and drawing suspicion. There were only a handful of people who knew I was still alive, and drawing attention to myself was something I didn’t need in case I was recognized.
The line trudged forward, and I took the time to simply look at her. My wife. The woman I had taken a bullet for. Technically. Her jaw was clenched, her emerald eyes hard as she clenched and unclenched her fists at her sides. A sign she was expecting something bad.
Vas hadn’t informed her of what was in store for her. Ava was no doubt under the impression she would be cast aside once the funeral ended. That wasn’t the case. She’d just inherited the largest, most powerful criminal organization on the West Coast. Soon she’d learn more about who I was. What I did.
That I wasn’t merely just the leader of the Bratva. I was also the founder and CEO of a multi-billion-dollar security company.
We’d discussed the company before, but in the short time we had been married, I never fully discussed with her just how far of a reach I had, both legally and criminally. The world’s largest target was now painted on Ava’s back. All because I needed to fake my death.
There was a threat out there worse than Christian, and it needed to be taken care of. Something I could only do if everyone believed me to be dead.
My wife was stunning in a pair of high-waisted black trousers that clung to her shapely legs. She’d tucked a cream silk blouse into the waistline and covered herself with a brass buttoned Armani blazer. I was slightly miffed that Vas hadn’t made her wear a thicker jacket. It wasn’t fucking summer out here.
Ava shifted slightly from side to side uncomfortably, her heels sinking into the wet earth beneath her feet. She’d left her hair down, the luxurious red curls framing her porcelain features that were highlighted by a minimal amount of makeup.
She didn’t paint herself up like most women her age, but she did try to appear stronger and more resilient than she felt. It was easy to spot in the way she held her shoulders erect, her spine stiff. Her emerald eyes were hard as she quietly greeted the men and women who came to pay their respects to the new Pakhan, no doubt believing the soft platitudes were meant for Vas.
Ava would soon come to realize what I left her.
What I would be back to claim.
Just as soon as I took care of my own problems. Starting with Kirill Kasyanov and that fucking bastard who called himself Jonathan Archer. He might have been an FBI agent, but everything from his name to his background was false. I knew it from the moment I saw him on the video feed Neil provided me of Ava while she’d been held captive by Christian.
It was the reason I’d turned to Serena the night of the gala. Her family’s involvement with my father went back long before I had been born. I needed that information, and so I put the plan together the minute I learned about Kenzi. It pained me to keep what I knew about her sister secret when Ava had been nothing but worried for Kenzi, but I couldn’t risk putting my wife in danger even further.
“Isn’t spying on your wife at your own funeral a bit morbid?” The voice was light, but there was a hardness that tainted it, an edge she couldn’t quite hide. I barely heard her approach. Her footsteps were light on the grass, her shadow barely visible due to the dim clouds crowding the sky. I wondered what my wife would think if she knew the truth about the woman who had so casually snuck up on me. How she had spent the last few years of her life training to be an assassin. A ghost.
“Isn’t showing up at the funeral of the man you killed a bit stereotypical for a psychopath?” I shot back, my eyes never falling from my wife. “It’s terribly predictable, don’t you think?”
“Sociopath,” she corrected calmly. As if it made any difference what you called it. Crazy was crazy, and wherever she had been had given that to her in spades.
Keeping my eyes forward, I shifted slightly, drawing her into my periphery. After all, one should never turn his back on a serial killer. A paid one at that.
I couldn’t help but point out one thing, though. “If my wife sees you, Kenzi,” I smirked, “she’ll kill you.”
The sociopath shrugged nonchalantly, her jacket rustling slightly.
“Vas even told me she has a picture of you with your eyes scratched out pinned to her wall with one of my knives,” I continued, just to see if I could get a rise out of her. “The tip goes straight through your throat.”
“Sisters disagree all the time.” Kenzi smiled widely, her lips parting to reveal pearly white teeth. Fuck, she resembled a Strzyga. A female demon in Russian folklore that was much like a vampire. At least she wasn’t a rotting corpse, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t drink the blood of her enemies.
Hell, the bitch probably bathed in it.
“She’ll get over it.” Kenzi sighed softly, her light tone dipping slightly before she pulled it back in place like nothing had happened. “Especially once she finds out I didn’t, in fact, kill you.”
“Still shot me, though,” I muttered a bit petulantly, the pain in my abdomen flaring at the memory. I could still hear Ava screaming my name. Her wail haunted my dreams.
“You told me to make it look real.”
“And you did.” My lips curled in distaste. “By blowing up the ambulance. You could have shot me in the shoulder.”
The woman fell silent for a brief pause before she snorted the thought away. “Nah.” She scrunched up her nose at the thought. “Needed to make it believable. No one would have panicked as much if you had been shot in the shoulder.”
“That was what we agreed to.”
“And I altered our agreement,” she pressed on. “Stop being such a big Russian baby about it. It’s not attractive.”
We lapsed into silence, which wasn’t all that uncomfortable, seeing as how we were two predators standing side by side. Two people who had violence thrust upon us without our consent. We were kindred souls in that aspect.
Compared to her sister, Kenzi was an enigma. I wondered if she’d had the same knack for lying before she had been sold to the Chameleon Agency, or if it was the result of her training. I’d talked to her several times, and her ability to switch her emotions on and off at the drop of a hat was something both awe-inspiring and concerning. She was obviously trained to fit into any situation she could, flipping from one personality to the next like she was turning the pages of her favorite book.
Little was known about the secret underground agency, but from the intel I managed to gather, they were a mediator of sorts.
Who had given themselves a horrible name.
The Chameleon Agency.
Pfft.
There were rumors floating around the underground about a group that had been buying up women left and right before they ever hit the sex auction. Whispers ladened the streets these days, hushed conversations on missing girls of all ages. Ones no one would care about and the police would never search for.
It all led back to one place.
The Dollhouse.
Kenzi mentioned the name a time or two, but beyond that, she refused to give up any information. Not out of any sorted twisted loyalty that I could glean from her, but from the one thing that motivated people the most to keep their mouths shut.
Fear.
Kenzi, the serial-killing sociopath, was afraid.
And rightly so. Since learning their name, I’d connected the Dollhouse to more than a dozen high-target assassination in the last ten years. Congressmen, presidents, Al-Qaeda leaders. The list went on, and those were only the ones I could find. Who knew how many more people they had murdered or how many events they had controlled?
“You don’t have to go back, you know,” I whispered. The receiving line was dying down, and it wouldn’t be long before I was noticed. Maksim scratched his nose. Another signal.
It was time to go.
With a heavy heart, I turned from my wife and walked away. She was the woman I had once called my weakness and the chink in my armor, but I had been wrong. Ava made me stronger without even knowing it. I was blind to it for so long.
Slowly, I made my way toward the modest-sized SUV parked at the far end of the cemetery.
“They’re already suspicious,” Kenzi admitted with a bite to her lip. She followed just behind me, her body angled mildly toward me. It was a smart move. If I or one of my men made to incapacitate her, she could easily knife me between the ribs as she made her escape.
I had no plans to betray her.
Not that she knew that.
Like me, Kenzi dabbled in the art of paranoia and knew what it meant to let her guard down. It was a matter of life or death. I could understand her reticence. Without having to look at her, I already knew that her gaze was sweeping the cemetery for threats. Her eyes were counting the shadows, judging the distance of the people behind her by how close their shadows loomed.
“If Christian doubts that I believe him, you’ll have another host of problems on your hands that you can’t afford,” Kenzi pointed out. “Plus, I wanted to kill him the night of the gala, remember? You’re the one who was adamant about letting him live.”
“Christian is just a pawn,” I reminded her. “If you kill him, we risk not finding out who the man behind the curtain is.”
“Is that a Wizard of Oz reference?” she teased. I grumbled half-heartedly at her, cursing her name. “I knew you’d watch it, you big softie.”
Some of the real Kenzi was coming out to play.
“It was our favorite movie growing up,” she admitted, a twinge of sadness lacing her words once again, but this time, she didn’t pull it back. “Every Friday night, we used to do movie night together. Me, Ava, and—” She paused, her breathing growing rapid as memories of her dead sister pushed and pulled at her fragile mind. For just a moment, she was a vulnerable nineteen-year-old again. “Anyway…” The false Kenzi was back. “I knew you’d like it.”
“Never said I liked it,” I mumbled.
“People don’t quote movies they don’t like.”
God, give me strength.
“I’ll admit I liked the movie if you tell me more about the Dollhouse.”
“Nice try.” She rolled her eyes. I knew it. I had a sixth sense for those things. “I already told you what I know. I thought I was going to college like he promised. Instead, when I arrived in England, they took me. The moment I stepped off the plane, they grabbed me. No one batted an eyelash. Not one person in that terminal lifted a hand to help me. That is how much power they have.”
“Then what?” I pushed. I needed more information; I couldn’t fight an enemy I couldn’t see or find. Information was power, and Kenzi had that information. She just needed to see the power it gave her. “Where were you taken?”
“It was all very Red Room,” she admitted. The false Kenzi faded away to something new. Someone devoid of emotion, her voice sounding far away. She was disssociating from her memories, protecting herself against the trauma she endured. “The very first day, they stripped us of our clothes. Made us do everything naked. They said it would desensitize us. They wanted to get us used to being naked, and if we pushed back—” She shivered slightly, her cold, detached persona dropping minutely before her shell fixed itself back in place. “They showed us just what they would do to ensure we understood what it meant to not comply.”
I stopped once we reached the SUV and gazed down at the woman standing with me. In many ways, she was still just a child. Then again, growing up in a household like Elias’s, was she ever really a child? Trauma and pain were two key essentials in casting childhood aside, like a wet rag that could no longer be used.
From what I learned from Ava; Kenzi was an outcast in her own home. In the game of chess, she was the first pawn to be sacrificed. How many times had Elias told her she had no worth? No meaning because her womb was barren and she couldn’t be married off? Even if she could, I doubted that Elias would have fetched a worthy enough alliance with another family when she couldn’t bear an heir.
That would explain why he sold her. With no chance of an alliance, money was the only other use she had.
“Get in,” I murmured, opening the door for her. Kenzi’s gaze flickered to her surroundings before she slid into the running vehicle. Leon was already behind the wheel, waiting.
“Here.” He reached back to hand Kenzi a small black tablet that had been sitting on the passenger seat. “Mark said he loaded everything for you.”
“Thanks.” Kenzi nodded as she took it and powered it up.
“We’re not done with this,” I warned her. “You’re holding back.”
Kenzi huffed and reached forward to dial Mark on the small screen attached to the seat in front of her. The seat in front of me had one as well that would mirror hers, so there was no need to lean over and share. “We’ll see.”
I grunted. We were not done with this, and that was a promise. The Dollhouse and the Chameleon Agency presented a big problem. I couldn’t have families selling their children for cash to fund underground assassination agencies or worse, selling them to brothels or perverts.
“Kenzi,” Mark’s warm voice greeted from over the crisp video feed. He was sitting in the office we’d given to him, his guards visible in the background. He’d needed to earn our trust back after the incident with Archer, and he was well on his way to doing so. “Sir.”
I nodded my head in greeting and left the rest to Kenzi. The pair had been working closely for the last week to find the information I requested. The pair of them were like the nerd hacker wonder twins.
“All right.” Kenzi placed the tablet in the cradle that sat between us. It allowed for me to view the information without having to pass it back and forth. “You gave us quite the task when you asked us to search for this Kirill Kasyanov guy.”
“Shouldn’t have been all that hard,” I drawled. “I even provided a photo.”
Kenzi blew out her lips. “Yeah, the only problem is that Kirill Kasyanov doesn’t exist. At least, not anymore.”
“So, he is dead.” This is what I had hoped for, but the look on Kenzi’s and Mark’s faces told me another story.
“Nope.” Mark shook his head. “The problem is that Kirill Kasyanov literally doesn’t exist. His surname isn’t Kasyanov, it’s Tkachenko.”