Chapter 7 - Konstantin
Washing up the dishes and putting away the leftovers didn’t calm me down, but at least it wouldn’t fall to the cook whose services I was borrowing from my nephew Nik’s fine dining restaurant.
The sous chef was an artist with authentic Russian fare, and I was lucky he’d brought something that was one of Tati’s favorites.
Really, she was lucky I didn’t give her plain bread and water. I couldn’t pry anything out of her during my attempt to make peace. So, no more of that.
My day had started early, waking up at the crack of dawn to help Aleks and Mat with a stakeout of their own, taking Sofiya to the airport, and making sure she actually got on the plane, because knowing my offspring, anything was possible.
Then my own stakeout at the Yakuza headquarters, and finally the impromptu kidnapping of one very stubborn woman.
Rescue.
All in all, I should have been exhausted, but even though my body craved sleep, as soon as I lay down, my thoughts began to race. No matter how many sheep I counted or plans I made, I couldn’t get Tati out of my mind. Just down the hall, locked in, probably hating me.
That was fine. I wasn’t too pleased with her myself. Nothing but trouble, and determined to get herself killed. And for what?
That was what I needed to figure out. What did I know about little Tatiana Kanatova? Well, not so little anymore. Those missing buttons on her blouse kept drawing my attention during dinner, no matter how she tried to keep them from flapping open.
To keep from fixating on her smooth, creamy skin, I jumped out of bed and fired up my laptop.
Time to see what Tati had been up to while her father and I were taking over the world.
She had been remarkably adept at dodging questions about herself during dinner, and while Grigor sometimes bragged about one of Tati’s accomplishments here and there, we just always had other things to discuss besides our kids.
I hadn’t seen her in more than a year, and even then, she was just a shadow in Grigor’s house. She hero-worshipped her old man, so it's no wonder she adamantly refused to believe he could ever do anything wrong.
Could that worship have led her to follow in her father’s footsteps?
She was smart, that was undisputed, so it was a mystery to me why she suddenly dropped out of college in her first year.
It wasn’t money problems and certainly not grades, and it was something Grigor only shrugged off, stating it was what she wanted at the time.
And Tati always got what she wanted, though no one could ever accuse her of being spoiled.
I couldn’t call Sofiya up out of the blue and ask her if she knew anything without getting my worrywart daughter back on my case, and there were no clues anywhere on the internet.
Tati had no social media presence whatsoever, which wasn’t suspicious considering what her father did for a living.
We didn’t generally like calling attention to ourselves in the Bratva.
All I could find out was that she was apprenticing at a textile mill, which seemed innocent enough until I started digging into the mill itself. Some of the investors traced back to a rival family in Moscow. Not exactly enemies, but could that have been the start of Grigor’s betrayal?
I couldn’t recall if she ever won any artistic awards, and hell, if I knew if perhaps weaving was her life’s passion, but what I did know was that she always excelled in school, blowing Sofiya out of the water with grades in half their classes.
If Grigor weren’t so damn rich, Tati could have had a full scholarship to any university she chose.
So, why quit, even if she was into art and textiles? It didn’t make sense, and my revved-up brain wouldn’t let it go. There was something there. The red-hot thing that had me so obsessed with Tatiana’s safety gripped onto it like a dog with a bone.
The sound I had assigned to the tracking device on Riku Yoshida’s car pinged, and I froze with my fingers hovering over the keyboard, just about to attempt to tie Tati to the Yakuza.
It was only set to alert me if he was within a couple of miles, and I reached for my phone to pull it up, ready to spring into action.
There was no way he knew I was in town at all, let alone in this apartment, which was so well hidden in terms of being able to trace ownership, I could have been safely in Siberia as far as any outsiders were concerned.
According to the tracker, his car was sitting two miles away, and I sent a small team out to drive by. “Just get eyes on him,” I told them.
It was a big city, and I was currently in the heart of it. This could be nothing, or it could be something.
In the meantime, I got back to my search, more on edge than ever.
But I couldn't find any ties to the Yakuza, in any shape or form, with the limited capabilities I had on this computer. With a sigh, I leaned back and laced my fingers behind my head, staring at the dead end I ran into on the screen. This could be solved quickly, if there was anything to solve, but I wasn’t quite ready to call in the big guns yet.
My nephew’s wife, CJ, was the kind of genius everyone should be afraid of, and her tracking software could have dug a lot deeper, but for now, Tati was going to stay my little secret.
The small amount of information I found out about her barely scratched the surface of what I wanted—needed—to know. Having Riku so close didn’t help, and when the team I sent to scout this unsavory situation called me, I jumped to answer. Finally, something concrete I might be able to use.
I was already up and preparing to follow my men into ambush, the one person who might be able to give me the answers I needed, about Grigor’s location, and perhaps more importantly, about Tatiana’s involvement in all of it.
“Bad news,” my guy said. “He’s not here.”
“What do you mean? I’m looking at the tracker right now.”
There was a muffled shout in the background, and the man on the phone groaned. “Yeah. We just found it. The tracker.”
I swore a blue streak. The bastard discovered it and ditched it.
Whether or not he got rid of it so close to my location as some kind of warning remained to be seen, but as of now, I had no way of keeping tabs on him.
The one man who could get me answers. The one man Tati was determined to meet with, and who would tear her to pieces if he got the chance.
Neither one of those things was going to happen.
I told him to search the area, but I knew it would be fruitless. Running on fumes, I slugged back a shot of vodka and managed to force myself to fall asleep as dawn crept in with a low light through the slats in the blinds.
Only to be jolted awake again by a terrified scream.