Chapter 12 Milo
MILO
Iwas fucked.
I was so, so fucked.
Three showers later and I could still smell her. Her scent soaked into my skin like a stain I couldn't scrub out. Not that I'd tried that hard.
Today I woke in my own bed—sterile designer sheets, an empty loft, a view of a city I'd never really seen—and the hollowness of it hit different. Wrong. My apartment felt like a waiting room. A place between destinations.
Her apartment felt like home.
That's when I knew.
The Italians called at noon. Cleanup job in San Marcos. Good money, easy work. "Two hours there, two hours back. You available?"
"Sorry. I'm booked. You'll have to call someone else."
"No one else is as good as you."
"Can I put that on my resumé?"
He wasn't amused. He hung up.
I wasn't booked. And I was currently sitting in my car outside The Silver Table, watching the dinner crowd filter in, cataloging every man who glanced at the entrance. Making sure none of them looked too long. Stayed too close. Or thought about following a pretty blind woman home.
The last guy who'd had that idea was currently dissolving in a barrel of lye in a storage unit off I-35.
You're dead, boy.
My father's voice. But it was quieter now. Drowned out by the memory of Raven gasping my name, her nails carving marks down my back, her body clenching around mine while she came apart beneath me.
Yeah, Dad. I know.
The smart play was to walk away. Put distance between us before Viktor noticed. Before the compromise became fatal.
I wiped the condensation from the window so my view wasn't obstructed.
So. Fucked.
***
I stopped hiding in the alcove.
That night, I walked through the front door of The Silver Table like I had every right to be there.
Because I did. I'd cleaned this place more than once—the private dining room after a negotiation went bad, the walk-in freezer after someone talked when they shouldn't have.
The Russians owed me discretion and competence.
Now they owed me a table.
I wore the charcoal suit. The one that made me look like money instead of the guy who scrubbed your mistakes off tile grout. Hair pushed back, black hoop catching the light, the easy smile that opened doors and closed suspicions.
Geoffrey materialized like a nervous gnat. "Good evening, sir! Do you have a reservation?"
"No."
"Oh. Well, I'm afraid we're fully booked tonight, but if you'd like to wait at the bar—"
I looked at him. Didn't smile. Didn't blink. Just looked.
He swallowed. "Let me... let me see what I can do."
Three minutes later, I had a table. Not in the back where the Bratva sat, not in the front where the tourists ate overpriced borscht by the windows where everyone could see them. Right in the middle with a clear sightline to the piano.
To her.
She was already playing. Chopin, something delicate and sad that made rich women dab their eyes with linen napkins. Her fingers moved across the keys with that same precision I'd felt on my skin, mapping me in the dark.
The bruise I'd left on her throat was visible even from here. Dark against pale skin. She'd worn her hair up tonight—deliberately, I knew her well enough now to know that—so everyone could see it. I couldn't even be mad about it.
Mine.
The thought landed like a fist in my chest.
A waiter appeared at my elbow. "Can I start you with a drink, sir?"
"Vodka. Neat."
He scurried off.
I leaned back in my chair and watched her play. And I let everyone in this room see me watching.
***
Viktor found me during her break.
I'd been expecting it. The back of my neck had been prickling for twenty minutes. That sixth sense you develop when you spend your life in rooms where breathing wrong gets you buried in the desert.
He didn't slide into the chair across from me.
He stood behind me.
Close enough that I could smell the Versace Eros and gun oil. Close enough that his shadow fell across my vodka glass like a threat.
"Milo." His voice was conversational. Pleasant, even. That's how you knew you were fucked. Viktor only got polite before he got violent. "Come walk with me. You're hogging our best table."
It wasn't a request.
I stood and followed him through the kitchen, past the line cooks who suddenly found their prep work fascinating, and into the walk-in freezer.
He closed the door behind us.
The cold hit like a fist. My breath fogged. Viktor's didn't. The man ran cold-blooded even in summer.
"Do you know," he said, lighting a cigarette in a room full of meat and hanging sides of beef, "how many bodies I have stored in freezers like this? Over the years?"
I kept my face blank. "I don't keep count of your work, Vik. I just clean up after it."
"Seventeen." He took a drag. "Seventeen different walk-ins, across four different cities. And you know what they all have in common?"
"They made bad Stroganoff?"
His hand shot out. Before I could react, he grabbed the back of my neck and slammed my face into the stainless steel door of a freezer unit.
Not hard enough to break anything. Just hard enough to make the point.
I tasted copper and felt warmth trickle from my nose.
"Ouch!" I told him. "Dammit…"
Ignoring my outburst, he released me and continued like nothing had happened.
"They all thought they were smarter than me.
" Took another drag while I straightened, wiping blood from my upper lip with the back of my hand.
"They all thought I would not notice when they stopped doing their job and started doing something else. "
I turned to face him. Let him see the blood. Let him see I wasn't scared.
Even though I was. I was fucking terrified.
Not for me, though. For her.
"I'm doing my job," I insisted.
"Your job is to watch the blind girl. Make sure she is not problem." He flicked ash onto the floor. "Your job is not to fuck her. Your job is not to sit in my restaurant like you own table fourteen. Your job is not to make eyes at her like lovesick teenager."
"I'm not fucking her—"
"You are distracted." His eyes went flat. Dead. "And distracted men make mistakes. And this organization does not tolerate mistakes right now."
Something in the way he said it made my skin crawl.
"What's really going on, Viktor?"
"What is going on is we have problem. Big problem. Someone is talking." He stepped closer. "Shipments are being intercepted. Targeted. DEA knows exactly which trucks to stop. Coast Guard knows exactly which containers to search. Someone is feeding them information."
My blood went ice-cold beneath the warmth trickling from my nose.
"And you think—"
"I think it is someone close. Someone who hears things. Someone we trust to be in the room while business is discussed." He smiled. "Someone we have, until recently, dismissed as harmless."
He knew. Or suspected. Same thing when it came to Viktor.
"The blind girl plays piano," I said carefully. "How could she hear anything over that? And besides, she doesn't speak Russian. She doesn't know what you're talking about half the time."
"Does not need to speak Russian to hear dates. Times. Numbers. Names." He ground out his cigarette on the wall. "Does not need to see to remember."
My molars were going to crack if I kept this up.
"You're wrong."
"Maybe. Maybe not." He grabbed my jaw. Forced my face toward his. Blood from my nose smeared his thumb. "But here is what I know for certain. You are compromised. You want to protect her. And if she is the leak, you will try to stop me from doing what needs to be done."
"Viktor—"
"So I am going to make this very simple for you.
" He squeezed harder. "Konstantin has just arrived from Moscow.
If you have not resolved this in one week, he resolves it for us.
And his methods make mine look gentle. You have one week to prove she is not the problem.
Find me proof she is clean, or I will find proof she is dirty.
And if I find it first..." He released me.
Smoothed his jacket. "Well. You know what happens to rats in restaurants. "
He walked to the door, but he paused with his hand on the handle.
"And Milo? If you get in my way when the time comes..." He looked back. Smiled. "I will kill her first. So you can watch what we do to her before you die. Slowly."
The door opened, and warm air rushed in.
Viktor was gone.
I stood in the freezer with blood on my face and ice creeping through my veins.
One week.
Fuck.
***
I stayed until closing.
My nose had stopped bleeding, but the ache had settled into my sinuses. Viktor had pulled the hit perfectly. No broken bones, no visible damage that would show past an hour. Just pain to remind me who was in charge.
Raven finished her set at 10:30. I watched her navigate off the platform, and the thing that used to pique my interest—that bird-tilt of her head, the way she paused between pieces to absorb the room—now made my stomach drop.
Because I knew exactly what she was doing.
She'd told me everything—the names, the dates, the shipments, Judge Whitmore, Yuri's Galveston routes. She'd handed me her loaded gun and I'd kissed her and called her terrifying and never once asked the question I should have asked.
Who else did you tell?
She'd said it was for herself. Insurance. Power. Proof that the blind girl was smarter than they thought.
I'd believed her because all I could think about was being inside her at the time. Because her hand was on my chest and her lips were on my throat and she smelled so sweet and tasted like the only real thing in my hollow fucking life.
But Viktor's words were crawling through my skull like roaches.
Someone is feeding them information.
Someone who hears things.
Someone we have dismissed as harmless.
I watched her walk past my table. That slight turn of her head acknowledging my presence. The same subtle tilt she'd just aimed at the back booths where Viktor's crew had been discussing routes all night.
She heard everything. She'd told me so herself. Proudly, defiantly, like it was a badge of honor.