Chapter 6
visit
NICOLAI
The suite’s front door clicked shut behind Ueli and Dusha as they chased after Lexi, who was following Clemmy, and I turned back to the bedroom to grab my socks, jacket, belt, and wallet.
My scalp was still damp. I’d barely toweled off in my haste to make sure Lexi didn’t tell the attorneys anything ambiguous.
Ridiculous, that Clemmy had swanned in and countermanded what must happen, what I desperately hated, what I would have to live with.
I wanted to strangle my cousin, who was probably my nearest living relative after my brother, so that would be unfortunate if I ever needed a kidney or a spot of bone marrow.
My belt rested atop the dresser, and I coiled it around my fist. I could snake it around my waist in the car as I wouldn’t be driving, of course.
My socks had been folded in the second dresser drawer by the staff as usual, and I grabbed a pair to match my black trousers. Englishmen match their socks to their mood, and the sentiment seemed spot-on, even though my genes were likely mostly continental European rather than English.
My ancestors were in the forefront of my mind, those psychopaths who wouldn’t have cared if an innocent spouse were torture-murdered. I didn’t know why I was different. I just thanked God I was, if I was, if I wasn’t fooling myself.
The motionless air in the suite was so silent, so undisturbed by another living being, that my ears rang a bit as I hurried into the living room, shoving my wallet in my trousers’ hip pocket and tapping my phone in the right front as I caught my jacket that slipped over my arm.
My belt unlooped itself several rotations from around my fingers.
The end dangled.
So irritating. I couldn’t even hold onto my goddamned belt as I tried to catch up with Clementine and Lexi, who were heading for the damned street.
Thank God the Billionaire Sanctuary staff were reliable and the coffee table bowl had been refilled with apples.
I veered to snag one for my breakfast in the car.
Surely Lexi would heed my words and not endanger herself by getting into an open, unguarded car with Clemmy, who I was quite sure had never been taught to drive by a responsible adult.
Yet another drawback of growing up in a boarding school was that we taught each other mundane skills, such as driving, despite having absolutely no knowledge but a great deal of arrogance in the area.
Clemmy dodged through traffic like she was playing a video game, racing and slipping through openings far too small for whatever convertible sports car she’d rented or stolen.
Convertibles, dear God. Shades of JFK’s and Archduke Ferdinand’s assassinations.
One ride with Clemmy on the Autobahn was most likely responsible for the ashen smudge of gray that had emerged on my temples when I was twenty-three. That ride was the closest I’d ever come to screaming like a husky being groomed.
I was ruminating, cogitating, generally grumbling in my head at everyone I knew but especially at my fucking cousin swanning about and poaching Lexi as I reached for an apple in the crystal bowl, and that was when I perceived the gun pointed at my head.
The hollow emptiness of a handgun’s barrel followed my movement as I dipped, reaching for the apple with my belt-wrapped hand.
My fingers grasped the cool firmness as I looked up, cycling through which of my enemies or friends might be pointing a weapon at me, but the man was a stranger.
White guy, brown eyes and light brown hair, wearing an unstructured suit made of cheap black cloth, a deadpan Slavic pucker to his mouth, and his head tilted back with the aggressiveness of someone who might already be squeezing the trigger.
The apple fell from my fingers.
I snapped my belt like a bullwhip. The leather cut his face.
The man’s head jerked aside like I’d landed a heavyweight punch.
I slapped the gun out of his hand, juggling it twice before grabbing the grip and flipping the business end around to point at him.
By the time he’d turned back to narrow his eyes at me above his bleeding cheek, I’d backed up three paces, out of his reach. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I bring you message from person you know.”
“Volkov.” Fuck.
He shook his head with a sneer and a sniff like the odor of Volkov’s name offended him. “Demyan Volkov is small-time crook, trying to break into big business. He does not belong there. And so you don’t marry that ugly daughter of his.”
The ugly crack seemed cruel, but I wasn’t arguing about Volkov. “I’m already married.”
The guy smeared the blood on his cheek and scowled at the red on his hand. “Fuck you. That leave scar on my face.”
“Occupational hazard.”
The guy’s nose crunched up on one side, twisting his lips into a sneer. “At least I have occupation, you fucking leech.”
He wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t going to argue politics with a man who’d held a gun to my head. “Tell your boss, whoever that is, that I’ve already been married in the Russian Orthodox church. I’m married.”
Implying permanence.
Even if I was most assuredly lying.
“Make sure you stay married,” the hitman said. “He heard you would not be married anymore, would get annulment and then marry Alina Demyanova.”
Alina, that was Volkov’s daughter’s name. He hadn’t mentioned it a few nights before, as far as I remembered, and now it sounded vaguely familiar, now that I heard it out loud. “How the hell did Vladimir—”
“We do not say name. The walls have ears, the phones have ears, and the fucking thermostats.”
“How would he know about the annulment?”
The asshole’s smirk had its own superiority complex. “Like I said, everything has ears, if you know how to listen. The world is not as it was in the days of the tsars. You don’t rule it anymore, Tsesarevich Nicolai.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Is what Volkov calls you. And most of your friends.”
“No, it’s not, and they don’t,” I argued. “No one calls me that, ever.”
“Yes they do, to your face and behind your back. It is much cheaper to watch everyone now than in old days of the Guard Department. Cameras everywhere now, in traffic, in hall and elevator, on every doorbell, and an AI to sort through to find who we want and what is said. Whether you lose dog or heir to Russian empire, is easy to find them. Hack into car computers, know where you are and where you are going. Computer turns off brakes or steering when you are on cliff or bridge. Is no matter. Is easy now.”
“It’s him, isn’t it? I swear to God, I have no quarrel with him and no interest in Russia.”
“You know who my boss is.”
The would-be assassin lumbered to his feet, shoving on the arms of the chair to hoist himself like his back was bad.
Sending a half-disabled hit man after me seemed insulting, somehow, but I had almost died, maybe.
“You keep your business out of Russia,” he grumbled.
“We busy enough with ruling the world through puppets with blackmail and threats. If Russian leader sees you so much as sneeze in general direction of St. Petersburg or Moscow, he will send SVR sniper to end you before you know what happens, but we kill that woman first, and make it take time.”
My blood stopped in my veins. Chills traveled over my skin.
The spy started to limp toward the door.
“How did you get up here?” I demanded, still looking over the open sights of the handgun at him, keeping the muzzle post’s white dot securely in the notch of the proximal sight and aimed at his head. “The club is supposed to be secure.”
The asshole smirked at me as he opened the door and walked through. “Secure for private sector, maybe. Easy to override commercial camera surveillance. No one will see I was here.”
My whole life, I’d tried to avoid entanglements with either the bratvas or the Russian government.
Yet in two days, both had noticed me.
As the door closed, I yelled, “Why didn’t you just kill me?”
He shrugged. “Bad publicity. We would prefer not to. Don’t make us eliminate you.”
The door clicked shut.
I shuffled sideways across the room in case he kicked the door and opened fire, maintaining the shooting stance until I was certain he’d gone.
“Shit.” I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and activated the emergency routine by saying, “Code Blue. Ueli, Code Blue,” denoting a neutralized attack but an ongoing threat. Green meant all-clear.
My phone rang as I clicked the safety on and stuffed my new nine-millimeter SR-2 Udav handgun in my belt at my spine, being careful not to shoot myself in the ass. I whirled my suit jacket around myself and shoved my arms in to conceal it back there.
As I answered my phone, Ueli demanded, “What happened?”
“Secure Lexi and Clementine right now.”
A pause, a scuffle, a click. “Secured. Your cousin is not pleased with the delay. What is the situation?”
I reiterated what had happened as I shoved my bare feet into my shoes.
“And yet you didn’t activate the panic button on your watch,” Ueli grumbled.
“I was too busy keeping the sights on him.”
A huff. “We could have apprehended him.”
“I was out of the living room for literally one minute after you followed Lexi and Clemmy downstairs. He had to have been waiting in the hallway to enter the suite.”
“The hallway was clear.”
“Then he was already inside the suite, maybe waiting for hours, maybe since we were gone last night.”
“Impossible.” Ueli sounded much more confident than he should have.
“He didn’t seem impressed with the club’s security.”
“That makes two of us.”
I needed to confer with Ryan about the club’s precautions. I wasn’t the only one who needed enhanced security measures. “Did you see him come through the lobby?”
“Twelve people have passed us since you texted the Code Blue.”
“Were any of them middle-aged Russian ex-SVR officers?”
“Four possibles, but the club personnel were deferential, as if they recognized them. Come to the lobby. Nechtan and Delta Team will wait for you at the lifts.”
Yes, I needed to confer with Ryan about a lot of things, like just who the hell he was selling club memberships to if a Russian intelligence agent had infiltrated my room so easily.
Ueli swore in German with astonishingly creative compound words, and then, “Come back here!”
Fear turned hot, and I started to run. “What happened?”