Vasily the Nail (Baranov Duet #1)

Day 1

I am going to die in Flagstaff , the voices remind me. It’s inevitable. The clock just hasn’t started ticking yet.

Dima cuts me out a line of coke. He hasn’t used the stuff in years. Most of the Bratva hasn’t. There are too many headaches from the local methed-up biker gang and the opiate overdoses that get dumped on our land, not to mention the cholos breezing through from Mexico on four-day benders running all manner of nasties up from the border. Most days, it feels like we’re running a daycare filled with gun-wielding psychopaths.

Dima doesn’t question my drug use. He understands that I’m different. If anything, he supports me, chopping up a sliver of Xanax and mixing it into the coke to stave off the jitters. The only one who gives me shit for this is my brother, which is ironic as it’s his fault my usual cocktail isn’t enough to get me through this day.

My pupils vibrate from the mushrooms I ate an hour ago. I’m all too aware of my teeth, and I can’t stop staring at the pile of spaghetti on Dima’s head.

Nope, that’s hair. Fuck me in the goat ass. The psychedelics were a bad fucking call.

“You can do this,” Dima says for the hundredth time. He speaks in English, the words flowing from his mouth in purple, chewed-up grape gum.

“I don’t have a choice,” I reply in Russian, and in the peripheral, where my cheekbones blur, robin-egg mist rises.

“You’re not the bad guy,” Dima insists in grape. Insists not just that I’m not the bad guy but that I need to turn my brain over to the English side. But I hate the English side. I don’t care that I could speak it fluently with a perfect Standard American accent if I wanted. Flagstaff is my own personal hell.

“I’m going to scare the piss out of her,” flows from my mouth in that unnamed in-between of blue and purple, but pale. Kseniya has painted my nails this exact color before, so there must be a word for it, but it escapes me.

I think I’m leaking.

“Well, don’t tell Kostya if she pisses on you; he’ll jizz in his pants.” Red pulses over Dima’s shoulders. He hates Kostya, always has. I have no idea why. I mean, he tells me all the horrible things Kostya does, but they’re no worse than what the rest of us have done in this dead-end hellhole in Arizona. None of what he’s done compares to what I’m about to do.

That girl must be so scared. She probably doesn’t even know what’s going to happen, what deal her piece-of-shit brother just brokered to get out of a measly $150,000 plus interest. The fact that he’s second in line for his syndicate, same as I am in mine, and would rather sell his sister’s pussy than come up with 150K is madness. I’d cut off the dick of any man trying to buy even a touch of Kseniya for that kind of money. She’s a human being. She’s not for sale.

“Lay off Kostya,” I growl as I take the mirror from Dima. Kostya’s fucked up, but no worse than I am. We’ve both buried our fathers in this sun-bleached shithole. The only difference is when his father was murdered six months after we were uprooted from Russia, sentenced to life in Arizona, he was too young to be the avtorivet of our minuscule outpost. He escaped succession, pinning it squarely on my father’s lineage.

Artyom and I were already adults when our father was killed. Birth order gave me a stay of execution, but every late-night call I get, I expect it to be news of Artyom’s death. It’s been twelve years since Uncle Kostantin’s death, six years since Papa’s. It’s Artyom’s time.

And then mine. In godforsaken Flagstaff.

“Stop thinking so hard and take your medicine,” Dima says. We’re crammed in the office of our shitty strip club, the only thing making us money half the time, and it smells so strongly of ancient cigars, old ledgers, and spent cum that I can see it. Worms slithering through the foul carpet and phantom spiders skittering up the walls, roaches clinging to the ceiling.

I’m going to die in Flagstaff.

I jam the stub of a neon green straw into my nostril, lean down, and snort both lines down. The effect is immediate, a sharp burn from the Xanax followed by the thick drip of the coke sliding down my nasal passage and into my throat. I taste it on the roof of my mouth, although that’s just the process, not a hallucination. I can tell the difference, not that it makes any more difference than it does to identify the giant lizard as an alligator or a crocodile as it’s ripping your intestines out of your gut.

I’m going to die in Flagstaff.

Dima rolls his eyes. “Will you stop saying that?”

My eyes widen and then slit. “Get out of my brain.”

“Dude, you keep saying, ‘I’m going to die in Flagstaff.’ In English, I might add, so don’t act like you can’t speak it. You start babbling in Russian in there, that girl really is going to piss on you.” With a weary sigh, he sits back on the edge of the office desk. The whole thing trembles beneath his considerable weight, and his ass starts sinking into it. I’m not sure how much of that is hallucination. “Man, how fucked up are you? You gonna be able to get it up in there? You better not fuck this up with a limp dick.”

“Is fine,” I snap, the sounds rolling out in green. Broken English. I think. “But give. Just in case.”

I reach for the baggie of coke, but he snaps it away from me, instead meticulously cutting another snip of the neon green tube, pinching the end, and warming it with his lighter to seal it. He dumps the smallest fucking bump in the entire state of Arizona into the tube and seals the other end.

He ignores my glare as he tucks the tube into my breast pocket, knowing I’m going to be losing my pants soon. Probably the shirt, too, but I’m playing that by ear. I’m planning on checking out on this one and letting my body do whatever it’s feeling good about.

“You’ll get the rest of this when I’m back on Saturday.”

“You’re leaving?” I ask, ignoring the whine in my voice. I’m a grown-ass man. I’ve killed other grown-ass men. I’m considered the best sniper in the syndicate — not that it’s a major accomplishment with how small our brigade is — and I’ll gleefully bare-knuckle the best of them. But Dima’s lived with me for years. He’s more of a brother to me than Artyom most days. I get nervous when he’s not around.

I scan for lumps in his pockets, trying to figure out where that xanny vanished to.

“It’s a week. I’m just going to Jacksonville to check in on Roman. Someone’s causing him some grief.”

“Right, yeah,” I say with a nod that makes the yellowed light overhead shift to red, but I’m not about to tell Dima the walls are bleeding and I’m positive this means he’s going to die. I have gypsy ancestry, my visions are drug-induced lies. He’s not going to die.

Probably.

“Go on, now. The girl’s pretty. You’re not the bad guy. You’re just the debt collector. You’re not going to die in Flagstaff, not today.”

It’s a murder tableau.

In the front row seats, illuminated by the haze of the stage’s neon spotlights, Alex and Vladimir share a table. Alex lazily twirls a gun on the table while Vladimir smokes a cigarette that’s nearly burnt down to the filter and drums his fingertips on his thigh.

Mikhael’s picking at his fingernails, cleaning out whatever gunk is under them. He’s a nasty fucker. We usually keep him on the road running counterfeits to Vegas and Los Angeles. Artyom decided that if Mikhael nabbed the girl, she’d be relieved to find out I’m the one collecting the debt.

Kostya sits a row behind everyone else, at a small booth directly behind the group. He’s illuminated less by the stagelights than he is by the cellphone he’s forever messing with. People underestimate Kostya because he’s hardly ever watching what’s going on around him and most of his work in the bratva involves driving me around.

Most people don’t see what I see from him. He might be looking at his phone, but he’s also chosen a spot where he can see every exit while also monitoring the man of the hour. Kostya’s spring-loaded, shying away from the blood the rest of us spill but the most lethal among us when shit flips in an instant.

Directly in front of him is Ivan. Twitchy fuck. The oldest among us, having served under my father and my uncle before him, he loves to wax poetic about the Soviet era. He’s more fucked in the head than I am.

Maybe.

I don’t think there are voices rattling around in his.

So the fact he’s got his hand on the knee of Tony the Bitch — that’s what his own people call him, not just us — doesn’t mean anything either threatening or romantic. That’s just Ivan being Ivan.

Tony’s not seeing it that way. I can tell by his flared nostrils and his glare on Ivan’s hand. He’s a small guy, got that yappy dog energy. All bark. He’s learning now what happens when he tries to sink his teeth in. It’s messing me up, though, that the lasers I can literally see beaming out of his eyes are right on Ivan’s hand. Does he not even care about how he’s paying for his dumbass debt?

I have to bodily pivot to force myself to look at the stage. Halfway down the underlit plexiglass catwalk is the stripper pole, and the slender girl holding it — no, cuffed to it — is barefoot. She’s dressed, sort of. More than the girls on this stage usually are, at any rate, although the dress she’s in is sheer. That pink light below her glows right through it, showing off the simple black briefs and strangely cut bra beneath it.

Wait, no. I spend far too long leering at her before realizing she’s in a bikini and cover-up. The briefs are a retro fashion, covering everything from just below the navel to her thighs. The top is simple molded cups and thick bands. It’s a chilly forty-five degrees in Flagstaff, but they were dragged up here from Phoenix, which I’m sure was twenty degrees warmer. Still, I’m thinking they must have an indoor or at least heated pool. At her neck is a diamond-encrusted crucifix too large for her slender structure.

But her brother can’t cover a $150,000 debt. Fucking bullshit.

The girl isn’t slender; she’s scrawny. Hardly anything other than a decently curved backside to make her look womanly. They’ve confirmed this is Tony’s nineteen-year-old sister, but fuck, man. I feel like a pedophile just thinking about how he’s settling that debt.

Those pink neon lights begin to coil around her body, threatening to pull her under, a virgin sacrifice to the neon volcano.

I sniff and shake my head. The cocaine drip hits again, propelling me forward — into a table because leave it to me to ruin any sort of commanding entrance when the spotlights look like floating fruit loops and the booths are made out of slaughtered muppets.

Everyone turns and looks at me, including the girl, whom I’ve only seen in profile. Her gaze is a punch in the gut.

She’s got a small, round face, a petite nose with a slight upturn, and an equally small mouth framed with angelically, sinfully plush lips. A fucking cherub with a mouth I shouldn’t be allowed to fuck.

The thought of it, with those tawny lips framing my shaft, tells me I’m not going to need to coke up my dick for an erection to happen. It’s already tweaking like the rest of me.

Giant brown eyes. Goddamn. Like, inhumanly large. Cartoonishly large. A princess from those Japanese cartoons Kseniya loves so much. The more I look at her eyes, the more they grow, until her face is nothing but deep, chocolatey brown framed by octopus tentacles.

But . . . pretty tentacles? Air tentacles waving on a breeze, tempting me forward. Siren tentacles. Water tentacles.

I am underwater, swimming toward her. Keeping my hands at my sides so she doesn’t know I’m tripping balls to get through this. Tony can’t know I’m too much of a pussy to do this sober.

I make my way to the stage slowly so no one can see how unsteady I am, either. The pink bathes my cock, unseen through my pants, but I feel the heat. I can do this. I just need her to be cool.

The girl — fuck, did no one tell me her name? — trembles. From the opposite end of the catwalk, it looks like terror. As I near, it becomes an oscillation beckoning me forward. Inviting me into her. Welcoming me into the arms she can’t separate much more than the width of the pole because of the cuffs. Raven wings unfurl behind her, bouncing and waving in the current.

Probably just hair.

I get close. Too close. She smells like citrus and pepper, something sweet that tickles at my nose. I’m close enough that she has to tilt her head up to look at me, and that’s when I notice her lips are moving. She’s whispering something. I’m not sure if I hear it so much as I read her lips and the flow of violet, a far more pleasant and crisp shade than Dima’s English, as my brain translates her words.

“May He be after me so that He may guard me, may He be above me, that He may bless me, who with God, the Father, and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns forever and ever.”

I’ve heard enough English prayers over the years, but it’s usually the same one ad nauseum, hallowed be thy name and whatnot. I’ve heard it so many times I can recite it better than many of the men who have begged for God’s mercy at my feet. Half of them get the words wrong and have to start over several times. Some don’t even realize they’re wrong and plow through it, as irreverent in their death as they were in life.

Not me. I have prayers, strong ones in the Church Slavonic of my youth, but I know I’m going to Hell. I won’t be praying on my deathbed.

This girl, though. She’s devout. I doubt she even needs that prayer. I see the light in her eyes. I see she believes the words she’s saying. She’s not begging her God to look past her transgressions, she’s simply asking her God to keep her safe now if He deems it.

“Poor little lamb,” I murmur as I touch the pole she’s leaned away from to put distance between us. “God does not decide what happens here. Pray to me now.”

Her pupils quiver at that. The lavender darkens on her more frantic “May the Lord Jesus Christ be with me, that He may defend me.”

Someone clicks their tongue. I peer out off the stage to see Vlad wagging a shaky finger at me. “She won’t if you say it like that.”

I have to think about the colors. They seemed right, but the neon pink would have tinted them. Not purple, blue. Russian. “ Ovechka ,” I still say, unable to remember the actual English for a young sheep. “This no God house. This Vasily house.”

She inhales deeply and exhales slowly, stiffening her lips against the uneven rise and fall. “And you are Vasily.”

“ Da .”

Vlad clicks again, but she knows what I mean. “Your house is a strip club.”

Cheeky. Is it bravery or bluffing, I’m not sure. “You know why here, ovechka ?” I ask as I succumb to the urge to touch her chin, her throat, her collarbone.

She tries to look away from me as she shakes her head, but I keep that hold on her chin. I force her to look me in the eye as she says, “To hurt my brother?”

She’s lying. Oh, I have no doubt that this was what she was told, that it’s as simple as he is the hero and I am the villain and my only motivation is to hurt the hero. But I can see in the nearly magenta waves that she knows that’s not true. She knows her brother fucked up and this was how he chose to handle it. This was the negotiation he made with Artyom.

“Strange. Both tools of brothers,” I murmur, more to myself than to her, but I see a flicker of softness there. She’s young. Not a child, although I have a feeling her nineteen is a world away from what my barely tamed sister’s was. But there’s a sensitive nature about her. She doesn’t deserve this. She deserves to be loved by a gentle man who will earn her trust by respecting her.

Most of us in this world don’t get what we deserve, though. She’s not special.

“You know what I will do?”

She swallows. I can feel it against my palm, just as I can feel her ragged breath. It makes my skin tingle.

“On the woman pill? The birth control?”

That’s enough to make her deep brown eyes go liquid, what little shows of her irises behind her blown pupils reflecting in the tears welling in the rim. “I am,” she says voicelessly, her bravery of a moment ago squelched by the confirmation of what will happen here.

“Your brother say virgin. Did he lie?”

It’s not a trick question. Despite what Artyom has tasked me with today, I’m a man who respects women. I don’t care if she’s a virgin or not, but it is what will settle this debt.

Her lip quivers, and she tears her eyes away from me. “May He be within me, that He may lead me. May He be after me, so that He may guide me.”

“No, no, ovechka . God will no protect here. Only me. And if Tony lie, Tony punished. I protect you.”

I expect her to pull away as she lets out a single sob. Instead, she shifts so slightly that I doubt anyone else can see it. It’s only a change in heat, a change in the pressure of the hand I’ve lowered to fan across her collarbone.

She’s leaning into me.

Over her head, I narrow my sight on Tony. Vapors swirl around him in bloody red, evil leeching from his pores. When he asked for the loan last year, I advised against it, but Artyom overrode me. Now the debt is being settled with something none of us wants, least of all me. Pain only begets pain. There are no winners here.

“Your name, ovechka?”

“Lacey. Analiese, but everyone calls me Lacey.”

That word, that name, is a color that makes my eyes burn. “Is whore name. You are whore, Analiese?”

Her nostrils flare indignantly as she shakes her head. I believe her.

“You are virgin?”

“Please don’t do this.”

“Answer me, Analiese. Virgin?”

Her voice crumbles again. “I am,” she whimpers, her knees wobbling. “Please don’t do this.”

I catch her easily with one hand around her tiny frame. She feels good against me, even with her elbows jamming into my chest, the chains of the cuffs digging into my shoulder and pinning me to the stripper pole. Her head drops to her wrists, and I give her a moment to cry there as I rub her back and hush her gently. “I take care of you, Ana,” I promise her. “You brave for me.”

The sound she makes is raw. “I’m not brave.”

“You are. I’ll uncuff you.”

“Thank you!” She looks so hopeful, her chest rising and her spine straightening, that I feel bad that she’s misunderstood me.

I have to be man enough to look her in the eye despite those octopus tentacles whipping into a frenzy. “And then I blindfold you. Is for best.”

“No!” she wails, and suddenly her entire body attempts to kick and claw and flee but accomplishes none of it. “Please, please, please, no! Please, I’ll do any—we’ll pay you! However much you want! I’m sure Tony’s good for it. Take your–your hurt that way.”

I have a choice here. What I would enjoy most would be to tell her exactly how much money her brother is not good for. How small a price tag he put on her virginity. Not only that but her future. All she’ll ever be is someone’s wife then someone else’s mother, and then she’ll be left to dry up in her kitchen. I’m taking away her nice kitchen.

She should know it’s her brother doing it.

But her brother will be in her life going forward, and any ill feelings she has toward him will have nowhere to go. I’ll be a memory soon enough. No, it’s better for her if she doesn’t know just how shitty her brother is.

“We are tools of brothers,” I tell her again. “Hammer, no more able to hold back from striking than nail from being struck. But I keep you safe. I bring you pleasure, Ana.”

“How can you possibly?” she says with a sniffle as I pull the keys from my pants pocket and uncuff her. She is a smart girl. She doesn’t bother to try to escape.

I pull the handkerchief from my back pocket and fold it into a strip just wide enough to blind her without irritating her. “Because you’ll let me.”