Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 120165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
My feet turned me around without me willing them to. I looked up at him and his gray eyes were scalding, melting me…
And then suddenly, I shook, a whole-body shiver that left my stomach churning. My whole life, with my folks and then with Baba, I’d always been raised to stay out of trouble. The police only chased the bad people, the criminals, and now suddenly I was one of them, an accessory to fucking murder, I could go to jail, for years and—
Radimir rushed forward and grabbed me, and I slumped against him. My heart was going faster and faster, out of control, and the shaking wouldn’t stop. “What’s—Why am I…?”
Radimir crushed me against him. “It’s the adrenaline,” he told me. I could hear the pain in his voice, the guilt that he’d put me through this. “It’ll pass.” And he began to stroke his palms up and down my back. It wasn’t sexual, it was calming. Caring. He pressed his chin against the top of my head and cursed in Russian. Then, “I’m sorry I got you into all this,” he muttered.
He held me like that for a long time and I gradually felt my heart slow. I moved back from him, looking up in wonder. There was another side to him, one nobody saw. I thought back to what we’d been talking about, just before the police arrived. What happened to him and his parents...and was that why he was so cold? I wanted to help him, but he’d made it clear the subject was off limits. I’d have to wait until he chose to go there.
“How did they know?” I asked in a small voice. “The police. How did they know it wasn’t an accident?”
He squeezed my shoulders. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”
30
RADIMIR
An hour later, Valentin, Gennadiy, Mikhail and I sat down at the big table in Gennadiy’s dining room. “What’s going on?” I asked.
Gennadiy sighed and leaned forward, steepling his fingers. “According to our guy in the police, they know it was foul play. They found a partial footprint in the bathroom: someone wearing shoes, and Borislav was naked.”
“How have they found it now?!” I demanded. “It’s been almost a week! Borislav is in the ground! I thought they’d closed down the crime scene and gone home!”
“They had,” said Valentin sympathetically. “Spartak has cops in his pocket just like we do. Word is, he suspected it was murder and pushed them to go back and take a second look.”
I put my head in my hands and unleashed a long string of curses. It had been raining that night, my shoes had probably been wet and dirty. Why hadn’t I checked the floor before I left? But I knew the reason: I’d been racing after Bronwyn. I lifted my head and looked around the table. “I’m sorry,” I said solemnly. “I fucked up.”
Gennadiy reached across and patted my hand. “You’re human, brother, much as you like to pretend it’s not true.” The others nodded sympathetically. But Valentin looked drawn and tense. He was probably thinking that it should have been him in that bathroom, doing our family’s dirty work. If I’d let him, we wouldn’t be in this situation. He wouldn’t have been running after his lover. But I’d been too determined to protect him… I cursed again.
“The good news is, the police don’t know it was you,” said Gennadiy. “All of the families have had visits from the police.”
“The bad news is that Spartak has heard,” said Mikhail grimly. “He knows now that his brother was murdered. He’s called a meeting of all the families. He wants us there now.”
“Your woman—” Gennadiy began.
“She has a name,” I cut in.
He nodded apologetically. “Bronwyn. Is she going to be able to handle this?”
I glared at him. He’d wanted to kill her. That had always been his preferred solution, cleaner and simpler than marrying her. And what really bothered me was...if the situation was reversed, if he or Valentin or Mikhail had gotten themselves involved with a woman, I knew that I would have been pushing them to kill their lover, to protect them, just as he was trying to protect me. “She’s already lied to the police for us,” I said. I thought of how hard she worked, how she refused to quit despite being in constant pain. “She’s tougher than you think!” It came out sharper than I meant it to, and I felt my face heat.
We both dropped our gazes. I stood up. “Let’s go and see Spartak,” I muttered.
Spartak could have held the meet at his house, or at a club. But he demanded that we all go to an abandoned theme park on the edge of town. The wind whipped snow sideways, rocking the Ferris wheel back and forth a few degrees. Above us, an old-fashioned roller coaster sagged sideways, looking like it might collapse on us at any second. And the haunted house, once comically unscary, had been turned into something genuinely unsettling by mold and rot, the roof sagging and the broken windows gaping like jagged maws. At one in the morning, in the middle of a snowstorm, there was no one but us for miles and Spartak’s message was clear: he could kill us all and no one would know.