I’ve never seen this room before, but I know right away that Nate would call it Maxim’s murder dungeon or his demonic torture chamber. Really it looks like a storage room, some walls of shelves, a concrete floor slightly sloped to a drain, a big sink in the corner. There is a man strapped down to a metal chair in the middle of the room, andthat’swhat gives it away, really.
There is also blood dripping from his jaw, so that really seals it.
The restrained man catches sight of me and laughs. If I squint, I can almost recognize him. Low-level Orlov crony, if I had to guess.
“You called in your bitch to finish the job?” The man asks, and I recoil, but smile. This just got alotmore fun.
Maxim looks over his shoulder seeing me with Sasha, and his posture goes rigid before he turns back to the man and unleashes a fierce slap that sends more blood and probably one of the man’s teeth onto the floor.
I tut and waltz up to the scene, stopping at Maxim’s side with a hand on his shoulder. He shakes lightly, perhaps from thebeating he’s been giving, but more likely from rage barely kept beneath the surface of his skin.
“Who’s this?” I ask.
The knock made the man dizzy, but he rights his head on his neck after a few moments of saliva and blood dripping from his lip.
“Mikhail Kozlov.”
“He looks old,” I say.
“Not much older than your husband,” Kozlov taunts, and I grin.
“My husband wears it much better,” I say. I turn my attention to Maxim. “What did he do?”
The man must’ve really pissed him off for Maxim to be here bloodying his knuckles instead of at home softly snoring on the couch. Beating up a mobster in a murder basement feels like it toes the line of the enforcer work that Maxim seems to think he and I are so far above, but duty calls.
“Nothing!” Kozlov shouts. He spits, blood and saliva landing on the ground next to his chair. “As I was explaining, it was just business.”
My eyebrows jump in amusement.It’s just business, being said by anyone other than the boss is a sure way to tell that they were getting up to shit they shouldn’t be.
“So you’re an entrepreneur,” I say. I wrap an arm around Maxim’s waist and rest my head on his bicep. Every bit of him is tense, practically vibrating with the anger twinging through his body. “Cute of you.”
The description annoys the bound man, but he has some desperate hope in his eyes while he talks to me, like I might take his side and convince Maxim to take it easy on him. LikeI’mthe merciful one of the two of us.
“It’s a good opportunity,” he explains. “I swear I was going to tell you—I just had to try it out first to make sure it was viable.”
“And what was this little start up then?” I ask. “And don’t say crypto.”
“Selling.Girls,” Maxim spits through clenched teeth. My stomach drops, though I don’t let it show on my face.
“What kind of girls?” I ask.
“See?” Kozlov’s face alights with more hope. “That’s the thing, they’re not even from the states, we bring them in.”
“How old?”
“Twenties,” he says, then amends, “most of them at least.”
Kids, is what he’s saying.
Facingchildren, ripped from their homes and brought to another country without their families so that rich men can do God only knows what with them. It makes me feel sick all over again.
Vanessa confessed that Cillian was mad that we were too virtuous for those markets and that we were wrong to think weapons were any less dangerous than selling real humans and their various body parts. There’s money in that, but as Dad always said, “The cost of such business is your very soul.”
“You told him no?” I ask Maxim. His eyes meet mine, a slight question in his and I nod just barely, imploring him to trust me. “Could be good money.”
“Money we would of course give you your share of,” Kozlov says. His tone of spitting and calling me a bitch has changed now that he thinks of me as a potential ally.
I’ve never gotten to play the good cop before, usually just my face inspires fear, but this man doesn’t seem to know me. For once, my reputation really does not precede me other than the wife of a powerful man.
