“I’ve been asking questions around the crash site, talking to locals who might have seen something,” he reports. “Found a few things that don’t add up, but I could be wrong about what they mean.”
“What kind of things?”
“There’s a small village about fifteen miles from the crash site. Local clinic treated a man who stumbled in three days after the accident—severe burns, head trauma, no identification. He disappeared before they could get proper medical records.”
“Description?”
“Matches your son’s general build and age, but the injuries made positive identification impossible. It could have been anyone. Hiker, vagrant, another crash victim from a different incident.”
“Anything else?”
“Not yet.”
I look across the room at Kasimira, who’s pretending to read baby name books while actually listening to every word of my conversation.
“Keep investigating,” I tell him.
44
DANTE
The mirrorin this shithole motel reflects a stranger’s face back at me.
The scars run from my left temple down to my jaw—angry, raised lines where skin grafts failed to take properly. The plastic surgeon I found in Mexico promised perfect reconstruction, claiming he could make me look exactly as I did before the crash.
He lied.
The work is sloppy, uneven, leaving me looking like a monster from some cheap horror movie, which is why I slit his throat in his own operating room before the final bandages came off.
I trace the worst scar with my fingertip, feeling the rough texture of poorly healed tissue. Nearly six months of hiding in backwater clinics while quack doctors tried to rebuild my face, and this is what I have to show for it.
But I’m alive. That’s what matters.
The crash should have killed me. It would have killed me if the pilot hadn’t given me those precious seconds of warning before we went down.
“Engine failure, sir. We’re going down hard. Brace for impact.”
I managed to get the emergency parachute on and jump before the plane became a fireball across the Nevada desert. The landing broke three ribs and left me unconscious for God knows how long, but I survived.
The question that’s haunted me since the accident is simple: who wanted me dead?
Someone sabotaged that plane. Engines don’t just fail simultaneously without help. Someone with access to my private aircraft, someone who knew my travel schedule, someone I trusted enough to let near my transportation.
But who?
The Russians I was supposed to meet in Portland? Possible, but they were expecting delivery of their laundered funds. Killing me would have disrupted their own operations.
Rival families trying to muscle in on our territory? Again, possible, but the Morettis have been careful about maintaining peaceful relationships with other organizations.
Or someone inside our own operation.
Someone who stood to gain from my death.
The thought makes my blood boil. Years of building the perfect money laundering network, training Kasimira to be the ideal front for our operations, and someone tried to destroy it all in one spectacular explosion.
Seeing her brought everything back. The way she used to look at me with complete trust, signing whatever documents I placed in front of her without question. The way she’d curl against me after I had to discipline her for some rebellion.
Yet, she ran away like an ungrateful child.
