Lev shrugged. “???.”Smoke.
A buzzing sounded, and all the lights went out. It was pitch black. I could feel bodies in the dark with me. I could hear them. Grunts. Sacks when they hit the floor. None of them touched me. I felt air. Air swirling, like when a knife slices through it at high speed.
When I felt brightness touch the darkness behind my eyes—I’d closed them for some reason, clutching the picture tight—I opened them to find a completely different scene.
Men were dead all around me. Blood pooled beneath my heels. Lev was at the top of the stairs, next to Bykov, who had pushed Livia behind him. Maybe realizing that the man he’d only heard stories aboutdidexist. A monster realizing a bigger monster lived and breathed in the darkness with him.
“Tell me, Livia,” I said, my blood running cold. I was done fucking around. “Is my husband hurt. My family.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Is my baby—”
“No,” I said. “A life for a life. You know the rules.”
“Let them go—” she started, but she stopped when she realized Lev had moved.
He’d taken a defensive position, even if the look on his face said that this was playtime.
Cerise walked out of the shadows on the arm of a man. A young man who wore black-rimmed eyeglasses. When he greeted Livia and Arsenius, it wasn’t with a Russian accent. Austrian.
The creator of the supposed “Russian” drug. Lev had told me he grew up in Austria but had Russian roots. It was the reason Lev and his numbers couldn’t shut down the operation unless it took place on home soil. The creator was keeping the main operation in Austria, even though he had brought the drug itself to Russia. Which Lev’s boss didn’t want.
It seemed that Lev took orders, and that was that. But he also skirted around the edges of those orders, sometimes, to help mamma. And since the girl in the picture was going to marry my brother—there was a personal stake in this war.
“Do not stop the party on my account,” Cerise said, holding tight to the man. Her accent was deep and French.
She looked as wild as I remembered, but not in a free spirit way. In a murderous one.
Her hair used to be blonde, but it curled around her head in a white storm. Her eyes were filled with liquid hate, and the lines around them reminded me of cracks. Cracks that were gouged from the hell she had created for herself. She’d aged. She looked older than mamma, and mamma was older than her.
Livia stared at her until her eyes narrowed. Arsenius opened his mouth, but Cerise held her hand up.
“This is not your fight,” she said to him. “You have no power here.”
“My son!” he almost roared. “My son’s blood is on the line.”
Livia seemed to be in too much shock to speak, but her lips moved. I read them. “Aleksander. My baby.” There was pleading there, but in her eyes—realization.
Cerise didn’t have to do what she did. Plot with the devil to kill my mamma. She didn’t have to endanger her daughter’s life for what had happened in the past. The time—years—spent apart was by Cerise’s own design. Hatred fueled her, and it drove a wedge between her and her daughter.
The young man on Cerise’s arm took her hand and kissed it. Permission?
“Kill them,” she said, a hunger in her eyes so dark that it seemed to be scenting the blood around her. “Kill them all.”
Livia screamed and went after her mother. The man on Cerise’s arm slapped her across the face before she could touch her. The sting of it rang out and Livia stumbled into the wall, holding her lip. It dripped blood.
Arsenius snapped his neck from side to side and then went after the man.
They were turning on each other.
A man stepped out of the shadows. I realized then that Lev had sensed him before. They circled each other, and a dangerous tension filled the air. More savage than it had been before.
Was he what Lev was? He moved similarly to Lev, but in his own way. It was hard to tell if he was just a trained killer or on Lev’s level.
It didn’t matter. I had my own issues. Men were moving toward me. Herding me in. There was nowhere to run. If I took a step forward, I’d be in their arms. If I took a step back, I’d be knocking into them from behind.
I reached inside my suit jacket and retrieved the gun Lev had given me. If I was going down, I’d be taking some of them with me. I held the gun tight in my hands, aimed, and—
The lights went out again.
