I looked quickly away, eyes roving across the tree diagram of Gennadiy’s businesses. As I stood there wracking my brain for a wayto bring Gennadiy down, I felt myself slowly rise up on my toes...and then sink back down. It’s an old habit left over from dancing, and it helps me think, but it looks dumb, so I only let myself do it when there’s no one around. I rose up...sank down. Gennadiy’s empire was vast and it connected to others too: Konstantin Gulyev, Luka Malakov...sometimes, the Russian Mafia felt like an infinite, sprawling beast…
I frowned.RussianMafia. I’d never thought about that part. Before they came to the US, the Bratva had operated in Russia. How had theRussiancops fought them?
I ran back to my computer and started typing, first looking on the internet, then connecting to the State Department and sifting through their files. I went down a rabbit hole, and when I emerged three hours later, I had my answer. The Russian government had tried everything for years. Nothing worked. And then one man changed everything. His name was Viktor Grushin.
I found a photo of him, a tall man in his late fifties with silver hair and a short, pointed beard: good looking, in an older man kind of way. He wasn’t a cop, he was former GRU, Russian Military Intelligence. A frickin’spy.Almost all of his file was classified, but he’d had a busy career, from the Middle East to Africa. And when the government brought him in to break the Bratva, he’d done it. He was like the Russian Elliot Ness, the one guy who’d been able to beat the gangs. I scanned quickly through his file, leaning forward in my chair. Was he still around? Could I get in contact with him, ask for advice?
Damnit.He’d died a few years ago. But he beat the Bratva. It waspossible.
As I closed the file, the exhaustion suddenly hit me. It was after eleven, and my day had started at six that morning. I stumbled downstairs and changed into my motorcycle gear, and a few moments later, I was scything through the streets on my bike.
Normally, I love riding. When you’re driving a car, you move in staccato, ninety-degree movements: pull out, overtake, pull in. On a bike, you chain together a series of long, sweeping arcs, blasting past the traffic like it’s standing still. There’s no feeling like it in the world,and it’s the only thing that lets me vent the toxic anger that builds up inside me.
Except...in the last few weeks, even riding hadn’t been working. Being around Gennadiy fed my anger, and the more he made me mad, the more I obsessed about him. He was like the loose tooth my tongue couldn’t stop jiggling. Even now, as I wove between cars on the Clark Street bridge, he was on my mind. I could see the wind ruffling his black hair, feel the kiss of his Russian accent against my ear. There were plenty of Bratva bosses. Why did this one rile me so much? Because he was arrogant? Because he’d destroyed part of my childhood and my mom’s legacy? Or something else?
I thought about the way his blood-red shirt pulled tight across the curves of his pecs. About the infuriatingly addictive scent of him. About those thick, tattooed fingers and how he’d described thrusting them into me. I could almost feel them, parting my damp lips and sliding up inside?—
A truck horn sounded, so close it vibrated through my entire body. I was in the wrong lane with a semi-truck thundering towards me, the driver bug-eyed with fear, waving for me to get out of the way. But my mind was still trying to catch up, and there wasn’t enough time. The truck’s headlights painted me white as we raced towards each other at a hundred-and-twenty miles an hour.
Fortunately, my body knew what to do even if my brain was frozen. My hands tugged the handlebars, and I instinctively leaned right. The bike drifted in behind a car, and the truck roared past an inch from my left elbow. I slowed and sat there panting, furious at myself. Ineverlost focus like that.What’s the matter with me?
At home, I clomped up the stairs to my second-floor apartment, then peeled off my leathers and sighed. I was starving, and I knew the refrigerator was empty. There were still packing boxes in the corner of the room from when I’d moved back to Chicago, two years ago. The problem was, I was never home.
I stumbled through to the bathroom, stripped off, and got into the shower. Long hot showers are my one indulgence. If anyone asked, I’d claim it was something to do with relaxing my muscles. But the truthis, I’d found that if you run the water hot enough and stand there for long enough with the water really hammering you...it’s almost like getting a hug.
When I got out, I wrapped myself in a towel and let myself fall full length on the bed. I was so exhausted, I instantly felt myself sinking down into black warmth.
But my mind was still spinning too fast. It wouldn’t let me come to rest in that peaceful darkness. It powered me on, down and down.
Down into my own personal hell.
6
ALISON
“We’re going to be late,”I muttered from the back seat.
“We’renotgoing to be late, honey.” My mom turned around and laid a gentle hand on my knee. “We left plenty of time.”
My dad, who was driving, peered through the falling snow at the nose-to-tail traffic that stretched all the way to the next intersection. He didn’t say anything, but I saw his jaw tighten: he wasn’t so sure. My stomach knotted.
“It’ll be fine, honey,” my mom told me. “Want to run through your routine again? I can play the music.”
I shook my head. I’d practiced the dance—as best I could, in our small apartment—since I woke up that morning, and I’d been running it on loop in my head since we left. I was as ready for the exam as I’d ever be. I just hoped I was ready enough.
“You got this,” my mom said softly, and patted my knee. “You’re gonna do great. And we’re proud of you no matter what.”
My mom was a ballet teacher, but back in the day, she’d been a pretty legendary dancer. She’d gone to the famous Fenbrook Academy in New York, toured with a big ballet company, had her picture on posters outside theaters… But she’d never pressured me to follow in her footsteps. When I was six, and she took me to my first ever class, she made it clear: “Try it. If you like it, do it. But don’t do it for me.”
As it turned out, I loved it. I had freakishly good balance, and transitioning from apliéto anarabesquefelt natural; it feltright.And the attention to detail, thinking about every angle of my body, down to the pointing of my toes, appealed to my obsessive brain. Plus, deep down, Ididwant to be like Mom. I didn’t have her calmness or her people skills, but I did have a little of her grace, and even if I’d never be as good as her, I wanted to dance. So I enrolled at her school, and I practiced every day alongside the other students. Mom made sure that I didn’t get any special treatment for being her daughter. Six years on, I was a gawky twelve-year-old on her way to her first big external exam, and I was a bundle of nerves. “We’re not even moving,” I mumbled.
“You know what?” said my dad. “You’re right. This traffic sucks. Fortunately,I have a plan.”
My mom and I rolled our eyes and smiled.I have a planwas one of my dad’s catchphrases. A big, bearded guy, he had a softly rounded belly and an enormous heart. He was a middle school English teacher, and a lot of people couldn’t figure out how someone like him had landed someone like my mom. She liked to tell the story of how she’d visited his school to talk to the kids and been utterly smitten by his gentle kindness.
My dad turned the wheel, and we broke out of the line of traffic and entered an alley. “We’ll follow this to the next street over and miss the traffic, it’ll save us ten, fifteen minutes. We’ll beearly.I deserve a cinnamon bun when we get there.”
“How about akisswhen we get there?” my mom said. “Your doctor said to moderate the cinnamon buns.”
