I needed answers to infuse order into this situation.
“What happened last night?” I said.
Dmitri took a slow sip of soup, his gaze never leaving my own. “Tell me what you remember.”
I tamped down my growing frustration that he couldn’t justtell meinstead of ordering me around.
“I was at the club with my friend….” Fear lanced through my insides. “What happened to her?”
“The redhead’s fine,” he said, waving his hand dismissively.
Some of the pressure eased in my chest.
“I remember this guy dragging me across the club,” I said with a frown. That’s where things started getting really fuzzy. Until the moment I stepped into Dmitri’s kitchen, I would’ve sworn my memory of him at the club was a hallucination. “And then you showed up.”
Dmitri remained silent, watching me intently.
“What were you even doing there?” I asked.
He didn’t seem like the type who went clubbing, but what did I truly know about him? It was also possible the club was just another business under his protection.
“Do you remember anything after that?” he said, completely ignoring my question.
“I vaguely remember lying on a couch.” I frowned, trying to pin down those floating pieces. “For some reason, I could’ve sworn there was a guy tied to a chair… And then I fell asleep.”
“So you missed the fun part,” he said flatly.
“Fun part?” I said, certain his version offunwas the complete opposite of my own.
“The part,” he said, his eyes narrowing, “where I sliced off every single body part of the man who dared touch you.”
Chapter sixteen
Alisa
I spent the next week looking over my shoulder, waiting for Dmitri to pop out of the shadows.
When a mark got a little handsy on a solo assignment, I almostwishedfor it. And then immediately dispelled that thought and dumped extra strong poison in the drink.
The man murdered my brother. It was a mantra I kept repeating to myself when I was secretly disappointed the shadows didn’t reveal him.
Every time I told myself I was relieved he was keeping his distance, something inside me rumbled its disagreement.
I ignored it.
Thankfully, Natalya had agreed to hang out with me. Relief from my own thoughts, and a dose of her cutting honesty was exactly what I needed right now.
After the doorman called up to Natalya, I headed into an oversized stainless steel elevator. I wondered if she even lived in this apartment building, or if she’d chosen it to throw competitors off track about the location of her actual home.
I’d known her my entire life and yet so much of her was unknown to me.
We sat together at the Pakhan’s meetings and traded laughs. But truthfully, beyond work and her wit I knew so little about her. We’d been trained from a young age to not trust each other. After all, we were all in competition for the same job.
But other than Gemma, she was the closest thing I had to a friend. And I sure as shit needed a friend to help set me on the right path.
When I opened the frosted glass doors to the meeting room, Natalya flicked her glossy hair over her shoulder.
“Your apartment has nice amenities,” I said, closing the door behind me. God, I wished my building had amenities beyond rusted over windows that were a workout to open.
