“You told us you didn’t know her location.” Dima’s eyes narrow. “That’s why you led us to Maleah.”
Mark flinches at the sound of her name.
“You knew her location all along, didn’t you?” Maksim snarls. Mark doesn’t even need to answer. The guilt is scrawled across his face in neon letters.
“Why the fuck would you give us Maleah if you knew where she was all along?”
“Look—” Mark tries, but Maksim’s rage won’t be silenced. Not on this subject. Not after what he saw.
“No,” he roars, his voice shaking the walls. “You saw what they did to her. She was sold, and you what? Saved your own skin while hers was bloodied and bruised by those?—”
“Ava never told us!” Mark screams, chest heaving as he bolts to his feet, eyes wet. “She never told us the full extent of what Elias did to her or what he was capable of. No one knew. Not even Libby. We thought maybe he smacked her around sometimes. We all knew he locked her up like some kind of leper, but none of us knew how far his reach went or how sick his mind was.
“Archer threatened me, all right?” Mark pushes a hand through his messy hair, pacing. “He said he’d send my mom to prison for her old drug charges. She’s been sober for over ten years. I couldn’t let my sister go into foster care. So, I told him where Ava was. And he said when the time came, I was supposed to give you Maleah’s name.”
“We didn’t actually track you down, did we?” I ask, calm as I can manage, trying to cut through the suffocating air. “You led us to you.”
Mark nods miserably. “He told me you’d come for me,” he says, voice small, eyes red. “When I asked why I had to give you Maleah’s name, he told me not to worry about it. That she’d be safe. I had no idea what Elias would… I still can’t…”
Words fail him. Words fail all of us. This goes deeper than any of us thought.
“What was the second thing he wanted?” Niko demands.
“He wanted me to clean up a video and decrypt some files,” Mark says, sinking back into his chair. “Then, I was supposed to give the SD card to Ava and have her deliver it to him.”
We’ve been wondering how Ava ended up with that SD card. Did she plan the whole charade when she ran from the penthouse? Or was it coincidence?
“So, you gave Ava the evidence of Matthias killing Elias.” I make it a statement, because what the fuck else could it be?
Mark shakes his head, firm. “No. That card had nothing to do with Matthias’s arrest. Trust me.”
Leon scoffs but keeps his mouth shut.
“When I asked why it had to be Matthias who took me, Archer said the only way I could access the files was inside the Bratva database,” Mark explains. “When I asked how he’d know when Ava had the SD card and how she’d get it to him, he didn’t answer. Just shrugged. Said it didn’t matter how—only that it had to be her.”
The pieces start to click together, one by one, until a picture forms. Ava hasn’t betrayed Matthias. Not in the way he thinks, anyway. She’s been trying to protect her friend and his family. It isn’t much of a leap to believe she was coerced into working with this agent long before she ever came back to Seattle.
“What was on the drive?” I ask, my curiosity sharp.
Mark smirks. “Let me show you.”
One second his hands are empty, the next he’s palming his cell phone and hijacking the main display system. The screens light up with dark, grainy footage I recognize instantly.
Fuck.
“I was barely able to clean it up.” Mark wrinkles his nose. “It’s old. Late eighties, early nineties. Plus, it’s Russian, which means the quality was even shittier than if it had been made in America.” He glances at us sheepishly. “No offense.”
Before I can snap at him, he presses play.
“From what I can tell, it’s two boys, probably in their teens,” he narrates. I don’t need to watch. I’ve heard this story too many times. “The taller one looks older, maybe trained. He comes at the younger one. They fight, then…”
He doesn’t have to finish. The younger boy wins. Then cries. Then shakily dumps body into the river below. The boy never surfaces. At least, as far as I know.
“Why is an American FBI agent interested in a fight between two homeless boys twenty-odd years ago in Russia?” Nikolai asks. He doesn’t connect the dots. He doesn’t recognize the boy. None of them do.
“It wasn’t just the fight,” Mark says, tapping his phone until the screen zooms in on the boy’s wrist. “It was this birthmark. That seemed to hold his attention.”
I don’t need to turn to know every set of eyes is locked on me, Roman’s included. They all recognize it. They’d all been there the day Matthias tattooed over the mark. Roman hadn’t, too young at the time, but he knows. He has the same mark. It’s in the bloodline.
