The cold hit like a fist. My breath fogged. Viktor's didn't. The man ran cold-blooded even in summer.
"Do you know," he said, lighting a cigarette in a room full of meat and hanging sides of beef, "how many bodies I have stored in freezers like this? Over the years?"
I kept my face blank. "I don't keep count of your work, Vik. I just clean up after it."
"Seventeen." He took a drag. "Seventeen different walk-ins, across four different cities. And you know what they all have in common?"
"They made bad Stroganoff?"
His hand shot out. Before I could react, he grabbed the back of my neck and slammed my face into the stainless steel door of a freezer unit.
Not hard enough to break anything. Just hard enough to make the point.
I tasted copper and felt warmth trickle from my nose.
"Ouch!" I told him. "Dammit…"
Ignoring my outburst, he released me and continued like nothing had happened. "They all thought they were smarter than me." Took another drag while I straightened, wiping blood from my upper lip with the back of my hand. "They all thought Iwould not notice when they stopped doing their job and started doing something else."
I turned to face him. Let him see the blood. Let him see I wasn't scared.
Even though I was. I was fucking terrified.
Not for me, though. For her.
"I'm doing my job," I insisted.
"Your job is to watch the blind girl. Make sure she is not problem." He flicked ash onto the floor. "Your job is not to fuck her. Your job is not to sit in my restaurant like you own table fourteen. Your job is not to make eyes at her like lovesick teenager."
"I'm not fucking her?—"
"You are distracted." His eyes went flat. Dead. "And distracted men make mistakes. And this organization does not tolerate mistakes right now."
Something in the way he said it made my skin crawl.
"What's really going on, Viktor?"
"What is going on is we have problem. Big problem. Someone is talking." He stepped closer. "Shipments are being intercepted. Targeted. DEA knows exactly which trucks to stop. Coast Guard knows exactly which containers to search. Someone is feeding them information."
My blood went ice-cold beneath the warmth trickling from my nose.
"And you think?—"
"I think it is someone close. Someone who hears things. Someone we trust to be in the room while business is discussed." He smiled. "Someone we have, until recently, dismissed as harmless."
He knew. Or suspected. Same thing when it came to Viktor.
"The blind girl plays piano," I said carefully. "How could she hear anything over that? And besides, she doesn't speak Russian. She doesn't know what you're talking about half the time."
"Does not need to speak Russian to hear dates. Times. Numbers. Names." He ground out his cigarette on the wall. "Does not need to see to remember."
My molars were going to crack if I kept this up.
"You're wrong."
"Maybe. Maybe not." He grabbed my jaw. Forced my face toward his. Blood from my nose smeared his thumb. "But here is what I know for certain. You are compromised. You want to protect her. And if she is the leak, you will try to stop me from doing what needs to be done."
"Viktor—"
