His shoulders sag with relief like I’ve just granted him a last-minute stay of execution.
“Go back to the other officers before you begin to look suspicious,” I say.
“Yes, Mr. Barninov.”
He hurries off. I glance at Andrei before turning and stepping closer to the wrecked storefront, looking past the shattered windows into the interior. This operation was one of the quiet, inconspicuous ones. No guns, no drugs.
But it was touched. And it was touched precisely as if to say, “You think you can turn this into something clean? It’ll be destroyed before you get the chance.”
I clench my hands into hard fists, holding for a beat, then releasing. Fury courses through me. But such emotions won’t do me any good in the moment. Indeed, whoever did this is most likely hoping I let my anger get the best of me and do something foolish.
Not a chance.
Andrei watches me, waiting for orders.
“Garin wants me spooked,” I say quietly in Russian. “He wants to push me into making mistakes.”
“You think it was him?”
“No one else it could be. None of the small-time operations in this town would risk the blowback from such an attack.”
Not to mention, Garin is exceptionally skilled at getting to me, of doing it in such a way that it doesn’t look like it was him.
Elena appears in my mind’s eye. For a moment, I’m back to the day she was killed. I shake my head, returning to the present.
“He wants me nervous.”
“And he wants the banks nervous,” Andrei says. “Even if you can keep your operations in order, there’s still the risk in their eyes that something like this will happen to anyone affiliated with you.”
I say nothing, thinking it all over, because he’s right.
“Do you want to hit back?” Andrei asks.
If it were any other time but this goddamn month, the answer would be yes. I’d put every man I could on tracking down who did this, then hit back twice as hard. But I can’t. I think of the IPO, the scrutiny, the delicate arrangement that holds my future and Sasha’s together. Nothing would sink my plans faster than being linked to an open attack.
“Not yet,” I say. “Nothing more than a quiet investigation for now.”
He nods, slipping his hands into his coat pockets. I’m not going to give the banks any excuse to pull back when I’m so goddamn close.
“We’ll find out who did it,” I say. “Then I’ll decide what to do with the information.”
My phone vibrates. I slip it out and see a message from Doran, one of my guards.
Sasha is back from tutoring. With Amalie now. Nothing else to report.
Good. I slip my phone back into my pocket and start walking toward the car, the image of the city burning in my mind’s eye.
It’s the least I’d do to keep those I care about safe.
“That’s our man,” Andrei says. “Never would’ve guessed he was a cop.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
My eyes are on Kyle Denning.
The first thing I notice about him is his gait. It’s not one you would expect from a cop, the sort that clocks them instantly as law enforcement even when they’re not in uniform—the head-on-a-swivel, squared-shoulders sort of posture.
No. His gait makes him seem more like a low-class thug than a member of CPD’s Intelligence Division.I imagine it’s all part of the undercover act.
