Alik braces his elbows on his thighs, attention fixed on me. “How do you know di Salvo?”
I dump what’s left of my potato chips onto an empty plate. Talking about that man kills my appetite. “Longstanding family connection.” Something about the way Alik said the name catches my attention. “You know him, don’t you?”
“Enough to want to castrate him and choke him with his own balls,da.”
Unease twists through my gut, but I smother it. I always feel queasy whenever Renzo’s name comes up. No reason for it to be any different now. “I followed him into the club. Saw him inside, too, just after you killed that guy.”
Alik mutters a vague acknowledgement then gets up and heads to his desk. The room is large, with a second cluster of furniture at the other end in front of an oversized fireplace, and plenty of space left over for the spacious desk and collection of wingback leather chairs that dominate the center of the office.
It’s not the size of the room that makes Alik suddenly seem far away. It’s the lost look he gets when he studies a picture frame that holds pride of place in one corner of his desk, right next to an enormous vase of lilacs. Their perfume is heady, maybe even more so for being out of season. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realize they’re the reason Alik aways smells vaguely of flowers—and that, despite the summery scent, their placement is somber. Like fresh blooms laid on a grave. I refocus on the framed photo. I don’t know whose picture it is, and I want to. Very much.
Alik is so lost in his own world he doesn’t realize I’m standing next to him until I bump our shoulders together. His gaze stays locked on the face in the frame, his grip angled so I can’t get a good view. “Who is that?”
When he speaks, his voice is so quiet, so cold, I have to lean closer to hear him. “This is the reason I’m in Chicago. The reason I’m going to kill Rocco Pagano, Renzo di Salvo, Burim Shkodra. The reason I’m going to kill them all.”
24
SERA
There’s rage in his voice, but heartbreak too. I shift so I can get a view of the photo. A woman stares up at me. She’s young, around my age if I had to guess, with blonde hair and light blue eyes. It’s a candid photo, her bright smile caught in the moment she turns around and realizes she’s on camera. “Who is she?”
“Katerina Varvara Valentin.” Alik’s voice hold a wealth of love and pain. He caresses his thumb across the woman’s face before placing the frame back on his desk.
Valentin. She shares Alik’s last name and it’s clear he loves her deeply. Cold trepidation blankets me. I don’t want to ask, but I have to. “Is she your wife?”
“Rina?” Alik startles. “No, definitely not my wife. She’s my baby sister.”
“Your sister?” He’s not married or widowed. I wait for the relief to come but it doesn’t. Instead, that trepidation twists harder. Whatever happened to this woman, my family is involved. “Where is she?”
Alik sighs and all the life drains out of him. He drops intohis desk chair, his eyes fixed blankly on the other side of the room. “Honestly, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, she vanished two years ago and while I’m next to certain she’s dead, I haven’t been able to find her body.”
Alik sounds so lost. I want to hug him, offer some sort of comfort. My arms are already outstretched when I stop, pull back. That’s not what our relationship is. Touching during frantic sex, sure. But where deep emotions are concerned, there’s a chasm between us that feels impossible to cross.
I retreat to one of the leather chairs on the opposite side of the desk, folding myself into it and well out of reach of temptation. “Rina is why you came to Chicago?”
Alik pulls a bottle of vodka and a glass from one of the desk drawers, pouring a shot and downing it quickly. He offers me one, but I decline.
“Yes,” he eventually answers. “I came here to find the people who took her, who murdered her. I came here to destroy them, but not before I find out where they left her body.”
In some cavernous corner of the house, a clock strikes the hour. Four echoing gongs that confirm we’re not getting any sleep tonight. “Tell me what happened.”
Alik releases another heavy sigh. “Rina was going to college in Boston. She’s much younger than me and my brother, Ruri. The only child from our dad’s second marriage. She wanted to come to the US to study, free from the family’s influence and restrictions, and thepakhannever says—neversaid—no to her. So, despite all my objections, Rina comes, is studying in Boston, partying with friends, and then, one day, she’s just… gone.”
I watch Alik down another shot. His throat strains with the effort to swallow, memories trying to fight their way past the alcohol. “Do you know what happened? What did the police say?”
“The police…” His laugh is flat. “They were one step past useless. They were able to track down her last known location, a heavily trafficked bar popular with university kids. The kind where every surface is damp with some sort of fluid. The cops, her friends, the asshole she was dating at the time—they all confirmed the same thing. Rina went out with a group of friends. They remember that she was dancing and drinking one minute, then gone the next. That was all the cops could give me before their leads went cold.”
I shiver, all too aware of how easy it is to make a young woman disappear. “If Rina disappeared in Boston, how did you end up in Chicago?”
“I picked up the interrogation where the cops left off. I don’t have the same kind of constraints they do when it comes to questioning suspects. As soon as Rina’s friends reported her missing, I flew over from Novosibirsk. While the cops sat on their thumbs, plodding through their rule book and looking for clues, I took a more direct approach. Turns out one of the bartenders was on a local thug’s payroll, doping drinks and handing unconscious women over to a guy on the bottom of a very, very long food chain.”
Agitated, Alik slams down another shot of vodka before pushing back from his chair. His bare feet make heavy steps as he starts to tread a hole in the carpet. “I moved as fast as I could, Sera. Ripped apart lowlife after lowlife, barely leaving enough time in between to wash their blood off my hands. Weeks went by, then months. My father was working every back-channel connection we have from Russia while I was on the ground here, literally tearing information out of people’s mouths, and we still couldn’t find her.”
He paces close to where I’m sitting and I want to reach out and squeeze his hand, but don’t. “When did you realize Rina was here, in Chicago?”
