26
VIKTOR
Isee one of the employees unlock the door as I park my car. For the entire drive, I kept thinking about Tati and how she looked at me with those eyes—round and dark with fear and worry. I couldn’t tell her that I feel exactly the same. I don’t like the idea of leaving her right now, even knowing that Teddy will be there to protect her. He could be God Himself and I would still want to be the one by her side.
It’s got to be done this way, though. If I’m wrong and someone is looking out for me here, the smart thing for them to do is to attack her first. She’s a walking Achilles’ Heel. I don’t know what I would do if someone hurt her in front of me.
This task is more about preparation than anything else. After I take Nikolai off the chess board and the smoke’s cleared, his loyalists will want answers. And if I can’t provide, I’ll have to deal with them, and then whether I survive or not, all of this will be for nothing.
I’m not planning to be here long. Just in and out. Simple. It started raining as soon as I got here. Large raindrops splatteredmy windshield as I turned the car off. Of course, the weather would start to turn now, of all days.
As soon as I step out onto the sidewalk, the memory of Marla’s last moments comes back to me. It was warm just like it is now with the smell of coffee from the shop down the street mixed in with the asphalt in the air. I pass by the place where she died, the sound of hard soles walking over the very last place she would ever see the sun. The concrete has clearly been cleaned of her blood prior to the rush of rain falling now, but I know the spot. I’ll always know it. It’s like there’s a vibration pulling at me.
She died for this. I can’t let her sacrifice be in vain.
I get inside the bank and the air conditioning blasts me, cutting through my damp clothes and chilling my bones as I walk across shiny linoleum that’s been freshly waxed and past an overfed security guard standing at the door. There’s no other customers around. A relief, really, just in case I was wrong about being followed here.
There’s a single teller sitting behind a counter. She’s a young woman with dark hair and cat’s eye glasses, looking down at a computer just out of my line of sight. She’s typing quickly and the moment I step up, she stops, turns, and smiles at me.
“Welcome to First Community Bank,” she says. “How can I help you?”
“I need to get into a safety deposit box.”
“Okay,” she says, turning to her computer. “Name, please?”
Shit. This might be an issue. In all the madness, I didn’t realize that I might have to identify myself. “It’s for Marla Chekov,” I tellher. I’m ready if I need to force the issue. I hope I don’t, though. Holding up a bank isn’t exactly in my repertoire.
She nods and continues to type. After a few seconds, she turns to me, her eyes still on the screen. “ID, Please?”
I hesitate for half a second, then I hand over my driver’s license. She takes it, then walks it back to the printer behind her and makes a copy.
“Thank you, Mr. Morozov,” she says with a smile. A wash of relief comes over me.Thank you, Marla.
She takes out a paper on a clipboard and places my ID on top before sliding it to me. “If you could fill this out, please? She started the paperwork to add you, but since you were out of town at the time, we just had to leave a note in the system that you’d be stopping by.”
Well. I guess she thought of everything.
It’s less than thirty seconds later and I’m being escorted to another room. The teller tries to make small talk with me and I respond politely, but my focus is sharpened. I need to get done with this and get back Tati quickly.
Down a short hallway to a locked door that she uses a ring of keys to unlock. The room we enter is covered in three walls of drawers from floor to ceiling and a counter in the center with two stools on either side of it. She leads me around the wall of drawers, silently looking up and down each row before stopping in front of one.
“Four-two-three-nine.” She says it softly and nods to the drawer marked with the numbers. It has two keyholes. I pull out my key and she pulls out hers, and we unlock it at the same time. Shethen pulls the drawer out, a long metal box with a hinged lid keeping it shut, and sets it down on the counter.
“Take all the time you need,” she says and leaves me in the room by myself. I open the lid and pull out all the folded papers and envelopes. As I do, a small note falls out and onto the counter. I set everything down and open the note. It reads,
Viktor,
If you’re reading this, then I’ve failed and now you’re the only one left who can get justice for Nicki. Inside this box is everything I’ve found about his death so far. I’m not going to tell you what everything is because you need to learn what I did for yourself. I’m hoping you’ll see evidence of what I’ve suspected all along. The truth of things is that Nikolai somehow found out that Nicki was planning on leaving the Bratva and had him killed.
You should also know that the night of the accident, we came to you for help. He had been struggling afterthe job you’d done involving Sturov.
The name strikes like a bell in my mind. Jacob Sturov was a part of the brotherhood before he stole a brick of drugs from Nikolai during a deal. Nicki and I were to find and end him, which was done within a week of his trying to run and hide. We ended up finding him in the basement of a business of one of our supposed allies.
And now that I think of it, it was also around the time that Nicki started having hypotheticals with me about what life outside the Bratva would look like. I read on.
What you probably don’t remember is what Nicki found out about Sturov after the fact. You see, Sturov was looking to helphis wife, who was dying of cancer. Nikolai had stopped paying him as punishment for insulting him at one of the dinners he liked to have. Nicki never found out how he’d insulted him, but I guess that doesn’t really matter now, does it? The bottom line is that Sturov messed up and Nikolai was punishing him for it.
At the time that he stole the brick of drugs from Nikolai, it had been three months since he’d been paid a dime. As I understand it, he’d gone to Nikolai several times over that time period and every time, Nikolai would tell him that he would get his money, but it just never happened. Sturov apparently had money set aside in his savings, but it was running out and his wife needed her treatment. He was desperate.
