“I don’t owe you anything except you’re not dying by my hands. And you forget the Moscow and New York bratvas have an alliance. If anything, I should turn you over to Peter and have him mete out justice on his brother’s killer.”
Years of bluffing as a fixer lubricated my vocal cords to coat my tone in false bravado. “Then I don’t understand what there is to discuss. You think I’m going to beg you for my life?”
“I don’t know…are you?”
“Not in this lifetime.”
“How about your family’s?”
My gut tightened.
“As much as I hate to say this, turning you over to Peter is only going to start a bloody war between the Russian and Italian mafias. I’d rather not begin my reign as pakhan in the middle of one. And it will not end with your life, or the De Luccis, or the Morettis. Peter would wipe out three generations of your family.”
I inhaled sharply at this. The initial adrenaline I woke up with was slowly fading into a reality that my feet were lodged in shit-sucking quicksand. No, I was already waist-deep in it.
“I don’t know what else you need from me. Looks like you’ve already solved the problem.”
A crooked smile twisted his mouth. It was a smile that reminded me of the sharp blade of a scimitar and the blood it was going to draw.
“You think I did this out of an altruistic heart?”
“Didn’t know you have a heart to begin with,” I muttered.
He brushed my insult off. “You owe me, Miss De Lucci, and I’m going to collect on that debt.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “You have a scandal you want me to fix?”
He scoffed. “I don’t need your fixer capabilities seeing that many of your clients end up dead.”
Again. Asshole. But it did sting.
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense.” I held my tongue so I could go home because, the little I understood of Kirill, I was sure he was going to keep me from doing exactly that. “Is the traffic stop shootout on the police scanners now?”
“Yes, they’re taping off the crime scene as we speak.”
“Don’t state troopers have body cams and dash cams? They would have captured everything.”
“That’s taken care of. There was a disruption to the cloud storage. It never uploaded. My hackers had already edited the footage. When they finally dock what’s stored internally, it won’t show past when the trooper made the stop.”
“Wouldn’t that make the investigators suspicious?”
“That’s why we have to act now. Establish your whereabouts.”
I sat up straighter, my gaze turning wary. “That I was here?”
“Where else?”
“That I was with you?”
Kirill gave a condescending sigh. “Lyutsiferka,you’re not obtuse.”
I laughed a bit maniacally. “No one would believe it. Least of all, Dom or Luca. They know I hate you.”
“Ouch.” The way Kirill saidouchwas bland and without so much of an eye flicker. “You wound me.”
“And don’t think I didn’t know you just called me Lucifer.”
“Little Lucifer. I’ll think of a better endearment.”
