A plea to talk face to face so she can truly apologize.
“Oh.”
“What’s up?” Ruslan lifts his head. “What is it?”
“Moira. She wants to talk.”
“When?”
“Today. Can I… Can I go?”
Ruslan meets my gaze. “Do you want to?”
I nod. “Yeah… yeah, I think I do.”
“Okay, I’ll take you. But I have to attend a meeting first.”
“Can I come?”
Ruslan smiles and kisses my nose. “As long as you don’t mind waiting in the car.”
31
RUSLAN
Twelve hours later, I stand in front of Kraven Sidorov, daring him to lie to my face once again.
“Your good gesture to the Italians was to keep them quiet, wasn’t it? They still suspect you a little, but you knew they had nothing to do with that plane coming down. They knew because it was you. It was you all along and you were growing tired of keeping up the charade because for some reason, you were equally shitty at hiding your involvement.”
An official visit from the Suit isn’t like when we dropped by for a chat beforehand. When the Suit pays an official visit, everyone knows about it. News spreads like wildfire, minus the details of why a visit is happening, but over the years, the Suit has learned that the most effective way to stop people running when they’re cornered is to give them nowhere to run. While it’s tempting to flee, letting other families in the area know puts them on high alert since most are eager to get in good with the Suit.
Other than Kraven, apparently.
“It was clever, I’ll admit. The last time I was here, you told me the tattoos I’d find on those dead men would be fresh which would prove the Italians were trying to frame you, and you were right. Those tattoos were fresh, but they weren’t your men or the Italians. A couple of them were mercenaries for hire. The one who shot Cassian? His mug was all over L.A. on a wanted bounty. Not the smartest choice you’ve ever made.”
Kraven’s jaw tics back and forth as he sits behind his desk, glaring at me with hatred that pales in comparison to the anger simmering hot under my own skin. Ivy was so ready to die for this fucker, so ready to end her life so she would stop being a problem.
She was never the problem to begin with.
“So I have a theory.” I begin pacing back and forth in front of the desk. “You can tell me if I’m on the right track. That drug deal between you and the Italians was huge. The work you both put into it was enough to tell me and the rest of the Suit that both you and Nico were serious about peace. So why blow up the plane? Why put such an important deal in jeopardy?” Stopping at one end of the desk, I turn back. “It was an accident.”
Kraven’s brow twitches ever so slightly.
“The drugs weren’t the target, were they? It was Ivy all along.”
Kraven’s lips purse slightly.
“Digging a little deeper, I found that Camden, Ivy’s father, was about to flee the country with a wonderful woman called Florence Marino. Do you know her?” I laugh humorlessly. “Of course you do. She was engaged to your son a few years ago. Now granted, at a glance, having your son engaged to a woman like that and then to cut the engagement off could have been aninsult to the Italians. Are their women not good enough for your son? I could see them wanting revenge for that.”
Again, I pause at the opposite end of the desk and turn to face Kraven.
“But where does Ivy fit into that? And the attack against my own life and Cassian’s, where does that tie to the drugs? We were running in circles for weeks trying to make the connection until Ivy herself suggested that it was never about the drugs. It was about her.” Stopping in the middle of his desk, I place my hands on the smooth wood and lean toward Kraven. “Where’s your son? Where’s Alexei?”
Kraven fixes me with a furious glare but to my surprise, it quickly melts into tired defeat. Suddenly, he’s not Kraven the Pakhan in charge of an empire, but an exhausted father. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I lost contact with him a few days ago. I…” He shakes his head slowly and closes his eyes. “I have been trying to protect him for so long, you have to understand that.”
