Prologue
Aleksi Petrov
Four Days Ago
Halloween
New York
I don’t usually leave my lair on a non-designated day to be at the warehouse in Queens, but things are fucking weird. W-E-I-R-D. I’m not talking aboutI ate too much and now I’m seeing double.I’m talking—the servers I’ve been staring at are glitching. They’remyservers. The ones I developed with Francesca Gallo, Angelo’s wife. Millions of cameras all over the world I can tap into all in one place. Some I've snuck and set into place myself.
The feed I’m looking at is one I personally placed.
And it’s fuckingglitching.
I don’t like it.
It’s making my tummy hurt.
I gotta see Maksim about this.
I grab my phone from my pocket and ring Niko, making sure I’m seeing this right before I alert the boss. We’ve been tracking and surveilling Kane now for months, but the version of Kane on my screen that’s in the penthouse suite where he’s been staying is standing a little too tall. His eyes are a little too close together. His smile is too uncanny valley. It’s giving me bad, bad,badvibes and the fucking creeps. I press a few keys so my computer screen starts recording what I'm seeing.
“Yeah?” Niko answers the phone, sounding less than excited to hear from me. Then again, he’s been traveling back and forth nonstop for the past few weeks, so I don't take it personally.
“Hold on.” I grab the file I have on Kane Burton, the only male heir to the Ainsworth fortune on his mother’s side. No siblings. Medical recordsshow his mom had a hysterectomy due to uterine cancer shortly after he was born. Six feet even. Hazel eyes.
I tilt my head again.
So who the fuck is the guy on my screen?
“Are you close to a computer?”
“Yeah. I just got home. Let me log onto my desktop.”
“How was Boston? Still keeping tabs on that girl?” I ask, snickering because the idiot got caught mid-murder. Poor thing was so scared, she stayed frozen in place until he was done. Only when he approached her did she run away. But that’s Niko for you. He’s fucking intense and sometimes gets lost in the spills. He says the color mesmerizes him. It’s freaky, but not as weird as my Uncle Sasha’s whole eye-scooping thing.
Sasha’s never fully told anyone (except me) the story, and each variation you hear from those whothinkthey know is different. But it always starts out the same—his first solo kill was at an ice cream shop. The guy was pretty wily, almost got away, but Sasha reached up, grabbed an ice cream scooper, and, well, the rest is history.
Niko ignores me, of course. “Alright, I’m on.”
“Bet. I’m sending you a video recording.” I load the file, send it his way, then switch to FaceTime, propping him up on the stand I use to live-stream when I game.
I hear an unamused,“Okayyyy?”as his eyes narrow.
“Okay, now look at this one.” I send him a clip from a few days ago. “Look at them side by side. Tell me what you see.”
I can see him squinting while looking at the screen. He really needs readers but refuses to get them. “Did he get Botox? Wait. This ain’t right. The fuck am I looking at?”
“Weird, right?”
“That’s not Burton.” He sighs, shaking his head.
“I know.”
“So then where the fuck is Burton?” he asks.
“I don’t know. I’ve been watching every camera we placed in his suite since this morning. I’ll have to sift through hours of the time I was sleeping. If he switched places with a lookalike, that means the motherfucker had to hold auditions or something.”
