“You know the drill. Same as last time, but try to speed it up.”
He rolls a set of two paintings out and starts his review. I pace around the vault while he stares at the art.
After what feels like an eternity, he tuts his tongue.
“Obviously forged,” he mutters. “Not even good forgeries, the technique is all wrong for the era.”
It’s what I want to hear, but if that’s how long it takes to look at two paintings, we’re going to be here all day. Natalia was much faster at this. I want to know right now whether she betrayed me.
I point my gun at him with an exasperated sigh. “Could you goanyfucking slower?”
“I’m working as fast as I can,” he whines, frozen in fear.
Just as I’m weighing up whether a bullet through his kneecap would help him think faster, a speaker crackles to life somewhere.
The clipped tone on the other end of the line is straight out of all my nightmares and revenge fantasies.
“Aleksandr, how nice to see you.”
Maksim Bryusov.
Ponytail shoots me a confused look, but I gesture at him to keep going.
I scan the space. There must be cameras somewhere.
Good. He should watch as we take him down.
“Say goodbye to that Bratva Council seat. You’re fucked, Maksim,” I say in greeting.
He gives a tittering laugh that pisses me off. “No, I don’t think I am.”
A clanging metallic sound comes from outside the vault, followed by a hissing sound.
The door is locked. The handle won’t budge. The code doesn’t open the door.
The space suddenly seems tiny, the walls closing in around me. I’ve been locked in enough rooms at the Ivanov Center to know that nothing good happens behind a locked door.
I fire a bullet at the door, but it barely makes a dent in the thick metal. Ponytail yelps in surprise.
“Keep going, asshole,” I growl at him.
Maksim’s voice blares out of the speaker again.
“I wouldn’t try that. This vault is rather flammable.”
Right, so the sandbags are fire starters or something explosive. I take a switchblade from my pocket and slash one open. Crystalline grey powder spills onto the floor in a rush.
Fuck.
If I get out of this alive, Yuri is going to answer for this. Head of security, my ass. Maksim Bryusov has got in here and rigged the whole vault with explosives.
He speaks through the speaker again, but I turn to Ponytail. If I’m gonna die here, I need to know whether Natalia’s been working against me.
“How many? How many are forged?”
I point the gun at him again. He looks back at me, terrified.
“If I had to say, at this point?—”
