And begged for mercy some more.
No matter how hot the sun was as it baked on him, making every gaping wound and cut on him from my men and me burn, he refused to admit that he knew anything.
Dodging, lying, fudging, and hedging. He refused to admit that he knew what we were talking about.
Only once I realized that he wasn’t going to give me a single answer did I raise my gun and pull the trigger.
If he knew anything about that shadow network, if he knew anything about my uncle being alive, he was unfortunately taking it to the grave.
On the way back, as I used a handkerchief from a guard to wipe the blood off my hands, I accepted that I would now have to shoulder the emotional cost of removing Elena’s father, the last of her family.
24
ELENA
Viktor and Nikolai stayed with me while I worked.
I knew they weren’t supervising me. They didn’t need to. Sacha and Igor and another IT specialist were in and out of the room I was supposed to call my office.
I wasn’t a loose thread that someone had to hover over.
It seemed more like they weren’t sure what else to do.
As though he decided it might be better for me to not be alone.
Try as I might, I couldn’t focus on the screen. Numbers blurred and my thoughts wandered.
Sitting at the computer and working on any spreadsheet while knowing that the man I’d given my body to was heading out to kill my father…
This isn’t normal.
This can’t be normal.
Yet, I wasn’t hysterical.
My sense of normal had already been skewed. When I first figured out that the specific accounts I worked with belonged to crime families, mynormalhad shifted.
Then when my father gave me to Adrik Volkov as the price to pay for the mismanagement of that one big shipment and transfer, I acknowledged that it wasn’t normal either. I’d sat in the women’s restroom until Linda-Lisa found me, convincing myself that this couldn’t be reality, that it was fiction, not my life.
All this time I’d been living here and working as the Volkovs’ head accountant, mynormalhad shifted again. Perhaps I was too laidback. Or maybe I preferred to cling to the loose idea of ignorance being bliss, that so long as I didn’t know any details, my personal moral compass was still intact.
That killing people was bad and saving or helping people was good.
That lying was frowned upon and truth was rewarded.
Even when that intruder had clearly been shot outside the guest house, I could waver with my judgment, thinking that he’d been shot in the line of self-defense on my behalf.
But I do know the details now.
I was weighed down with the stark reminder of details. I was fully aware—from Adrik’s own words—that John Morovov was going to be killed.
Adrik had been direct and honest about going there to kill him.
No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
I couldn’t claim ignorance about this.
All I could do was try to compartmentalize it. To box and lock it up and hope that one day, I would process it.
