But if Bloody Lazarus has found out what happened, there’s going to be trouble. That I know.
It’s Saturday afternoon. No rush hour. Aleksio’s making phone calls. Marshaling troops.
We pull up in a garbage-strewn alley on the poor end of a business district where a lot of charities operate. The buildings on either side are nondescript office buildings, not old enough to be cool but not new enough to be nice. One of the white vans from the house pulls in behind us. A few guys with assault weapons come out, some of them Russian, some Albanian-American.
I’m alone in the car for a second, and then Aleksio’s back with handcuffs. He cuffs me to the door. The brush of his knuckles sends electricity rippling over my skin. I raise my gaze to his, fighting the sensation.
“We’ll be a few minutes.” He pauses, then continues, “You still have a chance to get out of this alive. Don’t blow it by hitting the horn or something.”
“Okay,” I breathe.
He regards me strangely, like he felt it, too, then he turns away with a grunt.
The pack of them are at a shadowy side door. An alarm beeps and stops, and then they’re inside. Except for Tito, who remains outside, guarding.
I lean all the way over, trying to check where I am, see whether anybody is around to signal. I catch sight of a small metal plate over the door. Worland.
That’s the place my father told them about. Worland Agency, he said.
Moving fast—they didn’t even case the place. This tells me they think Kiro’s in danger. Obviously. Why else take a risk like they did today?
And what happens to me if they can’t find him? Worse—what if he turns up dead?
Chapter Five
Aleksio
The adoption agency smells like new carpet and Lysol. There are two rows of cubicles surrounded by meeting rooms and a shitload of file drawers and computers.
The guys are flinging open drawers and pulling the lids off file boxes, packing up everything that could lead to Kiro.
Kiro is vulnerable as hell right now.
He probably has no idea of his true identity. He could be a guy working in a suburban carwash or college kid sitting in Accounting 101. No idea what’s coming at him. And if anybody figures out what we’re up to, there are some heavy hitters coming for him.
It’s a miracle Aldo Nikolla and Lazarus didn’t kill him or Viktor that bloody night, considering the prophecy. My guess is that Nikolla didn’t have the balls to kill two tiny kids. He thought he could lose them. Thought they’d stay lost.
And we thought we had time.
Tito and the rest of my crew knew I’d found Viktor. We tried to keep it a secret, but we recently found out the whole of the Russian mafiya has been gossiping about how I came from America to find Viktor. How I embraced him and told him he is my brother. How I asked him to help get vengeance and find Kiro.
Fucking gangster grapevine.
The guys are taking every file and every shred of paper related to the year our family ended. A few of them are downloading the computer files. We’ll take the laptops, too. I help stack the boxes at the door. I get updates from the guys watching across the street. So far, so good.
Worland is a charity that has a pregnancy counseling and adoption arm—I vetted it on the way over. It’s the kind of place people bring babies they don’t want, no questions asked—that’s one of the things on their home page. And apparently it’s also the kind of place a guy sends a baby he wants lost.
It really is possible Aldo Nikolla doesn’t know anything beyond the agency name. The agency could’ve set those terms to protect itself.
The files are building up. I have some guys check the basement, and I get others started on bringing the shit out to the van. It’s amazing to think the key to finding our baby brother could be hidden in all this paper.
Kiro.
My mom let me hold him when she brought him home from the hospital, so tiny and squirmy. Just so tiny. And he looked up at me with those big brown eyes, and instantly I loved him.
Viktor wanted to hold Kiro, too, but Mom said he was too little, but more like too reckless. Viktor was a one-boy wrecking crew. So he laid a careful hand on Kiro’s little belly.
Kiro needs you to be a good big brother to him, my mom said to me. Kiro needs his brother to protect him.
My heart nearly pounded out of my chest—that’s how proud I felt when she said it. I promised that I would.
I hold that promise like a blaze in my heart.
The slaughter happened soon after. Did Mom sense trouble was coming?
It hurts to remember her, but somewhere maybe she can see I’m fighting for Kiro. She needs to see I won’t let him down.
Little Kiro.
He could be in the army for all we know, though I doubt it. Marching in formation is not in the Dragusha DNA.
Viktor had no idea of his roots, but he grew up from nothing to become a key assassin in the Bratva—the Russian mafiya—in Moscow. Meanwhile I ran my own gang just under the Nikolla radar, developing my clan. It was like Viktor and I were living parallel criminal lives on either side of the world without knowing it.
Viktor comes up, and I clap him on the shoulder. Kiro. Alive. Maybe.
“A lot of paper to go through,” he says.
I grumble. It’s a lot, but we’ll go through it all the same, because they may not have computerized the older files. A low-rent place like this. Half-illegal.
“Good thing we have guys.”
Viktor checks a text. “Old man’s still out cold.” Viktor’s Bratva guys are holding Aldo Nikolla in the basement of a chop shop.
He shakes his head. He doesn’t like it. We were hoping for a quick address, and this is so roundabout. And Mira’s father is not a man you can hold on to long. It’s like kidnapping the president of the United States—even if you manage to pull it off, you know you’re not keeping him long. Too much heat.
“All this paper,” he says. “I say we send Aldo a finger.”
My gut twists. Sending Mira’s body parts was a backup plan. “Let’s see what we get. No need to spill all our jelly beans in the hallway.”
“Brat,” he says. I never get sick of Viktor calling me that—it’s the Russian word for brother. “No good that you remembered her candy. I think it will not be so easy to cut off her finger.”
I shrug. “I’ll cut off my own fingers if it saves Kiro’s life.”
He grunts and grabs a box. But yes, it was a lot easier to talk about sending her body parts to her dad in theory.
A text comes in. Suspicious car circling the block twice. Not good.
Viktor doesn’t have to see it to know there’s trouble—he can tell from my face. One year together and it’s like we were never separated. He’s hustling everyone out with the last of the boxes.
Back outside in the alley, I uncuff Mira, pull her out of the Maserati, and shove her into the back of the van with the files and boxes of laptops. Then I grab Tito. “You watch her. No one touches her.”
We continue loading up. When it’s done, Viktor swings in the front of the van, and I take the wheel. I don’t like putting somebody else in charge of Mira like this, but if things get hot, Viktor and I need to run the show. Our fucked-up talents as criminals know no bounds.