Viktor’s lieutenant, Mischa, pulls out in front of us in the flashy sports car. If there’s someone out there, Mischa’ll draw that person away while we get the van full of files out of sight.
By now, Bloody Lazarus and the rest of Nikolla’s crew will know there’s been an attack, but they won’t know who or why. People will be focusing on the house, wondering if Aldo was in there when it went up.
But no plan is foolproof.
“Got something to say?” I ask as I pull out.
“No, brat.”
Yeah, right.
We drive in silence.
In books, the feeling of being followed is always a tingle down the spine or your hair standing up on the back of the neck. But for me, it’s more of a buzzing in the awareness. So faint you don’t notice unless you tune into it.
Getting out of there, that’s how I feel—awareness buzzing, even though I turn one way and then another and I can see, technically, that nobody is following us, but there’s that buzzing, and I have the sense of eyes on the streets. Could they be after us already? Guessing our purpose? Nikolla didn’t get to where he was by surrounding himself with stupid people.
Viktor scowls, but he doesn’t question my maneuvers. He just scowls. He’s always ready for something to be bad. He was pulled from the orphanage at an early age and raised by criminals. I don’t know whether he even feels his kills anymore.
When I’m confident we’re not being followed, I pull the van into a wasteland area at the edge of the tracks and park in the shadow of some junky abandoned strip mall. A daycare and a bakery used to be here, long closed, but the payday loan shop down the block is still going full blast. We’ve used this area before. The sightlines and escape routes are killer. Another of our vehicles pulls up.
I hop out and send a few guys to the nearby corners, and then I go around and open up the back.
Tito jumps out. Mira stays huddled in a far corner, glaring, squinting, long dark hair pushed all around to one side, so that it hangs off one shoulder like an onyx waterfall, glinting in the streetlight.
“Everything go okay?” I ask Tito.
“Yep.”
I climb into the back and pull out a few files, knowing her eyes are on me.
She still looks at me like I’m that kid she knew. When she looks at me like that, I want to shake her. I don’t need her looking at me like that. I have to save Kiro.
Tito, a few other guys, and I are in the back with her. I’ve put myself across from her, far away as possible and separated by boxes of files and stacks of papers, like a signal to myself that she’s not mine.
A black SUV rolls up with two of my book-smartest guys. They back up and open the tailgate, and between the back of the van and the back of the SUV, we’ve got a bit of a work area between the six of us guys.
The problem with the files becomes evident pretty fast—all the names of the kids are blacked out. The names of the families, too. File after file has blacked-out information. There are codes and numbers at the top of a lot of them that don’t mean much. We trade files, comparing.
“This is bullshit,” Viktor says. “If the old man thought we were serious, we’d have a fucking address. He’s playing for time.”
“Can you uncuff me, please?” she says. “The edges are biting into my wrists—”
“You’re lucky they’re cuffed in front of you,” I growl.
She glares and something strange wells up in my chest. I love that she gives as good as she gets. “I could help,” she says.
“No.” I don’t even look at her. I wish I still had the mirrored sunglasses on. My threats at the gas station definitely backfired. What was I thinking? Pressing her against that pillar.
It was dangerous, that boyfriend act I put on. Pressing my hand to her cheek, I thought I might combust. She provokes inconvenient urges in me—Primal. Possessive.
All wrong.
Mira is everything I should never want.
I imagined pressing my face there, feeling her skin with my lips. She would’ve let me, too. Not out of desire, but because she wouldn’t want innocent bystanders hurt.
Unlike me, she’s still a decent person.
I remember Konstantin and me reading a lot of books in the run-down places we’d hide in. Usually he’d only want me to read shit like The Art of War, being that I was to grow up to be a capable killer and all, but sometimes I’d get my hands on regular stories.
I remember reading this one crusty old one—The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. This guy stayed forever young while some painting of him aged.
That’s how it felt with Mira and me.
She stayed safe and happy in that mansion, while I got hammered into something dark and deadly. She lived the life I should’ve had. I just got messed up.
Nothing’s on any of the computer files, like we feared.
We go through more paper files. The dead ends have me feeling angry and fucked up. “What good are files if everything’s blacked out? There have to be the names and addresses somewhere, or why keep files?”
Finally we find some actual names and addresses, but they don’t help. They all seem to have a number, more codes. Hundreds of codes, maybe thousands.
We decide we have to start matching things up, and then I catch sight of Mira, following our progress with interest. Like she understands something we don’t. She knows. She’s listening. Tracking.
“You got some insight here? Something for the class?”
“You want to let my father and me go free?” she asks.
I grab the next sheet. I tell myself it’s stupid to think that a mafia princess who’s spent the past few years on international shopping trips could help.
Kiro is out there, and as soon as somebody figures out we’re going for him, he’s screwed.
“Illegal adoption agency,” Tito says. “Maybe they didn’t keep real records.”
“No, there have to be records,” I bite out. “The answer is in here.”
We go through each file, one reading off numbers, and the other guys hunting. It’s like matching serial numbers on dollar bills or something.
We send a guy for pizza.
I can’t shake the idea that she could help, that she’s not as stupid as she acts in that blog. When the pizza comes, I join Mira on the far end and offer her a slice.
She takes it with both her hands, cuffed together as they are, and thanks me.
“If you can help, you should,” I say.
“And I should help you why?”
“Because if this doesn’t work, we go to plan B.”
She chews, staring thoughtfully out the window. Does she have an idea of what plan B is? I follow the direction of her gaze.
“What are you looking at?” I ask.
“The cartoons of laughing baby animals. Side of that building.”
I spot the shitty mural on the side of the old daycare. Smiling cartoon animals half-peeled off in the distance beyond a wasteland of rubble and trash.
“Ugh.”
“I like it. It’s sweet. Something nice in all this decrepitude.”
My face goes hot. Mira Nikolla with her dresses and parties on the boat and sunny smiles. “But if you stare at them too long, happy baby animal cartoons start to look maniacal. Don’t you see it? You look at them too long, and all you see is death.”