Roma Queen (Roma Royals Duet Book 2)

by Callie Hart

  “Since when have you been religious? You find God after I stabbed you in the stomach?”

  Lazlo bares his teeth—an animalistic, threatening display. “I didn’t find anything. I’ve always believed. I was trying to tell you before you started smashing the speakers off the walls. You weren’t listening.”

  “How could I not? You were ranting and raving like a fucking lunatic. Your mother died on the side of a railway line. My grandfather fucked over the woman who took you in and cared for you. She died because of him.”

  “Before that! Before she died! She knew she was dying, so she took me somewhere safe. She took me to a church. Somewhere I would be taken care of. Somewhere I would learn right from wrong!”

  “Shame the lesson didn’t stick.” Lazlo’s head tilts to one side. He looks like he doesn’t catch my meaning. The fucking gall of the guy. “The church. I doubt they taught you this was right from wrong, did they, Lazlo?”

  Sarah hangs her head. She’s crying. Her blonde waves tumble into her face, obscuring the iron mask, but I can hear her stifled sobs.

  Lazlo doesn’t react. Doesn’t defend himself. He just looks at me, as if he’s looking straight through me…and there it is, like a fist to the gut, winding me in one devious sucker punch.

  I was wrong.

  They did.

  They did teach him that this was right from wrong. That’s where he was taught about discipline and respect. Where it was drilled into him.

  The church.

  Fuck.

  Blinking rapidly, Lazlo inhales, still making sure to keep the gun aimed at me as he steps away from Sarah. In four strides, he’s standing in front of a bank of screens that are mounted on the wall to the left. I see the room filled with cots first. There are numerous other feeds, displaying a number of other rooms.

  “I like watching people during a crisis,” he says stiffly. “There’s nothing more riveting than observing people as they try to solve a mystery. It helps me understand how their minds work. I was hoping I’d get to observe you and Zara some more before we had our final show down. She’s quite remarkable, isn’t she? Quite beautiful.”

  I follow his gaze, hissing through my teeth. At first glance, I didn’t recognize and other rooms on the other screens. I do, though. One of the rooms is very familiar: Zara’s kitchen. The camera must be hidden on top of her fridge. From its vantage point, you can see the kitchen table quite clearly. “You were so fascinating to watch, the two of you, trying to sleuth out what was going on. I was gonna wait a couple of days before calling, just to see if you came up with any interesting theories. Then Yuri Petrov arrived and ruined the whole damn thing with that recording.”

  He sounds genuinely inconvenienced by the turn of events. “Sad times. Yuri ruined your fun? You murdered his son. I’d say you’re out in the lead on this one.”

  Lazlo’s eyes narrow into thin slits. “I’m not interested in talking about that with you. That’s a private matter.”

  “Did you punish Corey the same way you were going to punish Leo? What did that poor kid ever do to earn a visit from you, huh? What could he have possibly done to earn the violent, terrible death you gave him?”

  “I SAID I’M NOT INTERESTED IN TALKING ABOUT THAT!” Lazlo’s enraged yell echoes around the room, deafeningly loud. The arm is stretched out in front of him, held at head height now. His face has turned cherry red, and a rope of spittle is hanging from his twisted mouth. “You don’t fucking listen,” he grinds out. “You never fucking listen.”

  I’m restless, twitching, desperate to make my move. He’s not that far away, and I’m fucking quick. I could launch myself at him and dash his fucking skull open with the wrench long before Lazlo has a chance to pull the trigger. I need to pick the right moment, though. I need him angry again. I need him so fucking mad that he doesn’t know what the fuck’s going on anymore. Pushing down the urge to throw myself on him this very second, I try and buy myself some time to think. “I listened to that recording Yuri made. It led me right here, didn’t it?”

  “Yes. And did you figure out there were two people in that recording? No, you didn’t. Yuri did. He was the one who figured that out. And you came down here without giving a moment’s thought to who I might have down here with me, didn’t you? You didn’t care. You just came barreling down those stairs, head-on, without trying to figure out who you might be up against.”

  “It doesn’t matter who he is. I’ll kill him if he shows his face,” I counter. “He was smart enough to keep his mouth shut on that recording. Chances are he’ll be smart enough to stay away now.”

  Lazlo grins. “I wouldn’t count on it. He likes to make me happy. I wouldn’t call him exceptionally clever. Like Kezia here, he’s just a very quiet person.”

  “I don’t give a shit if he’s the chattiest motherfucker on the planet, or if he’s the silent type—”

  Hold up.

  Wait…

  Oh. No, no, no, no…

  There’s no fucking way.

  Garrett? It can’t be. Why the fuck would Garrett do…this?

  Lazlo’s been waiting for me to put two and two together. The bastard sees the realization on my face and is overwhelmed with excitement. “There we go! There it is! Pasha, I thought you might not figure it out. All that cage fighting, getting knocked in the head, it’s not good for the synapses.”

  “Garrett wouldn’t do anything that might hurt Zara,” I snarl. “There’s no fucking way.”

  “DON’T BE SO FUCKING NAIVE!” Lazlo roars. “Of course he would. Garrett’s a good boy. He does whatever I fucking tell him to. And that includes hurting Zara.”

  There’s such madness in his eyes. I look to Kezia, searching for some clue that he might be lying, but I don’t find it. Instead, I find sorrow and pain in the dark eyes that meet mine. Slowly, Kezia nods. The aunt I never knew I had. It kills me to see her suffering so badly. I know she’s worried about Zara. “Don’t worry. He can’t hurt her if he doesn’t know where she is,” I tell her.

  Lazlo chuckles. “Alas, Rom Baro. That’s the thing about redheads. Too clever for their own good.” He reaches up and raps the end of the gun against one of the screens. At first, the scene is nothing out of the ordinary: a room in an apartment, a living room, sparsely furnished. A little grubby, perhaps, though meticulously tidy. Then a door opens, and Garrett enters…

  …and in walks Zara.

  Twenty-Five

  ZARA

  The gun’s way heavier than I thought it would be. Seemed prudent to pull the thing as soon as we walked into the Bakersfield, and now my arm’s getting tired of holding it up at a ninety-degree angle.

  Fuck, it’s so surreal, being back here, so close to home. We’re not at my place, though; we’re in Garrett’s apartment. How many times have I been here before? Not as many times as I’ve been in Andrew or Waylon’s apartment, but still…I’m the one who bought the peace lily that’s sitting on the kitchen window sill. I’m the one who bought the small print of the black and white mountain range that’s hanging on the wall behind the threadbare sofa.

  I could never remember when Garrett moved in here before. For a while now, I’ve thought that he’s lived at the Bakersfield longer than I have, and everyone else has just agreed with me. He didn’t have anything to do with Sarah or the others until we started meeting across the road for our weekly drink on a Tuesday night, but that was never strange because none of them had anything to do with one another before then. It’s like…it’s as if I came along and became the glue that pieced our little gang of friends together.

  But I’ve figured it out now. I did move in here before Garrett. A couple of weeks before him to be exact. I’d brought that peace lily up here to him because I’d smiled at him in the hallway a few days earlier, and bringing him the plant had seemed official, like a proper way of introducing myself as his new neighbor. I remember seeing a box sitting out on the scuffed, rickety coffee table, and thinking nothing of it at the time.

  Now,
looking around his bare, empty living quarters, it hits me that the box had been the only thing he’d brought with him when he took up residence here.

  All he’d owned in the world.

  Garrett holds his hands out where I can see them as he walks into the living room. I’ve been behind him the whole way up here. He didn’t see me take the gun out of my jacket pocket, but he must know I have the thing aimed at his back. He stops by the coffee table, and, with infinite caution, he pivots on the balls of his feet until he’s facing me.

  His brown eyes are expressive. They have been since the day I met him. I’ve only ever needed to make eye contact with him to know what he’s feeling, or that he’s had a shitty day. When our eyes meet now, for the first time…I can’t really get a read on him. He seems closed off. Like a wall that’s never existed between us before has suddenly gone up, high and impenetrable, and there’s absolutely no way to scale over it.

  Swallowing hard, I point the end of the gun at the couch. “Sit down. And don’t even think about trying to rush me. I’ve had weapons training.”

  The look Garrett gives me is loaded. Come on, Zara. We both know this is the first time you’ve ever held a fucking gun.

  “All right. Fine. I haven’t had weapon’s training. But I’m not a moron. I know enough. This thing is loaded, and I’ve removed the safety.” I hold the gun up for him to see. His dark eyes scan the gun; he’s emotionless, as if he’s unaffected by the lethal piece of metal I’m holding in my hands. He doesn’t even quail when I aim the thing at his head again. He skirts around the table and slumps down onto the couch, and then gives me another easily readable look: Now what?

  “Now you’re going to tell me why you took Sarah. And then you’re going to tell me what the fuck Lazlo wants with me. Fuck, just start at the beginning. How the fuck do you even know the guy?”

  Garrett spreads his hands out in front of him, palms up. He shrugs, arching an eyebrow at me: how do you want me to tell you anything, when I have nothing to write with, Zara?

  “Fine. Where is it? Where’s the white board?” Occasionally, when I’ve pushed him hard enough, Garrett’s used a small whiteboard and a marker to communicate with. He hates it—I’m fairly sure I’m the only person he’s ever actually used it with—but when I’ve needed a complex answer to a question, he’s relented and brought it down to my apartment. He sighs and points off down the hallway. His apartment is an exact mirror to my own, except everything is flipped; at the end of the hallway in that direction is his kitchen. Down the hallway in the opposite direction: his bedroom.

  “Okay. Get up. Go and get it. Slowly. I’m gonna be behind you the entire time.”

  Garrett’s expression’s kind of pitying; he must know that I’m shitting myself. It’s almost as if he’s trying to console me as he gets to his feet again and walks extra slowly into the kitchen, once again keeping his hands out by his sides, in plain sight.

  The white board sits on the kitchen counter, next to an empty Chinese takeout carton. Aside from the carton and the board, the counters are clear of clutter and mess. In fact, they look like Garrett’s scrubbed at them recently with a goddamn toothbrush. He gestures to the white board, silently requesting if it’s okay for him to pick it up.

  “Yeah. Take it back into the living room.”

  He does as I’ve told him and collects the board, taking it back into the other room, where he sits back down on the sofa.

  “Good. Now. You know him, right? Lazlo? How?”

  Garrett pops the cap off the marker he’s holding and sighs again. He writes slowly, taking his time, then he holds the board up for me to see.

  Long story

  I huff, rolling my eyes. “How long? You’ve known him for months? Years?”

  Garrett wipes the board with his sleeve and writes again.

  1983

  “What? You’ve known him since you were…fuck, since you were born?”

  He shakes his head. Wipes. Writes.

  9 y.o. He claimed me.

  “Claimed you? What the fuck do you mean, he claimed you?”

  I was an orphan. A convent took me in. Lazlo adopted me when I was a kid

  To say I’m horrified doesn’t even come close. This thing is way more complex than I could ever have imagined. Garrett looks mournfully down at the whiteboard, his eyes locked onto the words he’s written, before he quickly scrubs them away with his cuff again. He’s still rubbing at the shiny surface of the board long after the black marker ink has disappeared, like Lady Macbeth, rubbing furiously at an imaginary spot of blood.

  “Why did you move in here, Garrett? Was it because of me? Did he tell you to watch me?”

  He doesn’t write anything this time. Only nods.

  “For…for three years? You’ve been watching me for three years?”

  Again, the marker remains clenched tightly in his hand, and he nods.

  “Why now? Why did he take Corey now?”

  The Midnight Fair returned

  “And? He wanted me to find Pasha?”

  Yes

  “But, for fuck’s sake, why, Garrett? Why would he want me to meet Pasha and fall for him? Why would he want Pasha to be king?”

  Lazlo likes to pull strings.

  Garrett considers what he just wrote, then frowns. He erases the last two words and scrawls something in their place, so that it now reads:

  Lazlo likes to puppet people.

  Then wipes the board again and quickly writes something else.

  Lazlo likes symmetry.

  A Rivin King hurt Lazlo before. He killed him. Pasha hurt Lazlo three years ago. Lazlo wants him to be king before he kills him. Neat. Tidy. Symmetry.

  God, this is insane. Lazlo is insane. The walls feel like they are closing in on me, pressing in from all sides, trapping me in this small, airless space, making it difficult to think straight. “Corey never hurt Lazlo. He was a boy. A child. Why would Lazlo have killed him?”

  Garrett’s face crumples. I’ve never seen a man so close to tears. He turns his head, looking out of the window, and a weird kind of vacancy overcomes him. His body’s here, in the living room, but at this very moment his mind is somewhere else altogether. When he returns to himself, settling back into the couch, he picks up the pen and writes.

  Revenge. Yuri Petrov murdered my parents in New York.

  He blurs his handwriting, sweeping the sleeve of his jacket across the board before I get a chance to read his words for a second time.

  Lazlo took Corey for me. He hurt him for me. An eye for an eye.

  His last sentence burns itself into me, branding me with horror. “An eye for an eye? A Russian mobster murders two adults, so Lazlo carves up two children. He killed Jamie, Corey’s brother, too, right?”

  Garrett’s eyes are filled with steel and suffering. He blinks, dipping his head ever so slightly—the barest hint of an acknowledgement.

  “And you okayed that? You were on board with that? Knowing that little boy had only been alive for five fucking years? And he was an innocent?”

  His throat bobs. He looks down at his hands, though he doesn’t move them to respond to me. He won’t even look me in the eye now.

  “Garrett, how can you have stood by and allowed all of this to happen? I thought you were a good man. I thought you were my friend.”

  He looks up, lifting his chin, and there are two wet streaks running down his cheeks. He seems as surprised as I am by that fact.

  ‘Friends are weakness. There’s no such thing as a good man.”

  Well, he can’t be any plainer than that. This has all been an act. A make-believe story that I’ve constructed in my own head. For one second, a burst of hot anger flashes through me, making me feel so fucking stupid for ever believing Garrett was my ally. The anger disperses just as quickly as it came, though. I’m not stupid. I’ve just been lied to. Garrett tricked me into thinking I could count on him. In the end, this is all on him.

  He’s a liar.

  A cheat.

>   He’s complicit in the kidnapping and murder of a little boy, and god only knows how many other hideous crimes Lazlo’s committed over the years. Just because Lazlo took him from that convent orphanage back in nineteen eighty-three, doesn’t mean he had to help Lazlo inflict so much pain and misery in people’s lives.

  I clench my jaw, determined to get one more piece of information out of him, no matter how hard it is for me to ask. I need to know, not because the information will change anything—Corey will still be dead, after all—but because I can’t live with the mystery anymore. “Lazlo wants Pasha to suffer because he nearly killed him three years ago. I don’t agree with that, but…I understand it. What did I ever do, though, Garrett? Why the hell has Lazlo come after me?”

  Garrett’s chest rises and keeps on rising. He draws one, long, huge breath into his lungs, and then he exhales down his nose, the sound of the air rushing over his vocal chords making me jump. I’ve never heard him make a sound before. He lances me through with distant, accusatory eyes.

  Then he writes.

  Because you look like The Empress.

  Because you saw what he did.

  Twenty-Six

  PASHA