by Stacy Gail
It was a terrifying death that my imagination played out again and again in my mind. And every time it did, my horror and devastation evolved into a fury so vast it became like a living entity inside me, making me yearn to tear the city apart to find the cruel monster who had taken Kon from me.
I wasn’t the only one burning for vengeance. It had been four days since Polo and Pavel fished Konstantin’s Rolls out of the river. While Pavel Medvedev had never understood his son’s homosexuality, Konstantin was Pavel’s baby boy. He’d loved his son. Added to that, the way Kon had been killed was beyond a contemptuous slap in the face. It was a declaration of war. The Medvedev clan was off the Vitaliev chain without my brother’s permission, and already the city’s streets were beginning to run with blood.
The good citizen in me lamented that the Medvedevs weren’t waiting for the proper authorities to bring whoever killed Konstantin to justice.
The Vitaliev in me wanted to personally find whoever did this, and give them exactly what they’d given to Kon.
At some point, Polo had asked about the men Konstantin had been dating, but he knew as well as I did that Konstantin always had at least a couple men in play at any given day. He then allowed me to see snippets of the security video of Konstantin checking into the hotel, but the smaller man that Kon had been with seemed astonishingly shy. His face was kept hidden under a ball cap pulled low on his head, and no matter how he moved only the top of that hat or a shadowed profile could be glimpsed.
I was no expert, but even I could see the man knew exactly where the cameras were, and he’d made all the right moves in avoiding them.
Bastard.
The service ended with the final blessing, the lowering of the casket, and a procession of mourners pouring a handful of dirt into the grave, symbolically laying the departed to rest. Next would be a pominki at the Medvedev house—a meal honoring the dead—but the thought of eating made me want to vomit. For days I’d felt like that, along with a grief so piercing I was sure I was bleeding internally. But most of all I was filled with the need to do something. Anything. The restlessness tore at me until it was all I could do to stop myself from running out of the cemetery and never looking back.
“Dash.” Arms came around me from behind, and only then did I realize I had moved to the edge of the canopy shielding the mourners from the rain. Polo, dressed in black just like Andrew the Giant, Indigo, Yuri and Alex Rodin who stood at the far edge of the canopy, pulled me back against his chest. “Where do you think you’re going without me?”
“I don’t know.” With painfully dry eyes I watched the archbishop open an umbrella and share it with Konstantin’s bereaved mother as he gently steered her away from her youngest child’s grave. God, today was beyond awful. “Just...away. Away from this.”
“I can get you out of here, but you have to go with me. Think you can handle that?”
Nothing could have sounded better. “Definitely.”
“Dasha.” Before Polo could open the large umbrella we had shared in getting to the gravesite, my brother came up behind us, flanked by a couple of his Bratva’s sparkly new recruits. Like Polo and the others, Knives’s suit and tie were black, but where Polo’s shirt was the traditional unadorned white, the shirt Knives had on appeared to be flashy black silk, and something my father would have smacked him in the head for wearing to a funeral. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine.” I wasn’t fine. I tried my damnedest to convey how un-fine I was by not returning his hug, instead keeping my arms held stiffly at my sides. “What do you want, Knives?”
“What do I want?” He backed away to search my face. “For starters, I want you to stop being mad at me. We can’t afford to have any distance between us, not when we’re under attack. We need to stick together now more than ever, because all I can think about is that it could have been you in the trunk of that car.”
A growl came from Polo as he pulled me to him and away from Knives. “I’d never let that happen. Never.”
“Yeah, I do know that, and I’m more grateful than I can say.” My brother’s attention zeroed in on Polo, who had tucked me under his arm to be held tight to his side. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad the two of you are together now. That gives me a level of comfort, knowing you’re there to guard Dash, especially in light of what’s happened. There’s only one family in all of Chicago bold enough to hit so close to home like this. If the Scorpeones are willing to leave the likes of Konstantin Medvedev as a message of what they plan to do to us, we need to circle the wagons and keep each other safe.”
The mere mention of that family made my stomach clench. “Are you sure it was the Scorpeones?”
“When Konstantin called in to report your run-in with Matteo Scorpeone, he told me he introduced himself by name. Less than forty-eight hours later he goes missing and is hit in such a vicious way that it’s obviously retribution. That might not be proof, but it is one hell of a coincidence.”
I nodded slowly even as Emily’s earnest face swam before my eyes. “It’s just...I don’t know if they have the firepower to even be in the game anymore. We’d be smart to widen our vision on this. You’ve been cherry-picking a lot of personnel from other organizations lately, and that can stir up resentment. Looking at it from that perspective, what other people are out there who’d like to send you a message?”
“There’s no one on my radar but the Scorpeones, and we won’t be safe until we wipe them all out.” The grim edge of my brother’s tone made me shiver, and his hazel eyes seemed almost black in the rain-soaked gloom. “You know what I mean, don’t you, Polo?”
“Yeah, I do.” Polo’s voice was low and meditative, and I glanced over my shoulder at him, only to find him scanning the slowly dissipating crowd with that familiar, well-trained eye of a bodyguard on alert. “At the very least, we need to up our level of security. Something you’ve already taken care of, from the look of it. How many guys do you have here with you, anyway? Aside from these two new ones?”
“Nothing wrong with a show of force, especially after what they did to Kon.”
“But no Grigor. He wasn’t with you at the hotel either, now that I think about it.” Polo’s expression was a mixture of tension and anger and grief as he looked around. “I don’t get it. Grigor watched Konstantin grow up along with the rest of us. Where is he?”
Knives shook his dark head. “He needed the time off, and I was happy to give it to him. I don’t think funerals are his thing.”
“Day off, huh? And you don’t know where he is?” Polo’s eyes narrowed, and if anything the tension in his face deepened until it was like a mask. “But you knew where Kon was on his day off. You said you run a tight ship and make your people report their locations even on their days off. Considering how Konstantin wound up on his downtime, I’d think you’d want to know where your main bodyguard is.”
“It doesn’t fucking matter where Grigor is,” Knives snapped, and I knew that tone. He was The Man in charge now, and The Man wasn’t about to stand there and be questioned. “What matters is staying safe. From this point on, no one goes out without extra security. No arguing,” Knives added when I opened my mouth to do just that. “And I want you to reconsider coming home. The both of you,” he added, surprising me as his gaze latched onto Polo like he was the only person my brother could see. “I’d feel a lot more secure with you both under my roof until this blows over. You don’t have Konstantin to watch your backs anymore. That means you’re vulnerable out there in the world. Come home where you belong.”
“My place is a fortress.” Polo’s attention went from cataloguing the faces of the people around us, to focusing on Knives with unblinking intensity. “And you’re not the only one who’s capable of hiring extra security. From this point on I’ll be with Dash, along with Andrew, Yuri, Alex and a couple other members of my crew. Once I move her into the penthouse at Paradis Nouveau, I can guarantee you that someone will be with her every minute of the day.”
&nb
sp; For some reason, that plan sounded much better than what Knives wanted, but I was too much of a Vitaliev to just meekly accept others deciding my fate. “Are you asking me to move in with you, or telling me?”
Polo’s eyes, when they met mine, burned with an inner fire so hot it threatened to turn me into a pile of ash. “What do you think?”
“I want for us to be together.” My brother’s unyielding tone was like an anchor around my neck, dragging me back to focus on him. “That’s when we’re at our safest. That’s where we all belong. When we’re all together, the Scorpeones can’t control us or threaten us or stand in—”
“I will speak with him, and if you touch me one more time, boy, I’ll speak with him as you scream.”
My head snapped around as a familiar, heavily accented voice boomed out. Pavel Medvedev and several of his sons—Anatoly, Oleg and Vasili—were being held up by two of my brother’s new henchmen, who clearly didn’t understand who they were dealing with. Their lack of knowledge and training was painfully evident when one of them made a move to reach inside his jacket for this low-level skirmish, and I couldn’t stifle my horrified gasp. “Don’t—”
Too late.
With his grief-stricken expression not altering a fraction, Konstantin’s oldest brother—and biggest bully, as far as I was concerned—Vasili grabbed the man’s wrist and wrenched with practiced ease, while Oleg caught the other guard by the head and pressed his thumbs into his eyes, driving him to his knees.
“No one move!” Knives waved the remainder of his security detail back while the two in the hands of the Medvedev enforcers screamed.
Just as promised.
Around us, several mourners cried out in alarm, and many scattered into the driving rain, with the notable exception of the Medvedev clan, who had never run from anything in their lives. For his part, Polo wrapped himself around me before I knew what was happening, then turned so that his back shielded me from the fracas, bending over me in a standing, semi-fetal position. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who expected these newbies on my brother’s payroll to unleash a wild-eyed hail of bullets.
“Jesus, it’s fucking amateur-hour around here,” Polo raged, not letting me go as he cranked his head around to glower pure death at Knives’s security detail. “You stupid-ass punks, keep your fucking hands out of your pockets until your boss gives you permission to do otherwise, you understand me? You,” he added on a harsh note to Knives, and if the jagged edges in his tone had been a physical thing my brother would be nothing but bloody ribbons, “need to get a leash on your recruits. Stupid shit like this is how wars get started and lives get lost.”
“It appears that war is what the new Vitaliev boss wants. But with whom? That is the question.” Tall and still impressively ripped despite his age, the patriarch of the Medvedev clan closed in on Knives, his weathered face indifferent to the men still suffering at the hands of his sons. “All my life I’ve served the Vitaliev family, with pride and with honor. I raised my children to do the same. Yet now, with my youngest boy dead, humiliated and ruined so that not even his mother could look upon his once-beautiful face one last time to kiss him good-bye, the head of the Vitaliev Bratva has no time for me.”
Shocked, I twisted around in Polo’s hold just enough to see my brother’s stony profile. “What?”
“Your sister,” Pavel went on, flinging a hand my way, “comes to my house the moment she hears the news. In tears, sick with grief. She doesn’t leave my wife’s side for a day and a night. She helps make arrangements for Konstantin’s funeral and pominki, while Polo is with me and my boys, turning this city upside down in the search for answers. But you? What do I get from you? I get a flower wreath. I get a phone call that orders me to do nothing, to be still, and that you’ll have time to talk to me some time next week. You didn’t even tell me Konstantin was missing. I had to learn my boy was missing from Polo, who was frantic to find him. Not you. Him. That means something to me and my family, and that is something you should know. You should know it, because my loyalty goes to the ones who show me loyalty. You don’t inherit Medvedev loyalty from your father. You don’t inherit anything from your father.”
Oh, dear God.
My gasp echoed in my ears. This was unprecedented. I had never known a life without the loyalty of the Medvedev family. They were the brawn behind the brains of the Vitaliev Bratva. To not have them was akin to having a body, but no muscle to make it move. My brother surely knew that. He had to.
Knives went statue-still. “I know you’re grieving over the loss of your son, Pavel. I know you’re hurting. That’s why I understand that whatever you say now isn’t necessarily what’s in your heart. Because if it were, we would have a problem on our hands, and it would be a problem that wouldn’t work out well for anyone here. When this is over and we’ve made the Scorpeones pay for what they did to Konstantin, you and I can go over this again. I’m sure we’ll come to an understanding that the Vitalievs and the Medvedevs are stronger and safer together, than they are apart.”
Pavel scoffed. “Such nice words, said with such good manners, Knives. Your father wouldn’t have responded to me with words. He would have taken his fists to me, then invited me to do the same, because he knew there are no lies in fists. I have no time for words, or a man who won’t risk the pain of what it is to be honest.”
In growing horror I watched Pavel Medvedev turn his back on Knives. Then his sons did the same. Then, beyond them, every remaining Medvedev relative still lingering under the canopy also turned. They did it in silence, one by one, with each one staring at my brother before their deliberate turning away.
It was enough to make my mouth go dry.
“You have to do something.” Pushing out of Polo’s protective hold, I grabbed my brother’s arm. “If you’re serious about going to war, you can’t do it without the Medvedev muscle to back you up. Right here, right now, you’re at a crossroads, so you need to decide which way you’re going to go—into battle with the Medvedev clan, or not. One way you win. The other way you don’t.”
“Oh, I’m going into battle, and the last thing I need is Pavel Medvedev constantly comparing me to my old man and thinking I somehow fall short. My army is bigger than Papa’s ever was, even without the Medvedev enforcers. He underestimates me.”
“The only thing around here that’s being underestimated is the importance of the Medvedev family,” Polo muttered, shaking his dark head in obvious anger. “Didn’t you see how quickly his sons took care of your bodyguards? They didn’t even break a sweat while they were breaking your man’s wrist. Think about that when you decide whether or not you want to make them your enemy.”
Knives didn’t spare his men—one of whom was still on his knees—a glance. “There’s only one enemy that matters, Polo, and you know it. Once the Scorpeones are gone off the face of this earth and I have control of this city, everyone will see that I’ve made all the right moves when it comes to keeping us safe.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“From now on, don’t even think about walking out of Paradis Nouveau on your own,” Polo announced as we moved from the penthouse’s private elevator and into the serene atmosphere of the foyer. “You want to leave, fine. But you’ll do it with me there to protect you, along with one of my guys, always. You’re free to come down into Heaven if you want, or one of the shops on the lower floors, but call in advance so that someone will be with you if I can’t be there myself. Also, you’re no longer driving yourself anywhere, not even to work or to your place. If you need to go someplace, just tell me. I’ll get you in the armored Escalade with someone experienced behind the wheel, in addition to a bodyguard. And since that kind of thing requires a driver, I’ll need your schedule a week in advance from this point on.”
As Polo went down his checklist of Bodyguard Protocol 101, I nodded mutely and hung up my raincoat by the copper-plated doors. The instructions he laid out for me didn’t come as a surprise; I knew siege-mode just as well as he did.
Have a battle plan ready.
Never go anywhere alone.
Always have an exit strategy.
Carry extra ammo.
Kill or be killed.
I was a Vitaliev. I knew the drill.
The problem was, Konstantin had known the drill, too.
Maybe it was all pointless, I thought, watching rain droplets slide off the weatherproof fabric of my coat. Making plans and following procedure like a good soldier...none of that had kept Konstantin from meeting a horrific end. Maybe it was just a matter of when your time was up, it was fucking up.
So, what was left to do?
Nothing.
Except live it up hardcore until there was no more life left.
“Dash.”
I turned to find Polo just behind me, his eyes turbulent, and I thought I understood why. “Don’t worry, I heard every word, I swear. You won’t get any pushback from me. I’ll do exactly as you’ve instructed. I’ll make sure I don’t endanger anyone—myself or your men.”
“I’m not worried about that, Fearless.” He pulled me into his arms to crush me against his chest with a beautiful, savage gentleness. “When are you going to get it through that thick head of yours that the only thing I worry about is you?”
“Since when do I have a thick head?” I tried to laugh, then inwardly cringed when it came out as a near-sob. But I couldn’t help it. God, how wonderful this man was, trying his damnedest to keep me safe, while all around us the world was falling apart. “Then again, maybe you’re right. I guess I was pretty thick to believe that death and violence would be put behind us once my father was gone, and that we’d be able to live like normal people. We’re not normal people. We’re cursed. We’re doomed to have that world follow us wherever we go. No matter how cleanly we live, there’s no hope of it ever getting better.”