In For the Kill

by Shannon McKenna

  Sveti dabbed nervously at her mouth with a napkin.

  “So,” Nick said. “We’ve been working on a plan. The way things stand, we’ve decided it’s best to keep you here on lockdown.”

  Tam looked at Sam. “And you’re not invited,” she said. “Last night was an exception.”

  Sveti shook her head, but Nick plodded on. “This house has the best security, and it’s the easiest to defend. Plus, there’s room for backup people to stay. Tam and Val’s arsenal is—”

  “No!” Sveti said sharply. “Are you guys even listening to yourselves? ‘We’ve decided?’ ‘Keep me here?’ What am I, a doll?”

  “Of course not, honey,” Becca said. “But it’s the only option. You were snatched from your own home, and we don’t know their agenda.”

  “I told you their agenda!” Sveti protested. “I know what they want! He wanted to know about what was written on Mama’s photo!”

  In the silence that followed, everyone abruptly had something to look at that was not Sveti. Her eyes widened, and a bright red slash began to glow on each cheekbone. “Oh, my God,” she said. “You guys don’t believe me either.” She looked at Sam. “What did you tell them?”

  He lifted his hands. “Just what the investigation turned up. The body I pulled out of that fire is Jason Kang. From Hong Kong. He’s a snakehead goon from Helen Wong’s gang.” He paused. “Not Ukrainian.”

  She looked betrayed. “But . . . but the guy who questioned me was not Chinese! I know what language I’m hearing when I hear it! And his eyes were gray! He was white, with gray hair, buzz cut! He put on the mask right before Sam came in!”

  “Calm down,” Lara soothed. “You’ve been through a terrible experience, and no one better than we can understand—”

  “You don’t understand! Not if you all think that I’m delusional!”

  Becca’s face contracted. “Honey. We just need to keep you safe.”

  “The nationality of the asshole gunning for you doesn’t matter, Sveti,” Nick said. “Our response remains the same.”

  Sveti looked at Tam. “You too? You think I’m crazy?”

  “I’ve had stress flashbacks.” Tam’s voice was colorless. “They suck. I would not spit in the face of a friend who offered to help.”

  “I’m not spitting in anyone’s face,” Sveti said fervently. “I’ve had stress flashbacks, too. But I was not having one yesterday. In any case, I’m leaving the country, so it’s irrelevant. Thanks for the thought, but I’ll handle this myself from now on.”

  Sam inhaled and braced himself. This was gonna be ugly.

  Tam was the first to find her voice. “Excuse me? Going where?”

  “Italy, and then England. It’s been coming together the past few weeks. I was waiting to tell you until I’d nailed the details down. There’s a conference on human trafficking in San Anselmo. I’m speaking on several panels and getting an award for my contribution to the fight against modern slavery. And I got a consulting job, in London. Illuxit Transnational. It’s a big contract research organization. I’ll be advising corporations on how to implement policies to prevent trafficking.”

  Nick folded his arms. “When were you going to tell us?”

  “At the wedding,” Sveti said. “But I, ah, got distracted. Oleg Arbatov showed up, and I had my freak-out, and then, ah . . .” Her eyes flicked to Sam and her whole face went pink.

  “It’s great about the award, Sveti,” Kev said gently. “You deserve it. But you can’t go receive it now. It’s too dangerous.”

  “It’s been dangerous from the start,” Sveti said. “It’ll always be dangerous. Whatever. I’ll defend myself. You all taught me how.”

  “Like you defended yourself yesterday?” Sean said.

  “Amen,” Sam muttered.

  “You shut up,” Sveti said furiously, whirling on Sam.

  Sam raised both hands meekly in the air.

  “We are not going to let you get killed,” Tam said stonily. “You’re one of us now, and we just can’t do it.”

  “It’s not up to you.” Sveti looked from one to the other of her friends. “I’ll always be grateful to you. But I will make the decisions.”

  “I promised your father I’d look out for you!” Nick bellowed.

  “That’s nice, but my father should have looked out for me himself,” Sveti said. “He did as he pleased. He made his choices.”

  “And got his guts ripped out,” Tam pointed out.

  “His choice,” Sveti repeated. “His risk.” She looked at Sam, at Nick, then Val. “I’ve seen your bullet scars,” she said. She looked at Kev, Tam, Miles. “You all have scars. None of you ever backed away from a dangerous job. And you criticize me? You want to wrap me in tissue and lock me in a cupboard? I’m calling you on your bullshit right now!”

  “This is different,” Tam said. “The scum of the earth can wait for you to flatten them into paste while we get a hold on this situation. You have your whole life to fight the powers of darkness.”

  “And if we never get a hold on it? I stay on lockdown indefinitely? Poor Sveti with her pathetic delusions, locked up so she doesn’t hurt herself. Uh-uh. I don’t think so. Some opportunities won’t wait.”

  “Your destiny will not be derailed by a single missed opportunity,” Val said.

  Sveti shook her head. “I won’t run and hide. I want my fucking award, and I want that fucking job. I won’t back down because of this!”

  Val rubbed his chin. “If it was Helen Wong’s gang, Europe might not be such a bad idea,” he said thoughtfully. “Their ties are to Asia.”

  “So you’re convinced?” Sveti asked. “You’re so sure that what I remember is just a hallucination?”

  Val looked pained. “Sveti, we must examine every possible—”

  “Then examine the possibility that what I told you is what actually happened.” Her voice rang out, challenging them. “I invite you to examine that, all of you. Please. Do me that courtesy.”

  Val nodded. “Very well, let us examine it,” he said. “Go through it again now, from the very top. Every last tiny detail.”

  So Sveti went through the whole thing, just as she’d told it to Sam, just as she’d told it to Tenly and Horvath. Not missing a beat or a detail.

  After she concluded, they all stared at one another, at a loss.

  “So the Ukrainian hired at least one snakehead for this job,” Sveti concluded. “I don’t know why, but that’s what happened.”

  “Tell me again about the photo,” Tam said.

  “I displayed it in my TED talk,” Sveti said. “A picture of my father, too. Remember the photo that arrived in the mail after she died, with the poem snippets on the back? The one she sent like a postcard?”

  “Let’s see them,” Nick said.

  Sveti reached for her tablet and pulled up the first one, tapping to enlarge it. “She sent me the JPEG by e-mail, too. In the very last batch of pictures she ever sent me.”

  She pushed the tablet to the middle of the table. Everyone leaned to study it. Sam waited a decent interval, then spun the tablet a quarter turn. Sveti’s mother had been a stunner. No surprise there. Blonde, but the full, sexy mouth, the stubborn set of the jaw, the elegant nose, the winged brows, the big, haunting eyes, all were echoed in Sveti’s face.

  But other than being a compelling portrait of a beautiful woman on a rocky, unidentifiable hillside, he saw nothing about the photo that could be significant to anyone but Sveti.

  Sveti tapped on the tablet once again. “This was the other one that I had up on the same screen. This is my father.”

  Sam took a quick look before pushing it back toward the others. Sergei had passed on Sveti’s amazing cheekbones. Handsome guy, dark and slit-eyed, crow’s-feet wrinkled up in a feral grin. He looked tough. There were two other men, lifting their glasses in a toast. The shot had been snapped from inside a house, looking out through a window.

  Becca pointed, her mouth tight. “That’s Zhoglo.”

 
; Nick squeezed her shoulders. “Dead and gone.”

  “He haunts me, though,” she said. “The bastard.”

  Sam leaned to examine the mafiya vor’s swollen, grinning face, then the younger guy. “How about that guy?” Sam asked. “Who’s he?”

  “I don’t know,” Sveti said. “And there’s no one left to ask.”

  Yeah, that was the thing exactly. No one wanted to say it, but there it sat, begging to be said. There was no one left to ask, and nothing left to ask about, because everyone associated with this old story was dead and gone. The phantom torturer had been asking questions about Sveti’s unresolved psychological issues. Nothing that was relevant or current. He didn’t know a gentle way to say it, so he kept his mouth shut. Let some other poor fool point it out.

  “Your mother took this?” he asked, indicating the photo.

  Sveti nodded. “She was a gifted photographer.”

  “Here are the pictures by Sveti’s bed!” Rachel popped up suddenly. “The ones in the gold frame! I ran and got them.” She held up the hinged frame triumphantly. Her eyes sparkled with excitement.

  “We’ve talked about eavesdropping, baby,” Tam said sharply.

  Rachel shrugged. “If it’s about Sveti, I need to know about it.”

  “We looked at these pictures already, sweetheart, on Sveti’s tablet, but thank you anyway,” Becca told her gently.

  Sam took the photo frame from Rachel’s hand and examined it. They were, in fact, the same ones Sveti had just shown them, but these had been trimmed to fit the frames. The shot of Sveti’s mother was cut to half its original size, and something was scrawled in Cyrillic script over the top, with a couple of numbers below. The one of Sergei was trimmed, too, the third man cut away, but Zhoglo still smirked in it, his bulbous goblin face positioned right over Sergei Ardov’s shoulder.

  “You keep a picture of Vadim Zhoglo by your bed?” Sam said.

  Sveti frowned. “No, I keep a picture of my father by my bed,” she said stiffly. “It’s the only one I have where he’s smiling.”

  “His murderer is smiling, too. Doesn’t that bug you?”

  Sveti shrugged. “You have to take the bad with the good, if you want to salvage anything.”

  “You lie in your bed at night and let that monster leer at you?” he asked, incredulous. “And that doesn’t hurt you?”

  “Back off!” she snapped. “Maybe it does, I don’t know, but I’m used to things hurting. I don’t even notice.”

  It made him furious that Sveti should be so used to things being painful that something so fucking crazy horrible as having Zhoglo’s ugly mug enshrined on her bedside table should just slip right past her. Unnoticed, among all the other crazy horrible things.

  “That needs to change,” he announced. He unhooked the lever in the back that held the picture in place, and the chunk of cardboard picture backing fell out, along with the picture.

  Everyone watched as he twisted and snagged the kitchen shears out of the knife block on the kitchen bar behind him.

  “Sam!” Sveti leaped up and started around the table. “Stop! That’s mine! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Changing history.” He cut into the photo, angling the shears carefully around Sergei’s head to cut out Zhoglo’s face.

  Sveti skidded to a stop next to him, poppy red. “That was not yours to alter,” she said, her voice tight. “You had no right to do that!”

  He’d be damned if he’d apologize. He shook the shears. The scrap of photo fell from the blades and fluttered onto the table.

  “You can’t change the past.” Sveti’s voice quivered, dangerously.

  “No?” Sam stabbed the point of the scissors in the middle of Zhoglo’s face. “You can change how you think about it.”

  “And you think it’s so simple? How the fuck would you know?”

  Sean fidgeted uneasily. “Um, guys? This sounds like the kind of argument you two should have in private.”

  Sam lifted up the shears, with the offending scrap stuck upon the point. “Burn this ugly motherfucker,” he said. “Burn him to ash.”

  Nick looked around. “I’m with that program,” he said. “Anybody here have a lighter? Nobody smokes in this crowd anymore.”

  A box of kitchen matches sailed into the air from the other side of the bar, lobbed by Rachel. The box bounced on the table, sliding open. Wooden matches spilled out.

  Sveti stood like a statue, fists clenched. Sam held the shears out to her. An offering.

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” she said. “And it won’t work.”

  “I’m with Sam,” Becca said, her voice hard. “Burn it, Sveti.”

  Tam banged her forehead against the table. “For the love of God, finish it,” she snarled. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

  It was Becca, finally, who grabbed a match and scraped it against the box. The puff of sulfur burned Sam’s nose as the flame took hold. Becca held it up to the photographic paper.

  They all watched it burn in silence. Flames blackened the edges, curling green and blue, shrinking from the outside in. Ghostly shards of ash drifted onto the table, disintegrating into a puff of gray dust.

  “Enough.” Tam sounded unusually subdued. “Let’s move on.”

  Sam picked up the picture frame, but Sveti snatched it out of his hands. “Do not touch my stuff again,” she muttered, as she teased the backing out of the frame. The picture of Sonia fell out, along with a square of thin, almost transparent paper.

  Sam held up the photograph. “What does that writing say?”

  “The Sword of Cain,” Sveti said. “The guy kept asking what it meant to me. I would have told him if it meant anything. It doesn’t.”

  “Did the part you trimmed off have anything written on it?” he asked.

  “Nothing about a sword,” she said. “On the picture side, there were a few numbers. I figured they were phone numbers, or maybe filing numbers. Sometimes she printed several different versions of a photograph before she was happy with it, and numbered them. The other side had snippets of poetry, the address, and stamp.”

  “Did she send any others?”

  “Not through the mail,” Sveti said. “She sent me lots of JPEGs, on my e-mail. But they’re just art photography. Pretty pictures of Italy.”

  Sam turned it over. On the back was more scribbling. Some in Cyrillic and some that appeared to be in English, but such tiny cursive, he could barely read it. “What’s this stuff written on the back?”

  Sveti shook her head. “Mama was cryptic,” she said. “They’re lines from various obscure poems. Some French, some Russian, some English, but she’d translated them all into English here. She taught poetry at the university, before Papa was killed. That first line in Ukrainian Cyrillic says, ‘When you don’t know which way to turn, look to the source.’ Then come the quotes.”

  He squinted at the first quote. The writing was so miniscule. “‘Darkness from that ragged hole/pulls like a prisoner’s shackling chain/drawing me into Hell’s blind’ . . . what’s that?”

  “Realm,” Sveti said. “Hell’s blind realm. Peter Rodionov. It’s very sad. Don’t read any of them aloud, please. I’ll break out into a cold sweat if I have to listen to them again.”

  “Is there a unifying theme?” he persisted.

  She shook her head. “Only that they’re all depressing. Lukyenov, Rafael, Lebedev. Poems about death. Whatever point she meant to make with them, I missed it.”

  Sam peered at another one. “ ‘Bear witness to this bowl of bones/this yellowed snarl of sticks and twigs.’ Wow. Cheerful.”

  “Esther Rafael,” Sveti said, her face stoic. “She survived Auschwitz. She wrote about the Holocaust. Oh, and another thing. The man who questioned me yesterday? He’s the one who killed my mother.”

  Tam’s eyes dropped. Val’s gaze slid away. Nick and Becca exchanged worried glances. A nervous silence stretched out.

  “Sveti,” Sean said carefully. “Wasn’t your mom�
�s death a suicide ?”

  “That’s what we thought,” Sveti said. “But that man talked about Mama as if he’d known her. He talked about the red dress she wore that night. How would he know if he wasn’t there? Besides, Mama was not a person who would kill herself. She must have been taking pictures that made someone nervous, so they killed her. And The Sword of Cain is the key, if I could figure out what the hell it is.”

  Sam took advantage of her distraction to pick up the square of paper. Sveti twitched it away and smoothed it back into its folds.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “Mama’s last letter to me,” she said.

  Sam waited, but when the obvious next thing was not forthcoming, he fished for it. “And you’re going to read it to us, right?”

  “I’d rather not,” she said. “It has nothing to do with anything, and it just makes me sad, and I really don’t . . .” Her voice petered off.

  Sam gazed at her, relentless. “You said everything, Sveti.”

  She unfolded it, with agonizing slowness, and began to translate.

  My dear Svetlana,

  I write to you from Renato’s atrium in the Villa Rosalba. An orange tree is heavy with fruit over my right shoulder, a lemon tree to my left. Before me is Renato’s sculpture garden, full of figures from myth and legend. Atlas is my favorite. Approach him from the bench where I sit, following the tree of life, until you can see his eyes.

  Look beneath. Look within, to find your way through the labyrinth. You already know more about that labyrinth than any young woman should. For that I will always be sorry. Forgive me for not protecting you better. I should have taken you back to France before disaster struck. Love makes one stupid.

  Sam winced inwardly. The very last thought he wanted Sveti to reflect upon right now, and he had bullied her into voicing it.

  He broke in as Sveti faltered. “France?”