She shook her head, her mouth twisted in an expression that said she didn’t believe him. “When he gave me the tea, Phillip warned me it was a temporary fix. That once a Gae Dokkaebi finds his way inside you, you’ll never be rid of them. You’ll be haunted forever. Or until they destroy you …” She offered him a smile that held an odd mixture of humor and sadness, and he could see that her front was crumbling. “You want to hear something funny?”
He shrugged.
“Last night, when you and I were together? Wade wasn’t there. Not just quiet; he was gone. I was truly and completely free of him for the first time in what feels like forever.” She dropped her hands to her sides, fists banging against her thighs, one of them strangling the pouch of tea she held onto. “So now I need you to tell me something, Michael, because I’m having a hard time figuring it out on my own.”
He looked away from her, forced as much contempt into his tone as he could scratch together to hide the ache in his throat. “And what’s that?”
“How am I supposed to give that up? How am I supposed to walk away from the only person who’s ever given me peace? The only person who’s ever made me forget?” She jammed the pouch back into her pocket. “Because, I’ve gotta tell you, whatever Reyes said to you last night, whatever he threatened to do—it’s worth the risk to me. You’re worth the risk.”
He shook his head, opened his mouth even though he wasn’t completely sure what was going to come out, but before he could say a word, Ben walked into the room.
“Ready?” he said, adjusting the way his black leather jacket sat on his shoulders. He bounced a look between the two of them. “I’ll just go wait in the—”
“No. I’m ready. Let’s go,” Sabrina said, shooting Michael one last look before she walked out the door.
Fifty-Five
“He’s afraid.”
It was Ben’s tone more than his words that made her look at him. They’d been driving in silence for a while. Ben behind the wheel, her staring out the window. She cast a sidelong glance in his direction and frowned. “He’s an idiot.”
He laughed, the sound at total odds with the pensive expression that etched his usually neutral features. “He’s created quite the cluster fuck, I’ll give you that, but he’s right to worry.” He shot her a quick look. “Reyes’s wife was pregnant when he killed her. Shot her right in front of our boy.”
She felt sick, her fingers closing around the links of the bracelet Michael had given her. “Why? What did he used to do for Reyes?”
“On the surface?” Ben cut her a look. “He was hired to protect Reyes’s daughter, Christina. She was four when he started—a little older than Frankie was when their parents died.”
Sabrina remembered her. Rosy cheeks and dark, bouncing curls. Kerry blue eyes and olive skin. The perfect mixture of her parents, Sophia and Sean. She could imagine Michael looking at another little girl and seeing a way to start over. To get it right. “He loved her.”
Ben shrugged. “I think if not for what happened with Lydia, he’d still be there with her.”
Lydia. Christina’s mother. The wife Reyes killed. What would drive a husband and father to do such a thing? “Was the baby his?”
“Michael’s?” Ben shook his head. “He’s surprising moral for an assassin. Lydia was only twelve when Reyes bought her from her father and married her. She was young—too young for anyone with a conscience. She was like a sister to him. Between Christina and Lydia, Michael had Frankie back—the little sister he walked out on and the young woman she’d become.”
She didn’t ask how he knew all this. She’d learned a long time ago that when Ben was involved there was no such thing as secrets. “I don’t understand. Why would Reyes kill his own child? Everything I’ve heard about this guy tells me he’s a classic narcissist. Killing his child would be like killing himself.”
Ben’s jaw went tight. “Just because the baby wasn’t Michael’s doesn’t mean it belonged to Reyes.”
She stared straight ahead, fingers worrying the links of titanium beneath them. A man like Reyes chose his underlings carefully. He’d find the perfect balance between cruelty and cowardice. No way one of his men would be stupid enough to have an affair with his wife … but someone who saw himself as his equal would.
“His son, Estefan,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
Ben nodded. “Reyes kept the wife and kid on his island and installed Michael there as his personal watchdog, but he didn’t spend much time there. Not enough people to worship him for his tastes,” he said, blowing out a disgusted breath. “When she got pregnant, Estefan knew Reyes would never believe the baby was his, so he very carefully and quietly pointed the finger at Michael.”
She imagined Reyes’s reaction to the news. Rage … but also humiliation. In a man like him, the latter would be a far more dangerous emotion. Bringing a man like Michael into the fold had been a power play. To own Cartero had been the ultimate show of supremacy and it had ended in his own betrayal—something that Reyes’s ego wouldn’t allow him to accept.
Ben spoke. “As luck would have it, the confrontation happened the same night he found out about his sister’s disappearance. He was leaving anyway, but it meant he couldn’t go back for Christina.”
Christina. She could imagine he’d grieved her loss almost as much as he grieved Frankie’s. “Reyes just let him leave?”
Ben gave a snort. “Let him? No, but there isn’t much that can stop Michael when he decides he’s going to do something—another slap in the face for Reyes. By the time he tracked him down, Michael was already under my father’s protection. Untouchable.”
“Until your father asked him to kidnap Leo Maddox.”
Ben smiled, but it looked more like an angry show of teeth. “Bingo.” He parked the car and turned to look at her. “My father can’t be trusted. Sooner or later, he’s going to figure out that Michael lied to him about Leo being dead. If recovering the kid proves too costly or if it suddenly no longer serves him, he’ll abandon him and anyone else he’s sent in to retrieve him.”
“Even you?” she said, surprised to see what looked like pain flit across his face. He looked down at his hand for a moment, the one that was heavily scarred, curling his fingers around the knot of hard flesh in the center of his palm until he clenched it in his fist.
“Especially me.”
Fifty-Six
Sabrina led the way through a heavy metal door and down a brightly lit corridor to a swinging door at the end of the hall.
She pushed her way through it and into a small room with a call button. Ben followed. She leaned on the button, a faint buzzing erupting from the other side of the door. “That look always scares me,” she said, and a few seconds later they were buzzed in.
“What look?”
“The look that says you’re planning something that no one else knows about.”
“Who? Me? Plan something?” He grinned at her. “I would never.”
“Liar, liar …” She pushed the door open and stepped into another small windowless room dominated by a big desk and a bank of black metal filing cabinets. “Hey, Dean. New piercing?” Sabrina said jerking her chin at the skinny kid behind the desk.
He nodded, tossing a mop of crow-black hair out of eyes rimmed with enough black eyeliner to give Ozzy Osbourne pause.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, flipping the bullring jammed through his septum up into his nasal cavity, hiding it completely. “Got it last month.”
“Nice,” Sabrina said with a half-smile, scribbling a tethered ballpoint across the sign-in sheet. She handed the clipboard to Ben and he took it, following suit.
“I heard you were back with Homicide. New partner?” Dean said, dropping a clear plastic box on the desk while giving Ben the once over.
“No—transfer. I’m just showing him around,” she said, pulling her SIG off her hip and ejecting
the magazine before depositing it into the box. “Dr. Black here? I have an appointment.”
Dean nodded. “She’s in her office. You too,” he said, nudging the box at Ben, eyes widening to the size of softballs as he pulled his pair of Desert Eagle .40s from his double shoulder holster. He popped the magazines and placed them in the box, giving the lab tech a slight smirk.
“Holy Dirty Harry, Batman,” Dean muttered, hitting a button mounted to the wall next to his desk. A few seconds later the lock on a second door popped. This one led to another interior corridor.
“Mandy is a … friend, so please—play nice,” Sabrina said to him as she led the way down the hall.
“She hot?”
She stopped in front of the half open door and turned on him. “I’m being serious, Ben. I don’t want her involved.”
“Then you shouldn’t have called her,” he said, shouldering his way past her to rap his knuckles against the door jamb.
Over Ben’s shoulder she could see Mandy’s sunny blond head bent over a stack of paperwork. As soon as he knocked, the head popped up to reveal a freckled nose and a pair of sharp green eyes. “Hotness has been established,” he said loud and clear, forcing Sabrina to dig an elbow into his ribs as she pushed her way to the front.
“Hey, Mandy. Don’t mind him,” she said, planting herself in between Ben and the woman behind the desk. “He was raised by wolves.”
“Hey,” Mandy said, her eyes settling on Ben immediately. There was no doubt she’d heard what he said. “I didn’t know you were bringing company.”
“Me either,” Sabrina said, sweeping a hand through the doorway to usher him inside. “This is—”
“Ben. Ben Shaw,” he said, holding his hand out. She took it, looking him straight in the eye. “And I wasn’t raised by wolves.” He shot her the grin over their joined hands. “I was raised by a cold emotionally unavailable mother and a father whose plot to take over the world kept him too busy for a game of catch.”
“Dr. Black,” she said, her tone a touch too cool to be considered polite. “Nice to meet you,” she said, sitting back in her chair, effectively removing her hand from his. As soon as the door clicked shut, the smile fell away. She produced a set of keys and used one of them to open the bottom drawer on her desk. She pulled out a manila envelope and tossed it on the desk.
“Thanks,” Ben said, picking up the envelope.
Mandy shot a look at Sabrina before narrowing her eyes at Ben, her cool professionalism wiped away to reveal something a bit more challenging. “Who are you again?”
“I’m the guy in the top hat with the bullwhip, organizing this circus,” he said.
She laughed at him.
Ben bounced a look between her and Mandy, utterly confused. “Did I say something funny?”
Ben never knew when to quit—especially when he was ahead. “Thank you,” she said, dropping a hand on his shoulder to pull him out the door.
“I thought maybe you’d like to know who he is before you go.” Mandy cocked her head at the pair of chairs across from her desk.
“You know who he is?” Ben said, sounding skeptical.
Mandy arched a brow at him. “I know enough about him to tell you that his abduction was anything but random.”
After exchanging a look, Ben and Sabrina sat.
She sat back in her chair. “The boy was approximately seven years old, and I estimate that he was abducted no more than a week or two ago.”
“What makes you think that?” he asked.
“X-rays show several fractures—hairline and spiral—on his arms and legs. Probably from struggling against being repeatedly grabbed and forcibly moved. All of these fractures were made at roughly the same time, and remodeling suggested that the injuries were sustained no more than two weeks ago. Whoever he is, he was abducted after Leo Maddox.”
“Sexual assault?”
Mandy shook her head. “My initial examination was negative for sexual assault.”
The same couldn’t be said for Alex Kotko. Experience, both professional and personal, told her exactly how much the boy had suffered. She knew better than anyone that even though he was dead, the boy in Mandy’s autopsy room had been the lucky one.
“So far, I’m not interested,” Ben said, baiting her shamelessly.
“I also found this,” Mandy said, pulling a photo from the envelope. It was a picture of a tattoo, magnified to show the detail.
Ф
“It’s Cyrillic. The letter F—on the back of his neck, hidden under his hairline. It’s small, no bigger than the head of an eraser, and it’s been there for a while. The ink has had time to settle into the skin, so a lot longer than a few weeks. Even without running DNA or prints, I could have told you that the boy you found isn’t Leo Maddox.” Black tucked the picture back into the envelope. “I can’t tell you much more about it without running the tattoo through our database.”
“You ran him through your database?” There was something strange about his voice. It took Sabrina a moment to realize what she was hearing. It sounded like urgency, bordering on panic.
Mandy shot her a puzzled look before shaking her head. “Well, no. Not yet.”
“Don’t,” Ben said as he stood, giving Sabrina a look that was undeniable. He knew something and he wasn’t going to share in front of Mandy.
Sabrina shot him a questioning look before following suit, rising slowly from her seat. “Thanks, Mandy,” she said.
“He has a family somewhere, looking for him,” Mandy said, her troubled gaze bouncing between her and Ben before landing on the packet of papers on her desk. “I can’t just leave him in cold storage. It wouldn’t be right.”
“Twenty-four hours,” Ben blurted out. “That’s all we need.” He swiped the documents and pictures off the desk, along with a business card from its holder. “Mind if I take one? I might have some questions later.”
Mandy cocked an eyebrow at him. “Be my guest.”
“Thank you,” he said, latching onto Sabrina’s arm and pulling her along on his way out the door.
She didn’t speak again until they were in the car.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on or are you going to make me guess?” she said, fastening her seat belt with a quiet click.
Ben said nothing, just worked the gearshift into reverse and backed out of the parking space slowly, giving himself time to think. Obviously seeing that tattoo on the back of that kid’s neck changed everything.
“Ben?” She sounded impatient but also a little apprehensive. “Tell me what’s going on.”
He blew out a long breath, eyes focused on the road ahead. “That tattoo on the kid’s neck. Dr. Hotness is right—it is a Cyrillic F. It also happens to be the mark of Sergey Filatov.”
She let out a low whistle. “Sergey Filatov? The Sergey Filatov?” she said, leaving little doubt that she knew exactly who he was. Between being Livingston Shaw’s pawn and the dinner companion of a Korean mobster, her new life had given Sabrina the education of a lifetime.
“Yup. That’s him,” he said evenly, gripping the wheel so tight she was sure he was about five seconds away from ripping it off the steering column.
Sergey Filatov.
“So maybe Michael had it wrong. Maybe the kid wasn’t abducted by Reyes’s crew. Maybe he had nothing to do with—”
“No, you don’t get it.” He cut her a hard look. “Michael was right—that kid has everything to do with what’s going on here.”
She gave him a confused frown. “Okay …”
“Filatov doesn’t mark the people he buys and sells. He’s too smart for that.” Ben shook his head. “That mark is reserved for immediate members of the Filatov family. It labels them as untouchable.” Tension gathered in his shoulders and neck as the implications of what he was about to say came crashing down on them both. “If th
at kid is sporting it, then he’s important.”
“Is he that crazy?” Sabrina said. “Is Reyes crazy enough to kidnap a close relative of a Russian mob boss?”
Not a Russian mob boss. The Russian mob boss. As Pakhan, Sergey Filatov ran it all. Unlike most organized crime syndicates, the Russians operated as a single entity. There were no factions, no competition within the family. As far as the Russians were concerned, Sergey Filatov was God.
Ben shook his head. “I doubt it. Reyes is a barely functioning sociopath, but he’s not stupid.”
“Then the question is, who hates Reyes enough to abduct a close family member of Sergey Filatov and drop him in the middle of his operation?” Sabrina said, her tone telling him she understood just how dangerous the situation was.
“I don’t know,” he said, cutting her a quick glance. “But I bet Michael has a pretty good idea.”
Fifty-Seven
Michael powered up Ben’s laptop and logged on to the secure conferencing site that FSS used to conduct long-distance meetings. Using his partner’s laptop would make it less likely that the meeting would be monitored, but it wouldn’t make a difference in whether or not Leon Maddox would agree to speak to him.
“Hey,” Lark said from the doorway, a file folder in his hand. “I got that stuff Ben asked for.” He walked in and tossed the folder on the table next to the laptop. “Some pretty heavy shit in there. Shaw finds out we’re poking around in his business, ain’t none of us gonna make it outta this one. Junior included.”
He waited for Lark to make his exit before flipping the file open, but it didn’t take him long to realize he was right. If Shaw knew what they were up to—what they knew—he’d kill them all.
The laptop let out a chime a second before an image of who he was sure was the Senator’s aide filled the monitor, her flirty smile fading when she saw who was on the other side of the screen. “Oh, you’re not—”
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