He hesitated, and it was the very strangeness of Maksim Kovalenko hesitating about anything that caught Val’s attention.
“By the way,” he said casually, “I called your parents while I was out. I told them I was the teacher for your theater camp, and that they’d forgotten to sign the dietary restriction waver for your class trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.”
“There is no way they believed that,” Val said wearily, trying to rally for the girl’s sake. The more they acted like everything was under control, the more she would believe it.
“Oh, they sure as shit did,” Emma said darkly. “They were happy I was out of their hair, right?”
“Your father said they were happy you’d discovered a passion for the arts,” he lied.
Val heard the lie clear as day, and there was no doubt Emma did too, because she snorted.
Maksim continued to set out supplies while Emma made short work of her meal. He’d purchased a large first aid kit, a couple packages of socks and underwear, and some men’s shirts and pants. There were also sports drinks, a loaf of bread, cereal, and a carton of milk which he wedged into a battered micro fridge under the sink.
“You got the winning lottery ticket in there too?” Val asked.
“Luck has gotten none of us very far today.” Maksim smiled faintly. “Preparation wins the day.”
“You must have been a boy scout.”
Maksim chuckled. “Hardly.”
He approached the bed, and Val drew tight all over, sitting up as straight as he could manage despite the agony of his body. As if he might impress the man with his size when he was lying there like an incompetent lump.
“Here.” Maksim cracked the lid on a blue sports drink and held it out. “Small sips.”
“Thanks.”
Their fingers brushed as he took the bottle. He squinted one eye, screwed up his face, and cautiously took a sip. It didn’t feel like the bucket of rocks that the water had earlier, so he took another mouthful.
“Your color is back,” Maksim commented, taking the empty seat at his bedside. “That’s a relief.”
“Can’t kick the bucket yet,” Val said. “Not until I get you out of the pressure cooker.”
“That isn’t what I meant in the slightest.” Maksim paused. “I need to speak with you, however.”
Val cast a glance at Emma, who gathered up her armload of goodies and hobbled to the bathroom, still chewing the last of her burrito. “No need to pussyfoot around me, gents,” she muttered around her mouthful. “I know when I’m not wanted, believe me. I’m going to take a shower. Once the door is closed, you can make all the cow eyes you want at each other.”
The door clicked shut.
“She’s… not normal, is she?”
“Definitely not.”
“Her home life is rough, huh?”
Maksim inclined his head. “Neglect isn’t relegated to the lower classes. Emma has never gone a day without food, but she’s starving just the same.”
Val mulled that over. “Never would have figured you for a soft touch.”
“No?” Maksim slid him a look full of irony. “Then you’d be correct. Most people prefer to maintain a degree of separation from me.”
“Why?”
“Presumably because I’m a sarcastic asshole.” He rolled one finger in a gesture for Val to turn over. “Let me look at your side.”
“It’s fine.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
Val grumbled but slowly and painfully turned onto his right side. He watched Maksim’s calm, intelligent face as he leaned forward and untaped one end of the dressing.
“Hmm,” Maksim rumbled. “Not much seeping. But let’s get you a dry bandage for the night just to be safe.”
His hands were warm, dry, and firm. They felt entirely different from the nervous icicles Emma had laid on him earlier. Val couldn’t help but close his eyes to feel them better.
God, it felt good to be touched. Not in a sexual manner. It was a touch that was solid and reassuring, and if he twisted his imagination just a bit, maybe even caring. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to close his eyes and lean into a touch like this.
He’d only hooked up once in the months he’d been home, a blowjob from an old football buddy who’d apparently become bi-curious while he was away. He’d gotten off, sure, but it hadn’t been relaxing.
He thought maybe the last time he’d felt a reassuring touch had been in his mother’s kitchen the week after he’d come home. She was much shorter than him, but she’d yanked him down, wrapped him up in her squishy arms, and just hugged him for such a long time. He’d closed his eyes and breathed in the fragrance of her lavender perfume, and he’d felt like maybe he could put his bad choices behind him and start fresh.
A few weeks later, he’d dragged her dead body out of their exhaust filled garage.
He knew she’d never meant for him to find her. She’d planned on it being Pop. If she’d known Val would be home that afternoon, there was no way she would have gone through with it. He should have told her, but he’d been full of so much anger and disgust at what his parents had asked him to do that he couldn’t bear to be in the same room as them.
By the time he’d realized he had things he needed to say, it had been too late.
“Am I hurting you?” Maksim asked quietly.
Val’s eyes flashed open. He had no memory of squeezing them shut. He sucked in a long breath, counted to seven, and then let it out through his mouth to a slow eight count. Just like the instructions on the PTSD YouTube videos he’d watched. “I’m fine.”
“You keep using that word,” Maksim quoted with a crooked smile. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Val barked a startled laugh. “First Abbott and Costello, and now The Princess Bride? You have surprising tastes, my friend.”
“What would you expect?” Maksim applied a thin layer of Bacitracin to a bandage before placing it over his wound.
Val winced when the cold gel touched his inflamed skin. “I don’t know. Something artsy from Sundance, maybe?”
Maksim scoffed. “I’m not sure what in the past twelve hours has given you the impression I enjoy pretension, but I assure you I do not.”
“Maybe it’s the way you talk. Like an Oxford dictionary, full of five dollar words.”
He said it only to distract himself from the way Maksim’s sure hands smoothed down the last bit of medical tape. His abdominal muscles twitched when those warm, rough fingers brushed his skin.
Maksim sat back and rested his hands flat against his thighs, almost as if he were restraining himself from fiddling with the bandage some more.
“Ah,” he murmured. “That’s the unfortunate result of trying too hard. I only spoke broken English when my mother brought me to the States as a child. We lived in a Pittsburgh ghetto those first few years. The residents had grammar so atrocious that everything I learned was incorrect.”
Val had a difficult time imagining him as anything other than the powerful, imposing man he was today. All that came to mind was those old photographs of immigrant children at Ellis Island. He had a ridiculous vision of Maksim in shortpants and a cap, with his piercing blue eyes and smudges of dirt across gaunt cheekbones.
“What changed?”
“My mother always believed I was smarter than I am.” His expression was distant but fond. “She got me a scholarship to a preparatory school. I grew tired of being teased by the other students, so I read the dictionary in my spare time, and I watched old BBC and Nick at Night programs to work on my accent. I think that’s why I still like old shows.”
The hiss of the shower turning on startled both of them.
Maksim’s manner became brusque and professional once more. “Do you think you can keep a few crackers down?”
“I can try.” Val gamely pushed himself up on the pillows. If he didn’t move more than a couple inches at a time, the pain retreated to a bearable dul
l throb rather than an excruciating crescendo.
He was working on the dusty crumbles of his first saltine when Maksim hit him with what he’d really wanted to talk about. “You need to tell me everything that started this. No more prevaricating. It’s in my and Emma’s best interest to help you resolve this quickly, and I have resources that may surprise you. But you need to be honest with me. I know when you’re lying.”
Val thunked his head back against the headboard. “Fuck, I don’t want to do this. You should never have been involved in the first place.”
“Yet here I am. Let’s proceed without the self-recrimination. It accomplishes nothing.”
Val let out an ugly sound posing as a laugh. “Seems about the only thing I’m good for these days.”
Maksim remained unimpressed. He sat there in his fancy clothes, with his arms folded across his chest, and his focus laser sharp.
Val didn’t think he’d ever felt like such a loser, even when his drill instructor had been screaming in his face. But he had as little choice to resist now, beneath that arctic stare, as he had then.
10
Maksim
“Where do I start?” Val cracked his neck like he was preparing for a cage fight.
Maksim watched the pulse leap in his throat. Had he always been so on edge? If so, Marine Sniper seemed like a poor career choice. Then again, maybe the career had been part of the problem.
That brought Maksim to his first question. Just like when he was preparing a witness, he needed a few simple background questions to establish a base level of candor.
“Why did you join the military?”
Val’s brows drew together. “I didn’t think we were starting that far back.”
“Humor me.”
“Okay.” Yet he sat there in silence, picking at the nylon threads of the bedspread. Eventually, he said, “I joined because I didn’t have any other options. You know how you went to that fancy school and showed up everyone else? I was the opposite of that. My school was rough and my grades sucked. Pop kept trying to get me to join the family business, and I mean, I loved him, but I had no interest in turning out like him. I’ve always been athletic, and I’m good at following orders. The Marines just made sense.”
Maksim cocked his head. “How did you end up in Recon?”
“A captain saw me on the range one day. I’d already pulled a Scout Sniper MOS, and the captain needed someone with advanced cross-training for his platoon. He recommended me. I got a rank promotion, salary increase, and a shitload of advanced training.”
“It sounds ideal,” Maksim said thoughtfully, but it really didn’t. Not to him, anyway. But he had a personal abhorrence to taking orders. For a boy no one had ever expected much from, though? It made sense. “Why did you leave? What changed?”
Val was still looking down at the blanket, so Maksim had a perfect view of the red flush that crept up the back of his neck.
“We were overseas a lot, you know? Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria. I’ve been in plenty of tight spots, but it’s not like we saw the action guys saw back in Fallujah. I killed people.” He laughed, but it was thin and thready, different from his low speaking voice. “I mean, of course, I killed people. I was a sniper. I was damned good at it, too. It didn’t bother me. Except I guess… it did. It just took me a while to notice.”
He could see Val’s distress in the way he kept glancing around the room and rubbing the center of his chest, as if it hurt. His Adam’s apple bobbed on a hard swallow.
Maksim handed him the bottle of Gatorade and cut him some slack. “So you decided the Corps wasn’t for you, after all, and you came home.”
Val looked surprised, as if he’d momentarily forgotten the point of their conversation. He absently rubbed his sternum, back and forth, back and forth, and took a deep, quavering breath.
“Yeah,” he rasped. “Medical discharge because of my cracked head.”
“Your parents must have been glad to have you home.”
“Mom was, yeah.” He smiled wistfully. “She had a feast waiting for me like I was the prodigal son. They had me real late in life, so they were both already in their sixties. Called me their miracle baby. That’s why she named me Valentine. You know, after the patron saint of lovers?”
Maksim nodded.
“She was especially glad to see me because she thought I’d be able to rein in Pop, for some fucking reason.” He shook his head. “I told the truth, mostly, when that detective asked. Pop was good to us. He loved us. But, man, he was the classic two-bit hood. He was full-blooded Italian and raised in Chicago, so he grew up with dreams of being Made by some big mob organization. They didn’t want him though. I guess he was too much of a liability. Smarts don’t run in our family.”
Maksim shouldn’t have an opinion one way or another, but hearing Val disparage himself rubbed him the wrong way. It pricked at him like a stuck thorn, impossible to ignore until he addressed it.
“The young man who kept me and Emma alive today is more intelligent than most people I know,” he said. “I’ve yet to see you make a dumb decision.”
Val asked mockingly, “What would you call getting in bed with the likes of Dominic Russo?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t gotten to that part yet. Go on.”
“Right.” Val licked his dry lips. Maksim’s gaze lingered on the shine he left there. “Well, uh, Pop had gotten deep in some petty crimes for Russo. He wasn’t valuable enough to be Made, but he was useful as an associate.”
“Stop. Clarify.”
“An associate is someone in bed with the mob but who hasn’t taken an oath. He’s expected to be loyal, but he doesn’t know much. They’re useful shmucks who can be cut loose any time.”
“Thank you. Continue, please.”
“Once they were empty nesters, Pop started hanging out at that strip club. He was getting into unsanctioned shit with Esposito, from what I can tell. I don’t think it was anything big: some blackmail, fraud, that sort of thing. Esposito was running underage girls out the back of his clubs, but I don’t think Pop was involved in that. He wasn’t a bad guy.”
Maksim knew the type. He’d represented clients exactly like Val’s father in both his official practice and at the CLC. They were nauseatingly common throughout all economic strata.
They were affable, perhaps even kind, as long as it didn’t cost them anything. The only thing preventing them from brutality was their cowardice. They were gutless, not good. They preferred to keep to the edges of criminal enterprises so they could tell themselves no one was getting hurt. No one they could see, anyway. They waited for the larger predators to bring down their prey, and then they took their fill of the carcass.
He didn’t say any of that, however. He had no father. His mother had gotten pregnant at sixteen, and to her deathbed, had never explained who his sire was. She’d never dated or displayed any interest in men that Maksim could recall. As he’d gotten older, he realized he didn’t want to know the act that had produced him.
Still, even having never experienced a paternal relationship himself, he understood that a man’s feelings toward his father were a complicated thing.
He gestured for Val to continue.
“Yeah, Pop wasn’t running girls. No one ever said he was, either. I don’t think he knew they were underage, or he wouldn’t have been…”
“He was having sex with them?”
Val looked like he was going to be sick, but he gritted his teeth and nodded. “Broke my mom’s heart when she found out. There were photos and everything. Russo himself dropped them by the house. He sat at my mother’s table, eating her manicotti, and then he pulled out a smartphone and started scrolling through that trash right in front of all of us.”
“To what end? Your father was already in his pocket.”
Val was gnashing his teeth now. Maksim could hear his back molars grinding from two feet away. Without thinking, he rested his fingers against his flexing jaw.
Val went utterly still be
neath his touch. His eyes flew to Maksim’s face. He didn’t appear to be breathing.
“Val,” Maksim said calmly, aware that he was behaving inappropriately but unable to stop himself. “Do you remember what I told you this morning? As your attorney, I’m on your side, no matter who it incriminates. I’m not here to judge. I’m here to get the truth.”
“Are you still my attorney?” Val whispered. He wasn’t meeting his eyes. His gaze had dropped to Maksim’s mouth. “I kind of thought the trail of dead bodies would sour you on the idea.”
Maksim’s thumb stroked over the edge of Val’s jaw. The roughness there felt so good that he abruptly pulled away, lest he embarrass himself.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve never quit a case before its resolution. I’m not about to begin here. Now, tell me. What did Russo hope to gain in blackmailing your father?”
“Me.” Storm clouds rolled across Val’s expression. “He wanted me.”
“You?”
“I guess Pop was proud of having a Recon Marine for a son. Bragged all over town for years. Mom said he’d talk me up to his drinking buddies, to anyone who would sit still long enough to listen. When I came home and had nothing better going for me, he got this idea in his head that I would finally join the business.”
“Did you ever consider it?”
“No,” Val said flatly. “I never wanted any part of that life.”
“Of course,” Maksim soothed. “My apologies. Please, continue.”
“Russo’s in his seventies, and all his closest capos are friends he grew up with. They’re old. The ones who haven’t already kicked it are getting soft. They just want to eat and sleep and fuck away their twilight years. It makes Russo look weak, so word on the street is the Russians have been maneuvering to take over his operation. Anyway, his trigger man had a stroke or something, and Russo needed to replace him. He needed someone with a cool head, someone good with a gun, and someone who had reason to stay loyal to him. I fit the bill. Maybe he thought I was greedy like Pop, or maybe he thought the dirt he had on Pop was enough to control me.” He chuckled bitterly. “It wouldn’t have been. I’d have let Pop rot in jail. But Mom… she fucking loved him.”
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