A shiver ran through Shaun. His switch from loving husband to deadly mobster was instant. She knew without a doubt that the man leaving their room was not the man she married, but the one who’d kidnapped her nearly two years ago.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Havel’s steps were muffled as he navigated the path from the mansion to Leeza’s cottage. Leeza and Adam’s cottage, he corrected himself. The home that they’d built together. The place where they’d created a family.
After Adam’s discovery in the closet safe room, six months earlier, it had been decided that he wasn’t a threat. He was allowed to return to his cottage, allowed to resume his work.
Or so Adam believed.
In reality, Jozef and Havel had decided that no decisions would be made about the other man’s fate until Leeza was found and brought home. Jozef thought perhaps she would try to contact her husband and they could trace her.
Havel knew better. Leeza wouldn’t contact Adam. She hated the man. No, that wasn’t true. She used to hate him. Now, she didn’t think enough of him to hate him. She wouldn’t contact Adam because she wouldn’t think of it. As far as she was concerned, the man she married all those years ago was useless to her.
Havel knew how her mind worked, had always known. He’d allowed bitterness over her choice to break up with him to cloud his judgment, but the fog was clearing and once more he could see her again. See the woman he loved for who she was. Strong, capable, frightened.
Havel had avoided visiting Adam until now. Though Jozef had asked his second-in-command if he wanted to interrogate the accountant, Havel had declined. While Leeza felt nothing for her husband, Havel felt everything. He wasn’t sure he could contain his rage.
Now, with Jozef out of town, Havel had decided it was time to have a talk with the accountant. Man to man. As the man who loved Leeza to the man who married her.
He stopped outside the cottage, giving himself one more chance to walk away. Did he have the self-control not to kill Adam Horáček? He was about to find out.
He unlocked the door and let himself in, his hand falling to the butt of his pistol. He didn’t need to worry though; Adam was sitting at his dining room table eating his evening meal.
He looked like the prince of his kingdom, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He was seated at the head of the table, a candelabra lighting the immediate area surrounding his placemat. All other lights had been turned off.
Adam was a weird guy and always had been. He seemed unflappable, even in the direst of circumstances. Though Havel hadn’t interrogated the accountant, Jozef had. He’d sat across from Adam, asking question after question, with Havel translating. Every man in the room had become fatigued by the process, though they knew better than to show their feelings.
Only Jozef and Adam had remained unfazed, each completely focused on the other. Interrogator and prisoner. One wanted information, the other… had no motive that any of them could see.
Except Jozef had a secret weapon, a file detailing Adam’s life from childhood to adulthood, including his marriage to Leeza.
It had been hard to retain an impassive face and a level voice when the subject of Leeza came up during the interrogation. Especially because Jozef was dropping bombs that Havel hadn’t known. Jozef knew that Havel cared about Leeza, but he hadn’t known the depth of their relationship before Adam entered the picture.
When the interrogation had ended, Adam had been allowed to resume his old life in the comfort of his cottage. He would remain under surveillance and his position would be suspended until after Jozef met with the Bratva, since Adam was a Bratva sanctioned accountant and related to one of their top men.
“I was expecting you sooner. Months ago, in fact.”
Adam continued to eat his meal without looking up.
Havel pulled a chair out on the opposite side of the dining table and dropped his heavy frame into it. The chair creaked and then held.
“Why is that?” Havel kept his tone level and his eyes unreadable.
Adam reached for his glass of wine, taking a long sip of the rich liquid.
“You were in love with my wife. I assumed you would want some kind of payback since I stole her from you.” Adam finally lifted his gaze from the table. Havel read triumph there.
Not an ounce of fear. The man was either sociopathic or he somehow thought he could win this confrontation.
Havel laughed coldly. “You don’t know your wife if you think she would allow herself to be stolen.”
A flash of something rippled across Adam’s face before he fought to control his emotions. Havel thought it was anger at being told he didn’t know his wife.
“Yet she still became my wife.”
“Yes,” Havel drawled. “Why is that? What did you say to Krystoff to get him to agree to a merger between his eldest daughter and someone who is so much lower than her?”
Adam didn’t react to the insult. Instead, he picked up his napkin, wiped his mouth and tossed the napkin down. “He was ordered to allow the marriage by Stellan Jovanovich.”
“You’re related the Bratva accountant.”
Adam nodded. “Yes. Stellan is my uncle.”
“Stellan Jovanovich? Well, no shit. Maybe we should give your uncle a call and see if he thinks we should continue to pay for your room and board, or if he’d rather you make a quiet exit from the organization. Word has it, you’ve been an embarrassment to your family.” Of course, Havel already knew about the association. It’d been in the file Jozef found in Krystoff’s things.
Adam’s throat bobbed, giving away his fear for a split second. So, not a sociopath, just a Bratva connected man with some very sick proclivities.
“You can’t kill me,” Adam said quickly.
“Why?” Havel leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his biceps.
He was surprised that rage wasn’t making this conversation more difficult. Instead, he felt satisfaction as he played with his food. He might not kill Adam today, but he would eventually. One day. And it was going to be awesome, glorious and satisfying. It would be everything he’d wanted to do to the man since Leeza broke his heart. Every fantasy come to life.
“Jozef won’t allow it.” Adam pushed his chair back and gripped the edge of the table but didn’t rise. “The Bratva won’t allow it.”
“Is that what you think?” Havel chuckled. “One day soon, Jozef will give you to me on a silver platter. And the Bratva? You’ve caused them more problems than you’ve solved.”
“I… I don’t know what you mean.”
Havel’s smirk disappeared and he straightened in his seat, placing his hands on the table and deliberately rising slowly, with menace.
“Don’t you?” Havel let his question hang in the air before continuing. “The Bratva doesn’t like when attention is brought to them unless they deliberately ask for it. You were given to this family to get you out of Russia and away from your highly positioned uncle. You were drawing too much negative attention to him. Now, what could you possibly have done that was so bad not even the Bratva could sanction it?”
Havel shoved away from the table and strode toward Adam, who leapt to his feet in alarm. He tried to stand his ground, but the hulking, muscular, tattooed thug bearing down on him gave him nowhere to go.
“This is ridiculous,” Adam said, his voice shaking. “You don’t know anything.”
“You think not?” Havel came to a stop uncomfortably close to Adam. Havel was several inches taller, bringing his collarbone in line with Adam’s eyes.
Adam was forced to look up when he answered.
“There’s no evidence.”
“There’s always evidence,” Havel countered. “As an accountant, you should know that. No one gets away with their crimes forever.”
Adam scrambled back, hitting the wall behind him then sliding toward the staircase leading to the top floor.
“What about you?” Adam tried to sound tough but failed. “What about your crimes?”
<
br /> “That is between me and God.”
Havel believed he would one day face judgment, then spend his eternity in purgatory. He was at peace with that. He was not at peace with monsters like Adam getting away with their crimes while still living on the earthly plane.
“But you…” Havel stalked the man across the room, their movements made eerie by the candlelight. “You are a killer. You will burn in this world before I allow you to go to the next.”
“You’re a killer too!” Adam protested. “What’s the difference?”
“I don’t murder innocent women.”
The truth lay in the air between them. Up to that point, Adam hadn’t known how much Jozef or Havel knew about his proclivities. Havel thought it was about time he lay his cards on the table. He was done with Adam living in his little cottage, enjoying his candlelit meals. Havel was going to give him something to worry about until the moment he was ready to end things with the accountant. He would torture the other man’s thoughts, drive him to the edge, then he would do it some more before finally taking his life.
Havel wasn’t doing it for any noble reason. He wasn’t doing it for the women whose lives Adam had stolen prematurely. No, he was doing it for himself. He wanted vengeance for the innocence this man stole from the woman he loved.
“Those women weren’t innocent,” Adam protested. “They were all prostitutes. They sold sex. They deserved – ”
Havel reached for his gun, pressing it to Adam’s temple. “Finish that sentence, accountant.”
Adam chose to remain silent.
Havel stepped back, tucking the gun back into his holster. “We’ll finish this conversation another time.”
Chapter Forty
Jozef greeted the Bratva with nods and handshakes as he accepted his place among them.
He’d been led by their footman to the ‘study’ where business was conducted during those times when it absolutely must occur on palace grounds. In general, the palace was used as a vacation home for the top members of the Bratva, not business.
Jozef believed the Bratva had brought him to the palace to make a statement. They wanted him to know that he was welcome among them. If they’d been trying to intimidate him, they would have invited him to Moscow. If that had been the case, Jozef would’ve left Shaun behind, despite the invitation making it clear that her presence was mandatory.
Jozef didn’t care if he went to war with the entire Bratva organization, he would protect his wife with the last breath in his body.
Fortunately, for their sake, it seemed the Bratva didn’t want him dead.
There were eleven men in the room. Jozef recognized all of them. The eldest member, a ninety-eight-year-old mobster by the name of Ivan Siberia, was the top voice of the Bratva. They called him Siberia because no one knew his actual name. Not even Ivan knew. He’d gone into a Siberian gulag as a teenager in the 1930s. He’d been among the first Bratva to rule the prisons. He’d had a reputation for blood-thirsty brutality that had only grown over the years. There were rumours that held he’d had enough men killed to fill a modest-sized city.
Ivan Siberia was the reason many of the Bratva of his age didn’t have families. He would use women and children for leverage, then kill them for sport. Despite his terrible reputation, or maybe because of it, he’d become a figurehead in his old age. And though the old man insisted that mobsters should never have families, rumour had it, Ivan had sired many illegitimate children over the years. He kept them well hidden from the organization he’d helped found.
Along with Ivan, the heads of seven families were present, each responsible for their own region of control. Also present were the two men who’d met with Jozef on the day of his uncle’s funeral: Alexei Ivanov and Yuri Antonovich.
Jozef was handed a glass of his favourite brand of vodka and a cigar. He accepted them, though he set the cigar aside. As he took a drink from the crystal glass, one of the family heads, Stellan Jovanovich, took the seat next to him.
“How is my nephew?” Stellan greeted Jozef, sitting in the plush chair next to the younger man.
Jozef contemplated Stellan before answering. Finally, he signed, for the moment, A-D-A-M remains unharmed.
A nearby footman translated.
“Pity.” Stellan lit his cigar while another footman discreetly opened a set of French doors.
He offered Jozef another cigar, which Jozef declined. Jozef had always detested smoking, had tried to convince his uncle to quit for his health. Ironic, considering it had been Jozef who’d ended Krystoff’s life, not cancer.
What do you want for your nephew? Jozef asked curiously.
Stellan thought about it. “I don’t wish to repossess the boy, if that’s what you mean. He was a fuck-up here on Russian soil, and from the reports we received from Krystoff, he was the same in Czechia.”
Jozef had been shocked to learn, upon reading Krystoff’s file on Adam, that the man was a rather prolific serial killer. Jozef was under no illusion that they weren’t all serial killers. Every man in the room had either killed, or had killed, multiple people in their lifetimes. But that was in the name of business. Adam divined a kind of sexual pleasure from his kills. He chose his victims from the weak, the helpless, society’s undesirables. Women who wouldn’t be missed.
From the pictures of their bodies, each one attached to a police report that had landed in Krystoff’s possession, Jozef could tell that Adam had played with his victims for hours before releasing them from their lives. He bruised and broke them without spilling a single drop of blood before strangling them to death. Disgusting and depraved were too kind to describe the monster who’d been allowed to marry Jozef’s cousin.
It was after he read the file that Jozef realized he couldn’t kill his cousin. She was as much a victim as the other women. Years of abuse were documented in the reports. But what Jozef hadn’t understood was Krystoff’s motive for marrying his eldest daughter to such a monster. At least, he hadn’t understood until he learned that Krystoff was not her father.
Jozef suspected that, while Krystoff had forgiven his wife for being unfaithful, he hadn’t been able to forgive Leeza, his supposed first born, for being illegitimate. It was twisted logic, but Jozef knew how his uncle's mind worked. Knew how petty the man could be.
Now, sitting among the Bratva’s elite, Jozef felt as though he belonged. He felt no fear because he knew he was an asset. Every step of his life had been in service of reaching this point. He could never have imagined it would be through the death of his uncle at his own hand, but he knew that one day he would sit in this spot.
He spoke to the men surrounding him as equals, with confidence. He had trade that they wanted. He had an elite team of mercenaries that they wanted. He had control of an entire country. He would live and work among these men. He was home.
Shaun spent her afternoon ensconced with three of the wives of the men who were meeting with Jozef. The conversation was stilted at first, but gradually the curiosity of the other women outweighed their reserve of the stranger in their midst.
“And you work?” Tatiana Ivanov asked in Russian. “As a doctor?”
The women looked so shocked by the notion that Shaun had to hide a giggle. She nodded solemnly, as though agreeing that it was definitely strange for a woman of her position to be working.
Shaun answered in Russian, choosing her words carefully. “I do. I recently took a position with the Prague General Hospital.”
The women looked at each other.
Tatiana, the spokeswoman for the three asked, “You work with people’s brains? Is that correct?”
“Da,” Shaun agreed. “I am a neurologist.”
“Perhaps you can help my little Niki. There’s something wrong with his brain. He’s not quite right.”
“Uh… is his problem behavioural or physiological?”
“You tell me!” The woman threw her hands up in the air. “He wants nothing to do with the family business. He spends all of his time with his musi
cian friends playing his silly guitar. He says he wants to be famous, to play heavy metal. What is that I ask you? He is definitely damaged in the brain.”
Shaun caught the amused eye of Yelena.
“I don’t think your son needs Mrs. Koba’s attention,” Yelena said softly, hiding her smirk. “Perhaps he needs his father’s attention more.”
“That is another issue,” Tatiana grumbled. “Alexei is hardly ever home. He goes out to the clubs and says it is business. Ridiculous. Who needs to do business with the thumping music and the dancing whores?”
Shaun choked on her drink, a vodka soda.
She carefully placed the glass on the marble side table next to her chair.
“Jozef does his business in a club.” Jozef had once explained to her that the club was an easy place to meet clients. There was a casual feel and being surrounded by people made them feel safe.
“You see.” Tatiana looked around at the other women, her voice hushed. “These men, they are always cheating.”
Yelena rolled her eyes and sipped her drink, not commenting. Shaun didn’t say anything either. Jozef’s devotion to her was unquestionable. She had no doubts when it came to him and other women.
When another round of cocktails was brought in, Shaun declined and asked for a sparkling water. Shortly after, she excused herself from the women, citing exhaustion. It wasn’t a lie, she was tired. Her early shift at the hospital, the plane trip and having to speak Russian all day had taken a lot out of her. She was glad when the women were told that the men would continue to meet well into the evening and that their suppers would be served separately.
In her room, by herself, Shaun ate a delicious meal of two kinds of salad and a side of roast beef. She particularly enjoyed the salad with the potatoes, mayonnaise, beets, onions and what tasted like pickles. She noted the ingredients, wishing she had her phone so she would take a picture. She wanted to ask their cook at home to make it.
She thought she would get bored without access to internet or TV, but she found that exhaustion had creeped up on her enough that, after a leisurely bath in a tub that was so huge it could easily cross over into swimming pool territory, she was ready for bed.
Goodnight, Sinners (Sinner's Empire Book 3) Page 26