Ash moved up behind me and took the notebook from me. He scanned through it, pausing at a page toward the back.
“‘I stand at his grave from time to time—whenever I can sneak back to Santa Monica—and whisper all the things I could never have told him in life.’ Are you talking about Dimitri here, Misha?”
Misha hung his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Sure, I would. I was in love with a woman who didn’t want me once.” Ash shook his head. “Sorry situation. But then I met Mina and realized it’s much better to love someone who is capable of loving you back.”
Misha didn’t even acknowledge Ash.
“From the stories I’ve heard, it’s much better that Dimitri never looked your way. He was a sadistic bastard.”
“Don’t say that!” Misha cried. “He was a good man. A strong man. His father just never let him shine.”
Ash laughed, obviously amused by the idea of someone like Dimitri shining.
“That man cast a shadow over my family that continues to haunt us. He was sick, beating women—pregnant women—and leaving them to die. There are scars on my wife’s body that speak of cruel and ugly things. Is that what you really wanted?”
Misha shook his head. “He was only cruel to people who crossed him.”
“How did my wife cross him?” I demanded. “How did a shy, modest woman who went to church every Sunday and spent the rest of her free time in the garden, how did she cross a man like Dimitri Bazarov?”
“She refused his advances.”
I cocked my head, not sure I heard him correctly. “She did what?”
“She refused his advances. Humiliated him in front of his friends.”
“When?”
Misha looked up. “I don’t know. At some restaurant months before that night.”
“The night you know nothing about,” Donovan snickered.
Misha’s eyes sparked with anger. “He was a good man. But she humiliated him. He couldn’t just let that go!”
I was at a loss. I had no idea what he was talking about.
And the memory came back to me. It was right before my deployment. The night before I was to leave for Fort Sam Houston. I took her out for a romantic dinner, at this Italian place she really liked. We had a lovely time, flirting in the candle light like we used to do when we were first married. And then she got up to go to the restroom and this guy cornered her by the bar, touching her hips and whispering things in her ear. I went over to intervene, but she had it under control. My meek little wife kneed the guy in the groan and left him doubled over in pain. He followed us out into the parking lot where we were laughing about it and made threats, but I shut that down easily with a few well-spoken words.
I’d totally forgotten about that incident.
I stepped back, lowering my head as the memory unfolded dramatically. That was what led to my wife’s death?
“You’re fucking kidding me!”
The room fell completely silent, my companions not moving as they watched with weary eyes as I approached Misha.
“He broke into my house nearly eight months later to get revenge for something he set himself up for? To get revenge for something that was never his right to take in the first place?”
Misha looked up, his eyes dark with emotion that I didn’t even want to interpret.
“He was prideful.”
I hit him harder than I’d ever hit anyone. His head snapped back and blood gushed from his nose and his mouth. I raised my hand to do it again, but I stopped myself.
“Tell me.”
Misha looked at me, his eyes narrowed. “You really want to know?”
“Tell me.”
So he did.
It wasn’t just two people. Dimitri went there with four men. Two were left outside to guard the perimeter of the house. Two went with him. They found Jesse asleep in our double bed, dressed as she always was in a long white gown that buttoned under her chin. They gathered in the room, all three of them, and forced her to undress. Seeing the humiliation this caused her, they paraded her around the room, heightened the humiliation until she was ready to beg for death rather than continue to have them play with her. But they couldn’t stop there. They held her onto the bed and—then they were interrupted by Grace’s cries. She often had bad dreams and would sneak into our bed in the middle of the night. That was one of those nights. But, instead, Misha carried her back to her own room and strangled her when she refused to settle down.
And then they continued their torture of my wife, hurting her over and over again until they were satiated. And then Dimitri shot her three times, finally ending her misery.
Every word, every image his words conjured in my mind, was torture. I sat on the couch, my gun in my hands, the urge to kill him almost overwhelming. But something stopped me and I couldn’t…I couldn’t figure it out.
“The script you gave to Jaime Hernandez…why was it missing so many details?”
“Dimitri was just playing with the cops. He wanted them distracted. He wanted them chasing their own tail. It amused him.”
“He didn’t intend for Mickey to go to prison?”
“Mickey wasn’t going to do it at all. He said he would, even took the money, but then he tried to disappear. Ivan found out what Mickey was doing, and he had him snatched off the street. Told him that if he didn’t go through with it, they’d grab his sister and do the same thing to her. Mickey spit on him, told him he wouldn’t dare touch his sister because of who his mother was. So Ivan shot him up with PCP and put him in that house so the cops would find him. And then he had a cop show him a picture of his sister taken through the windows of her house. That convinced him they were serious about hurting her.”
“Ivan was involved in all this?”
Misha spat again. “He was the other man in the house. Me. Dimitri. Ivan.”
I nodded, a sudden image in my head of Ivan raping my wife. I couldn’t…fuck! I couldn’t stop these images from flooding my mind.
“Mickey had nothing to do with it.”
“Mickey was a small time thief. And a drug addict. He couldn’t have put together a crime like that on his best day.”
“Why’d you kill him, then?”
Misha shook his head. “That was Ivan and that woman, that politician. I heard they were afraid he would expose the whole deal. Tell everyone who put him up to the confession.”
“Why?”
“Mickey told his cell mate that he was worried about his sister. Said she was getting in too deep and that he was afraid his case was taking over her life. He wanted her out and he was convinced the only way to do that was to admit the truth.” Misha looked up at me. “He thought he was doing the noble thing.”
I got up and strolled causally toward Misha. “You order the hit?”
“No, man. That was all Ivan and the politician lady.”
“What politician lady?”
I glanced at Ash. I could see the wheels turning in his head. He was making the same connection I was.
Abigail Grant.
“This woman. She and Ivan were working together way back when she was with the prosecutor’s office. She covered up a few things, and he greased her palm for it. When she moved to the state senate, she would pull strings for him, get his men out of jams, that sort of thing. Ivan always bragged that he was going to use her to take over the drug trade in all of the states, push everyone out of business and become bigger than even Dimitri and his dad. He was going to run the whole damn show.
“He didn’t know Mickey was her kid. Didn’t know she’d go to the cops and pad his confession. That was trouble for Ivan because it wasn’t what Dimitri had wanted. And then that girl started messing with things, investigating and fighting to get Mickey out of jail. Ivan was sure it would blow up in all our faces, especially after Dimitri’s father, and then Dimitri, were killed out in California. But that woman assured him she had it under control. She’d take care of it. And she did. When Mickey threatened to come
clean, she was the one who ordered the hit. Went to the prison herself and talked to that man, convinced him to do it for money she would pay his family.”
My anger cooled as I listened to him. It cooled and turned into outrage. And fear.
“Harley.”
David was immediately on his phone, calling Joss back at the house. He met my eye and shook his head as he spoke.
“Have that butler search the house. We need to locate her.”
But I already knew. I knew Harley better than I’d ever imagined. I knew where she was.
I never should have left her alone.
Chapter 12
Harley
She was in Austin of all places. Ironic, really. She was giving a speech at the capitol building, one of those bloated, self-serving speeches in which she spoke about how much she’d learned there and how she was using it to change the United States for the better. She gave these speeches twice a week, it seemed like. She really was a fucking narcissistic bitch.
She had a townhouse in Austin that she’d bought back during her state senate days. I’d stayed there a few times, back when we were still pretending to be family. She should have changed her locks.
“You sent him to prison.”
My mother jumped when I spoke, completely unaware I was standing in the corner of her bedroom until she spun around. She never aged. She looked just the same as she had when I was eight and got caught playing in her makeup. Even had the same expression on her face: a mixture of outrage and indifference.
“Harley.”
“Why did you have children, mother? Why did you even get married? What was the point?”
“It looked good on my resume. Widowhood looked better.”
She studied me, her eyes moving from my face to the worn jeans I was wearing. It wasn’t much compared to the wool suit she’d donned for today’s speech. We were both wearing our hair up, but hers was perfection, hair sprayed within an inch of its life. We had the same green eyes, but our similarities stopped there. Our faces looked so different that I once wondered if I was adopted. But Mickey looked just like her. The same delicate features, the same dark hair. Even the same build in some, strange way.
“He was your son.”
She smiled. “He was. And we got a lot of mileage out of the pictures we took when he was a toddler. But then he grew up and became a blight.”
“A blight?”
“He was a drug addict. He threatened everything I’d fought for. If anyone had ever connected us, that dirty, meth addict on the street, it would have ruined my career.”
“Then why didn’t you get him help?”
“I tried. I sent him to rehab after rehab, but none of it stuck.”
“So you just gave up on him?”
“No. I put him in the only rehab that would stick. Prison.”
I laughed because I could really believe that she honestly thought she was helping him. But she was helping herself more.
“He was innocent.”
“I know.”
My eyebrows rose as something like wonder shot through me. “You know?”
“I know. I know who really committed that crime. Do you think I would have done what I did without knowing all the facts? If I hadn’t known, it could have come back to bite me in the ass. And I make damn sure that never happens.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I pushed away from the wall and walked toward her.
“You knew. All these years I fought to prove that Mickey was innocent and you knew?”
“Of course.”
“They why did you let him just rot there?”
“Because it was for the best. For everyone.”
“No it wasn’t, Mom. What about that woman and her child? What about her husband? What about me?”
“I told you to back off. I told you it wasn’t worth getting involved in. If you’d just left everything alone, Mickey would have been clean and sober, you would be a brilliant surgeon, and everything would be right in the world. But you had to screw everything up.”
“He was my brother. I couldn’t just let him rot in there.”
“You could have. He was safe there. He was sober!”
“Is that all that matters to you? That he was sober and out of your way?”
“Do you know how hard I worked to get him there? How hard my publicist had to work to remove all traces of our connection so the press would never figure it out? It was the perfect plan, a plus for everyone. But you couldn’t keep your nose out of it, and I couldn’t find a way to get rid of you without the whole world knowing about it.” She shook her head, her fists clutching at her sides. “You threatened everything! And then you had to go and get the DNA tested and Mickey…oh, Mickey couldn’t keep his big mouth shut!”
She stepped into me, her angry face just inches from mine. “What did you think was going to happen, little girl?”
“I thought I was saving my brother.”
“You murdered him.”
I shook my head, over and over again. “I didn’t. I cleared his name.”
“Who’s going to believe you now?”
My mom turned away and crossed to her jewelry box, nonchalantly removing her earrings as she told me how she ordered my brother’s death.
“I couldn’t let him talk, and I definitely couldn’t let you present that DNA evidence in court. So I visited one of the Russian cartel’s little prisoners and offered to give his family a million dollars if he would take care of my problem. He couldn’t have been happier to cooperate.”
“Why?”
“Because it would have come out. Mickey was going to tell everyone that I was his mother. And if he didn’t, then the DNA evidence would have led back to Ivan Petrov and Misha Bogdan. And I had no faith that I could trust either of them to keep their fucking mouths shut. They’re in the middle of a battle for control of their territory. They’d do anything to stab each other in the back, including hanging me out to dry.”
“You had your own son killed to save your own ass.”
“You would have done the same thing in my position.”
I shook my head. “No.”
She turned around and looked at me. “Tell me honestly, doctor. If you had a gun in your hand right now, wouldn’t you use it on me?”
I thought about Kipling, about what he’d said to Misha about wanting to skin alive the man who’d killed his family. I understood that desire now. But it didn’t change my answer.
“No.”
We could hear sirens outside just then. My mom turned toward the windows, a frown marring her pretty face.
“Those sound close.”
“They are. They were waiting just a block away. Surprised your people didn’t spot them.”
She turned, anger burning like fire over her entire body. She rushed me, her hands coming around my throat. We fell back on the bed, our bodies tangled not unlike Kipling and mine had been hours earlier. I didn’t fight her. I was too overwhelmed by the whole thing to even care anymore.
My own mother killed my brother. What did it matter if she killed me, too?
Chapter 13
Kipling
Three months later
I stood at the windows and watched as she got out of her car. I felt like I was always watching these days, never participating. Just like before everything changed.
I knew the truth now. So did the world. David and Ash made sure that Misha Bogdan and Ivan Petrov found their way to the Houston Police Department, a little broken but still capable of speech. They confessed to the murders of Jesse and Grace, telling the story over and over again. The police also found themselves in possession of the DNA testing Harley had done, as well as all the other evidence she’d gathered over the years. It was more overwhelming than I’d ever appreciated, years of work compiling evidence on everything from the murder itself to the time the neighbor took his dog out to piss every night. She was more thorough than the cops had ever been. Their case was made for them in just that littl
e accordion file she’d carried around with her everywhere she went. If I’d only listened to her the dozens of times she’d tried to convince me of her brother’s innocence, maybe things would have been different. Maybe Ivan and Misha would have been behind bars years ago.
But it was over now. They’d confessed and were swiftly sent to prison. Their gang war lost its steam and the remaining members of the cartel scattered to the wind. It was possible they would come together once more, as they’d done after Bazarov and then his son died, but it was unlikely. The third time seemed to be the charm. I’d never forget the relief on Mina Grayson’s face when she heard the news.
Senator Grant’s arrest and subsequent trial—yes, she was insisting on going on trial even though she’d made sure her son never had that right—was proving to be quite a dog and pony show. She denied everything—even though Harley had gotten it all on tape.
Harley was a damn smart girl. She went to the cops, and they set up a digital bug that would allow them not only to hear everything said between Harley and her mother, but would make a recording of it to be used in court. And Mrs. Grant’s confession would have set the truth free in its entirety even if we hadn’t found Misha and convinced him to confess. She’d done what she’d set out to do. She’d cleared her brother’s name.
And then she disappeared. Not a word. Nothing. Just gone.
But she was here now, just as beautiful and strong as ever. I watched as she made her way to the front of the house. I watched as David embraced her. She was stiff, weary, as I guess she had every right to be after all that had happened.
This was all on David. As much as I desperately wanted to see her and speak with her, I couldn’t make myself go find her. If she wanted space, I had to give it to her. What right did I have to make demands on her after everything she’d gone through? All I could do was hope she’d find her way back to me.
But David…he found her and convinced her to come here today to make a statement about everything that happened in Houston. David claimed he needed it for legal reasons. He played on her sense of duty and justice. He mentioned it to me casually, clearly unaware of how it cut through me.
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