by SR Jones
“I already told Andrius everything,” she says. “The police too.”
“I know it's horrible to go over it and over it, but can you tell me once more?”
She nods, and bites her lip, looking away from me. She isn’t happy having to talk about it again, but I push gently.
“If you can start right from the beginning, just go through it all again?”
And she does. She shuffles about in the bed and gets herself comfortable. She sits up as straight as she can, takes a deep breath, and begins to speak.
She tells me everything that happened from beginning to end. When she gets to the end, though, it doesn't quite add up. She tells me that Zoey was about to shoot her but didn’t and instead ran away. It doesn’t make sense to me.
Why did Zoey stop? “Cassie,” I say. “Tell me again exactly what happened when Zoey was about to shoot you.”
“I already did,” she says. “I was laid on the beach, and I honestly thought Konstantin was dead. I had kicked myself out from under him.” Her mouth trembles, trying not to cry. “She trained the gun on me,” Cassie recalls. “I stared at her, thinking this was my last moment alive, and she squeezed the trigger. I saw the moment she squeezed down with her finger, and I shut my eyes, not wanting to see her face when she did it. I waited, but it didn’t come. She didn't do it. She didn't shoot me, and then she ran away.”
“Did you do or say anything to make her pause?” Andrius asks the question I've been thinking.
“No,” Cassie says. “I looked at her... Oh.”
“Oh, what?” Andrius asks.
Cassie hesitates and glances around at us men as she bites her lip.
“Honey,” Ilya says. “It might seem like nothing to you, but honestly, even the smallest gesture, a word, one single thing that could have changed what happened is important for us to know.”
She sighs, and it's almost in resignation. “I haven't even told K yet,” she says softly. “I'm pregnant.”
For two or three long beats there’s nothing but silence in the room. Ilya breaks the spell and steps up, smiling down at Cassie. “Congratulations, beautiful,” he says. “This will be the best news for Konstantin when he wakes up, and it will give him the strength to face what's coming. He's going to need all the motivation he can get in order to get well. I'm convinced this will help him get back to full strength. This is a blessing from God.”
I think Ilya believes in God, if I remember correctly, and I know that Andrius does. Bohdan too, I think. Not me. I've seen far too much shit to believe in God. If he does exist, then God is not a nice entity. In fact, if he does exist, he's an asshole. That's my view on it, and I won't be changing it anytime soon. Still, what Ilya said was nice and the right thing under the circumstances. It seems to relax Cassie some as she smiles at him. We all give our congratulations, but I’m eager to get things back on track.
“So, Cassie,” I say. “Did you tell Zoey? Say something?”
“No,” she says. “I did put my hands on my stomach, though. I suppose it was an instinctual movement. I didn't think about it. I just thought of my baby dying with me, and I was so sad, and I put my hands on my stomach. When she didn't shoot, I opened my eyes, and she was staring at me. Her eyes were wide, and her face was so white. Gully came running out of the ocean, barking like crazy, and for a horrible moment, I thought she was going to shoot him, but she ran off.” Cassie starts to giggle, and it's almost hysterical. “She dived into the sea like something out of a James Bond movie and swam off. I couldn't believe it. Then I turned to Konstantin, and I realized he was still alive, thank God. I don't know how I managed to find the presence of mind to do it, but I immediately grabbed my phone from my bag and called Andrius. The rest you know.”
“I think Zoey couldn't shoot you when she learned of the pregnancy,” I say.
Ilya nods his agreement. “Certainly seems that way, which ties in with our theory at the moment that she's hardly some highly trained assassin. And clearly whoever got her into this situation are also after her. Why else would they put an Interpol alert out? We need to find her before they do.”
“Okay,” I say, looking at the men around me. “How about Damen and Andrius stay here at the hospital while Ilya and I go find Zoey? You're going to need all the security you can get here and at the house, and you're already going to be stretched thin. Ilya and I are more than capable of finding her.”
Andrius scoffs, “No, you're not. No offense. I believe you're more than capable of getting information out of her once you do find her, but you're not trackers, and you don't know how to find someone who's on the run.”
Damn, he's got a good point. “Do we know anyone who is?”
“I'm not too bad,” Andrius says. “But I'm staying right here and looking after Violet and Cassie, as well as making sure there are no more threats here or at the house.
“I'm a good tracker,” Damen says. “I mean, I'm not some amazing top notch tracker that you might get who spends their life doing that kind of thing, but I've done it in the past. I did it in the Special Forces as it was part of my training when I was in the mountain division. Alesso too. I also know a guy here on Corfu who has some highly trained dogs, but unfortunately, we don't have anything of Zoey’s to give them. If we did, they could scent it and help us track her.”
I've got something of Zoey’s. But if I tell these guys I've got a pair of her unwashed panties, then they're going to definitely know that we screwed.
“She left clothes at the house,” Andrius says, saving me.
“Brilliant,” Damen replies. “I will call my friend with the dogs and see if he’ll lend them to us, and then we'll go to the house and let them have a good old sniff of her clothes. She could be anywhere, but if she swam, she couldn't have gone that far would be my guess? I bet she, or her employers, had a boat waiting for her in one of the bays along the coast from where she shot K. There are a few small coves where you could easily have a boat hidden away, and I bet they told her to swim there. The questions are, how big of a boat, and how far she went in it? The sea has been smooth these last few days, and we've had unseasonably warm weather for the time of year, so she might have decided to risk it and tried to motor across to the mainland or another island. It’s not far to the mainland, after all, but the currents do get quite choppy, even in good weather, once you get out from the shore area. If I were her and I'd failed in this task, right now I'd be hiding somewhere, trying to figure out what to do.”
“Yeah, I doubt she knows that Interpol have her listed, but I bet she's aware the people she's working for are not trustworthy and are probably after her right now,” Andrius adds. “My guess is she's hiding somewhere quite close by too, trying to figure out what to do. Thing is, all her fake identification, because I presume it is fake, is at my house. I checked her bag, and it has a passport and some other stuff in there. She's going to need some new ID and for that, she's going to need money which I'm not sure she has. She'll need to find people in Corfu Town who can sort her papers. This will be hard since she doesn’t know anyone. So, you guys go track her with the dogs. I’ll place everybody I know in Corfu Town on alert. I can send some of the men we have at the training center to look out for her in town and at the ports. That covers the bases there. She'll have to find somewhere to stay for a few hours because I assume she’ll want to change how she looks.”
Andrius shakes his head and gives a grim smile. “She has to know that the people she's working for are going to be looking for her now and they are not happy. She knows we're looking for her, and we're not happy. She's one woman alone, so far as we're aware, and there's no sign she's working with other people, which means she's extremely vulnerable and probably scared. We just need to make sure that we're the ones who find her first.”
Cassie turns to Ilya and me and sets her jaw. “When you find her,” she says with determination, “don’t go easy on her. I want her to pay for what she did to Konstantin. He's going to face so much pain and hardship in t
he coming months all because of her. I want her to pay. Do you understand me?”
Wow. When Konstantin took Cassie as his, I never thought she'd stand by him in the way he needed because I thought she was soft and too flaky for this world. She’s showing me now, however, that there's a core of steel at the heart of her. She might be sunny, and she might be positive, and she might be nice, but down at her core, she isn’t soft at all. Or at least, she isn't when someone hurts her family.
Normally, I respect the hell out of that. Right now, though, the fact that she's so hell-bent on revenge concerns me when it's focused on Zoey. I'm certain that Zoey is in way over her head and has done something she regrets, and I feel bad that I'm the one who let her down and didn't help her when she asked for it.
I'm still livid at her, of course. I'm angrier than I've ever been with any living soul. However, I want to be the one to call the shots here.
I want to be the one who decides her fate.
I want to be the avenging angel that determines life or death.
Me. No one else, just me.
I will be Zoey's judge, jury, and executioner.
Chapter Six
Vasily
We go back to Andrius’ house and wait for the tracker dogs to be brought to us. When they arrive, we greet them, me somewhat cautiously.
“I thought you’d have blood hounds not German Shepherds,” I quip to Peter, their handler.
“They’re Belgian Malinois, actually,” he corrects me. “Amazing breed. Loyal. Smart. And excellent trackers. If she’s left a scent trail, they’ll find it. Weather conditions are good, and you haven't left it too long, so I think your chances of picking up a trail are good.”
“Thanks, man, for this. You know I’ll look after your precious babies.” Damen bends down and gives one of the dogs a pet on the ruff part of its neck. He isn’t nervous at all. I’ve always been a bit wary of dogs. Saw a man get his arm mangled by a police dog once, and that’s enough to put anyone off for life.
“Call me when I can come pick them up. Guard their lives with yours.”
“It’s a lone female we’re tracking,” Damen says. “I doubt she’s going to shoot at your dogs.”
“Well, if she does, put her down,” Peter orders firmly.
Everyone seems determined to have Zoey killed. Everyone except for me.
We get ready in our own rooms, and I hit the downstairs hallway thirty minutes later to see Damen dressed like something out of an action movie. He’s wearing fatigues, and he has a massive backpack on his back. Things are strapped to his body too.
“Erm, do you think you’re taking this a bit far?” I ask.
He looks me up and down. I have my jeans on, a t-shirt, and a loose cotton shirt unbuttoned over the top to hide my gun and knife holsters.
“You have a first-aid kit hidden about your person?” he asks me.
I shake my head as Ilya joins us.
“Water?”
“I doubt we’ll need all of that,” Ilya says.
“We’re heading into the hills and forests; do you know how many poisonous animals there are?”
“No,” I say uncertainly. “This is Greece, not Australia.”
I served, for nowhere near as long or in as high a position as Damen, but I did serve. Spetsnaz training, toughest in the world. I didn’t see much action, though, not compared to Andrius and K and the like. I joined later, and we weren’t involved as much in wars abroad by then. And then I went and got myself injured and was medically discharged. So yeah, I have the badge, but I always feel that compared to these guys, I didn’t do the work. Certainly, once I was discharged, I didn’t keep on top of things, distracted as I was by the seedier side of life.
Are there deadly things in the forests here?
Damen cracks up at my expression. “Hardly any poisonous creatures, V. But that isn’t the point. What if one of us gets shot? Injured? What if she’s injured? What if we end up being out there for more than one day? Spending a night? Do you have shelter?”
Ilya looks at me, and his brows are raised high enough to be comical. “Shelter?” he parrots.
“Yeah.” Damen shakes his head in exasperation. “You ever watch that episode of The Sopranos where the goons get lost in the woods and nearly die of exposure?”
“We’re not goons, and no, I’ve never seen it,” I reply.
“You have no idea how long we might end up out there,” Damen points out. “This way, I’ve covered every eventuality. I have water for us all. Water filter tablets. Food in the form of nutrition biscuits. Satellite phone. First-aid kit, knives, a bivouac for each of us and hopefully anything else we might need.”
“Where the fuck did you get all that on short notice?” I ask.
Damen smirks. “Andrius was Spetsnaz. You should see the shit he has in his cellar. Bug-out bags, all packed. Survival shit. It’s all down there.”
Well, damn. Maybe I should have kept up the training and been a bit more of a Boy Scout.
“So, he’s prepared for the zombie apocalypse?” Ilya smirks.
“Or bad fuckers coming for him, which doesn’t seem so farfetched now, does it?” Damen gives us both a measured look, grabs all three dogs by their collars and attaches their leashes, then stomps out the door. I trail him with Ilya, both of us shooting one another amused glances.
We drive to the first cove down the coastline from the beach where Zoey carried out her attack, and in the direction Cassie told us she swam away.
We don't expect to find anything here, pretty certain she’s gotten as far as she can, but we stop anyway and park up by the dunes. We take a small, pebbly track down to a mixed sand and shingle cove.
Once we hit the beach, I see a small boat hauled onto the shingle at the end of the bay, covered in tarpaulin. We go to it, and I pull the tarpaulin back to see nothing but fishing gear. Damn.
Damen takes the clothes out and lets the dogs sniff them before they run around the beach, scenting at the sand and shingle, but they don’t pick anything up.
We repeat this task about six times, and I’m almost giving up. I’ve started to think she took the boat across the gap of water between Greece and Albania. It’s what I would probably do.
When we hit the next beach, we park up in a small gravel area surrounded by trees and take a long, rocky path down to a tiny cove.
This one is rocky with big stones and pebbles, making walking once we hit the beach harder. I see the small boat, but it’s like the others we’ve seen on previous beaches, and I don’t get any buzz of excitement.
Damen takes Zoey’s clothing out of his backpack, gathers the dogs around him, and gets them to scent her clothes. He gives them the signal to search, and the dogs run off, weaving a pattern around the beach. It seems to me they sniff at every pebble. The saying leave no stone unturned comes to mind as I watch them do their work.
My stomach is tight, and I realize I'm feeling something I'm not normally used to experiencing, and that's anxiety. I want to find Zoey, and I don't want to find Zoey. I'm going to need to make her talk because there's a threat against all of us now. It could destroy everything I've spent my whole life building, and it could result in the death of not only myself and my fellow Bratva warriors, but also their women. Violet and Cassie are both mothers now, or rather Cassie is going to be. They can't be left vulnerable to nebulous threats when we have someone hopefully within our grasp who can tell us exactly who is gunning for us.
I might not be a man who minds handing out violence when it's needed, but I certainly don't relish it. I'm not a sociopath. Unlike Bohdan, who I think sometimes enjoyed the fights, I just saw them as a necessary evil and part of the job.
Not that Bohdan is a sociopath, but sometimes I think he found the fights were a way to exorcise some of his past.
Not me. I don’t have any issues, or things that trouble me. For me, the violence is a necessary means to an end. I go into a strange headspace when I must dole out violence and do it almost on autopilot.
I doubt I'll be able to do so with Zoey.
The whole thing makes me feel sick to my stomach. I slip my hand into my jean pocket and feel the small tube in there I take everywhere. I don't know what it says about me that I still carry her lip gloss. Maybe I'm sick in the head. Or maybe I'm just weirdly obsessed. It's not like I'm generally the kind of guy who steals women’s panties and lip gloss. In fact, this is the first time I've ever done such a thing.
One of the dogs suddenly goes on alert, and it's fascinating to watch. His body language changes, and he seems completely obsessed with the small collection of pebbles that he's sniffing around. Then he weaves forward up the beach toward the woods. Damen looks at me and nods as he pulls his backpack over his massive shoulders and sets off after the dog at a fast pace.
Ilya and I follow suit, and soon we're heading deep into the cool woods. Birds sing and the dapple of sunlight hitting the ground makes this an almost idyllic scene. It's the sort of place I can imagine bringing a dog for a lovely walk and enjoying the afternoon. Instead, I'm walking through these woods searching for a woman I've got a strange obsession with, and I'm now going to have to hurt her.
I've never made rules to govern my behavior, the way Andrius did. However, I've never actually been called upon to hurt a woman. It isn't something you come across much in my line of work. There are rules to what we do, and we don't target families or partners, and there aren't many women working as Bratva enforcers. I've yet to come across a woman with huge gambling debts the way some of the men I’ve had to teach a lesson to have incurred. Women certainly don't get themselves in hock at the strip clubs the way men do. I'm lucky that Konstantin was never into shaking down businesses, so I haven’t had to deal with anybody who was innocent before. No threatening the local bakery owner and his wife. That shit was always for lower thugs working for lesser Pakhans.
Not that Zoey is innocent, I remind myself, but she is female, and she is someone I have feelings for, even though I don't understand what those feelings are.