by Roxie Rivera
She slugged half her glass before setting it down rather sharply. Her gaze seemed far away as she said, “Someday, you’ll understand.”
“You keep saying that,” I reminded her, “but someday never arrives.” I gripped my glass tightly. “Are you ever going to tell me about him?”
“Holly,” she said harshly, “there isn’t anything to tell you.”
“Bullshit.” I didn’t like swearing at my mother, but I was sick and tired of this wall she had erected around my father’s identity. “I want to know his name. I want to know where he lives. I want to know what he does. I want to know why he didn’t want us.”
Her hard expression softened. “Holly, he wanted you.”
“No, he didn’t. He let you leave Russia pregnant with me, and he never even had the decency to visit me or write me a letter or call me on the phone.”
“Holly, you don’t know the price he paid to keep you safe. He risked everything for you.”
My breath caught in my throat. It was the first time she had ever mentioned anything like that. “What does that mean?”
“Your father knew that you wouldn’t be safe if he acknowledged you as his child. He did everything he could to make sure you would be safe and happy here in Houston with me.”
“Why wouldn’t I be safe with him?” I swallowed anxiously. “Is he…? Is he in the mafia or something?”
“Why would you ask about the mafia?” She seemed concerned. “Who gave you that idea?”
“No one,” I answered quickly.
She narrowed her gaze. “Did Kostya say something?”
“No,” I replied forcefully. Now, I was the one narrowing my eyes. “Why would you assume Kostya said something?”
“Holly, I’m not stupid. I know what that man does for a living.”
I wasn’t going to argue with her about his work. “What does Kostya have to do with my father?”
“Nothing,” she said, hurriedly.
“You’re lying,” I insisted. “Mom, whatever he does, whoever he is, I don’t care. I just want to know. I’ve always assumed he was married or maybe in the government or a criminal.”
“He’s not in the government.” She turned away from the island and walked to the built-in refrigerator. “I thought we might do something simple. Eggs? Some turkey bacon? Fruit?”
Staring at her back, I tried to make sense of what she had said. She had confirmed he wasn’t in the government but the other two? “Are you saying my father is married and a criminal?”
She kept her gaze focused on the interior of her neatly arranged refrigerator. “He was married.”
“Was?”
“His wife passed away more than ten years ago.”
“And the other part? The criminal part? That he’s part of the Moscow underworld?”
She unleashed a tight laugh. “I’m saying that he is the Moscow underworld.”
Trying to process the confirmation of my worst fears, I reached for my glass of wine and finished it off in one long gulp before reaching for the bottle to refill it. “What’s his name?”
“Leave it alone, Holly. This is a door you don’t want to open.”
“But—”
“Holly.” She turned toward me in a huff of frustration. “Your father gave me very specific instructions when you were born. I’ve followed them, and it’s kept you alive and safe. Your father isn’t part of your life, but he’s taken care of you. Anytime you needed something, he was the first to offer to help.”
“What are you saying?”
“The money I used to buy your salon building? Your tuition to SMU, your sorority fees, your clothes, your cars, your vacations,” she listed off all the privileges I had enjoyed. “I’ve always made a very good living, but your father paid every single penny of your upbringing. He was absent from your life, but he wasn’t uninvolved. I sent him copies of your report cards. I sent him finger paintings and construction paper crafts. I made sure he had video of you cheering at football games and photos of you in the homecoming court and at graduation.”
At a loss for words, I watched her crack eggs into a bowl. So much of what I had believed about my father had just been shattered. I had so many questions, but I sensed Mom was done talking for the night. Feeling confused and sad, I pulled out one of the tall barstools and slid onto it, silently nursing my glass of wine while she cooked.
When she presented me with my plate, she changed the subject to shopping, and I let her. Part of me understood that it was selfish and cruel to make her relive her memories of my father, especially now that I knew that she had been the other woman. Maybe that was why she had never married despite all the nice men she had dated. Maybe her heart was still back in Moscow…
“I don’t think you should drive,” she said, eyeing me over the two bottles of white wine we had polished off during dinner.
Feeling tipsy, I agreed with her. “Can I borrow your couch?”
She laughed and started to clear away the dishes. I joined her at the dishwasher and loaded the pieces she handed me into the racks. She engaged the alarm before grabbing her suitcase and hefting it upstairs to the third floor where the master suite was located. The townhouse had an elevator, but she never used it.
While she unpacked, I made use of her extensive range of beauty products to remove my makeup and wash my face. We both had expensive taste when it came to beauty, but she had me beat with her jars and bottles of La Prairie, Shiseido, Sisley and La Mer. I scrubbed and dabbed and rubbed in the various anti-aging potions she had on hand before finding an extra toothbrush in a cabinet and borrowing a nightgown from her enormous walk-in closet.
“You had better not hog all the covers,” she warned as I face-planted onto her bed.
“Mmmmph,” I groaned, my head starting to spin as that fifth glass of wine hit me. Having shared my mother’s bed until I was almost ten, it felt familiar and right to be here again. Even after she had kicked me out permanently, I had still snuck into her room after bad dreams or during storms. In high school, I had often visited her bedroom for refuge and talk therapy about mean girls and boy drama.
A long time later, after I had started to doze in and out, Mom lifted the covers and slid into bed next to me. I felt her hand glide along the top of my head and over my hair, the gentle motion soothing and taking me right back to my childhood. No matter how many birthdays I celebrated, I would always be her baby.
It was also one of those moments where I realized how very few years she might have left with me. Twenty? Maybe thirty? It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.
As the pull of sleep dragged me down, I heard her say something. It might have been my woozy brain playing tricks on me, but it sounded as if she were speaking another language.
A language that sounded very much like Russian…
Chapter Twelve
CHECKING HIS REAR-VIEW mirror, Kostya turned down a road lined with abandoned buildings and shuttered businesses. The maze of potholes was a hazard that he navigated from memory, not wanting to bottom out the borrowed sedan. Other than the occasional transient, he hardly ever saw anyone walking along the cracked sidewalks here.
The old medical waste disposal company compound was the kind of place few people ever gave more than a dismayed glance as they sped through the derelict block. With its sagging fence, rusted signs and boarded up windows, the place looked like the set of a post-apocalyptic horror film. The biohazard and radioactive waste warning signs were an effective deterrent to most visitors. Not even graffiti kids jumped the fences to tag the walls.
Once on the property, he entered the main office building and walked through it to a rear section of the abandoned processing factory. He had a locked and reinforced room hidden away on the main floor and let himself inside using the biometric keypad. After turning on the lights, he placed everything he had taken from Marco’s hideout on the stainless-steel worktable in the center of the room.
While he waited for a pot of coffee to brew, he went int
o the bathroom. When he was washing up at the sink, he splashed some cold water on his face and patted his tired, dry eyes. He wiped his face with a few paper towels from the stack by the sink and took a moment to study his haircut. He touched the ends and thought of Holly.
That one taste of her had ruined him. The days of lying to himself were gone. He couldn’t pretend that he was perfectly happy living his solitary life. He couldn’t pretend that he didn’t need a partner in his life and a woman to love. He wanted what Nikolai had found in his wife. Vivian looked soft and sweet, but there was a ruthless streak in her. She would do anything to protect Nikolai and her baby and her family.
How far would Holly go for him?
How far would he let her go?
He cringed thinking of her face if she saw him now. If he had to tell her that he had robbed a bloody corpse, what would she say?
If he had to tell her that he had burned down a house and risked lighting up an entire trailer park, would she be disgusted? Horrified?
If she had to see him now, rifling through a dead man’s belongings while trying to decide who would die next, would she want to see him again? Kiss him again? Let him make love to her?
Tortured by those thoughts, he left the bathroom and made a cup of coffee before moving to the table. He slipped on a pair of black nitrile gloves from the box he kept there and began to process the weapons and backpack he had taken from Marco’s hideout.
The weapons were what he would expect someone like Marco to keep on hand for protection. They were throwaway pieces, not too cheap, but not top of the line either. The handguns had black electrical tape wrapped around the grips. One had been fired recently and one smelled as if it had been recently cleaned.
The knife he had taken from the scene, the one Tiffany had stabbed her lover to death with, he decided to clean and destroy. There was no reason to keep it. She was just a kid who had panicked, and the sooner she could walk away from this whole mess, the better.
Searching her backpack, he found her wallet, powered down phone, a phone charger, a wadded-up change of clothing and some toiletries. He gave the backpack a more thorough check, running his hands along the seams and pockets. He felt something stiff along the bottom of the backpack and inspected it more closely. A tiny slit had been cut and then glued back together with something clear.
Curious, he sniffed the glued seam. Nail polish?
He ripped open the seam and discovered a folded manila envelope. Tossing aside the backpack, he unfolded and opened the envelope. Inside, he found a thick stack of cash and multiple sets of clean IDs for Marco. Birth certificates, Social Security cards, driver’s licenses from multiple states and passports from three different countries. He examined each piece of identification, noting the high quality of the watermarks, font, inks and paper textures. These were much better than the average cobbler’s work.
As he looked at each piece again, studying them even more closely, he accepted that Diego’s suspicions were correct. The only way Marco could have gotten his hands on clean IDs and all the supporting documents with this kind of quality was if he was, in fact, an informant. Someone had given him a new life in exchange for information.
But why Marco? What the hell could he know about anything important? Was this just the case of an overeager Fed going after the low-hanging fruit?
Looking at the envelope and the hastily created hidden pocket, he started to form an idea about what Tiffany and Marco could have been arguing about that led to his death. There was nothing in the envelope for Tiffany. Was he planning to split and leave her behind? Did he have other plans for her? Had she found out he was planning to do something terrible? Was this her leverage? Had she tried to steal his ticket to freedom in exchange for her life or for something else?
Planning to get those answers in a few hours when he caught up with Sunny, he tossed aside the envelope and documents and picked up Marco’s wallet. He removed everything inside the wallet and investigated each piece, right down to the last dollar bill.
Putting it down, he removed his gloves and reached for his coffee before picking up the bagged phone and finger. Taking both to the laptop station across the room, he plugged a USB cable into the phone and pressed the severed finger against the screen to unlock it. He added his own fingerprint to the system before opening the program Fox had created that would retrieve everything from the phone. Taking the finger to the small refrigerator, he placed the plastic bag holding it onto a shelf until he had decided whether to process or destroy it.
Sometime later, when the program had copied the entire phone, he spent a few moments clicking through the photos and address book. At first glance, there was nothing on the phone that could help him. There were a couple of racy recordings and photos that compromised Tiffany. Disbelief at Marco’s stupidity, he deleted them immediately, not even opening the videos beyond the first frame. The fuck kind of idiot recorded himself in bed with an underage girl?
A soft alarm alerted him to the arrival of another vehicle on the property, and he glanced at the security screens mounted on the far wall. Max’s familiar face filled the screen as she punched in her code at the keypad. She drove onto the property and paused just inside the gate to make sure it closed completely before crossing the dimly lit lot to park next to him.
They had made up since their spat the morning after the thwarted hit at Holly’s salon. Of all his little spiders, Max was always the one to call him on his bullshit. Sometimes she annoyed the ever-living-fuck out of him, but mostly, he was glad to have her as part of his secret crew. She was the one he could count on to always take care of the others and keep them safe.
Max was also the only person he could trust with the type of lab work he needed done. She was two years into her doctorate in nanotechnology after finishing a double bachelor’s in biochemistry and nanoengineering. She was a genius who practically breathed chemistry, biology and physics. She had loved playing at forensics from an early age and had taken on creating and maintaining his little library of DNA samples and collected weapons while still in high school. She was going places—and he was going to miss her when she was too successful and busy to help him anymore.
The lock on the door popped as it disengaged. Max entered the hidden lab in a huff of attitude. She had a dark knit cap barely holding back the heavy waves of dark hair curling around her shoulders. A black pair of leggings and an oversized sweater with some geek reference he didn’t understand camouflaged the body she deliberately tried to hide.
“You know, Big K, some of us have classes and jobs and research.” She took off her hat and draped it on the hook next to the door. “This had better not keep me up all night.” She stared at the pile of evidence on the table as she gathered her long hair into a coiled bun. “Do I even want to know where all this shit came from?”
“Marco’s hideout,” he answered truthfully.
She made a face. “Did you find the girl?”
He nodded.
“Alive?”
“Yes.”
“Marco?”
“Dead.”
“Oh.” She held his gaze. “You?”
He shook his head. “Tiffany fixed the problem for me.”
“Jesus,” Max said softly. “She’s, like, Lobo’s age, right?”
“About,” he replied. “Sunny took her to a safe house for the night.”
“And then what?”
He shrugged. “I haven’t gotten that far. I have to figure out some way to bring her back to Houston with a strong enough alibi that she won’t be bothered.”
“Good luck with that,” she muttered and grabbed a disposable lab coat from the box on the counter. After slipping into the lab coat and some gloves, she approached the table and picked up the backpack. “What am I looking for? Anything in particular?”
“The backpack isn’t my priority. It’s belongs to the girl. But this,” he gestured to the envelope. “I want whatever you get can off of this envelope and the contents.”
&
nbsp; “So, fingerprints, trace, DNA…” She picked up the envelope and studied it. “What am I running the results against? Do you have a suspect in mind? Other than Marco and Tiffany, what do you hope to find?”
“I think it came from a Fed.”
She raised an eyebrow at that. “I’ll need Fox’s help to get into those databases.”
“Wake her up. My payroll comes with strings.”
“She won’t be much help. She and Nate were heading out tonight. They’re probably dabbing and playing video games at his place by now.”
He grunted with annoyance at that piece of information. “She keeps telling me they aren’t dating, but every time I turn around, they’re together.”
“They’re definitely not dating,” Max replied. “Or fucking in any sort of friends-with-benefits way.”
“Women say that all the time when they want to hide something.”
Max snorted. “She’s hiding something, but it’s not Nate.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“That you need to open your eyes and pay more attention,” she muttered rudely.
“Is there something I need to know? Something that affects all of us and our security?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “No. That’s not what she’s hiding. Whatever Fox’s faults, she would never put any of us at risk.” Sighing, she said, “It doesn’t matter.”
“If it doesn’t matter, why did you bring it up?”
“Just forget about it.”
Not wanting to argue with her any longer, he crossed the lab to the reinforced and securely sealed door along the back wall. He punched in the code at the keypad and scanned his thumb to unlock it. The lights turned on automatically, the fluorescent bulbs casting a pale blue sheen on the metallic walls, cabinets and countertops.
He snatched a pair of gloves from the box mounted on the wall and approached one of the ultra-low freezers where they kept samples. Inside this freezer, there were five shelves, each shelf divided into dozens of compartments. Max kept a detailed laminated map to identify the location of each sample referenced by a searchable database code.