Becoming Carter (The Carter Series) (Volume 2) (26 page)

Thirty minutes later, Mikey’s all-black Escalade pulled through the gate of a lavish two-story house with bright red brick and perfectly white doors. Once we were inside, Mikey and I escorted Kelvin to the guest bedroom, and laid him down on the bed. I could tell the pain medication was starting to wear off, and Kelvin was beginning to wince every time his arm moved even a little bit.

“I’m sorry, Babe,” I said with a frown. “Did I hit it? I’m so sorry.”

“Nah, it wasn’t you. It’s just starting to hurt whether I move it or not. Maybe leaving was a bad idea after all,” Kelvin tried to joke with a half-smile.

“Hey, Lily,” Mikey jumped in, “if you go down to the kitchen, you’ll find some pretty potent pain medication in the cabinet next to the stove. On the right.”

“Okay, great,” I replied as I stood up. “Thanks. I’ll go get it now.”

I quickly made my way down the immaculate stairs, careful not to glide my feet on the spotless carpet. It took me a minute to actually find the kitchen, but once I did, I found the pain meds pretty quickly and ran back up the stairs.

When I stepped into the room, Mikey, who I could hear talking before I even got to the top of the steps, suddenly stopped talking and began staring at me like I did something wrong by coming back to the room so quickly.

I furrowed my brow and squinted at the two of them. “What? Why the hell are you looking at me like that?”

Kelvin jumped in before Mikey could respond. “It’s fine, Lilliana. Come in and have a seat. Uncle Mikey just thinks that what we’re talking about might be too much for you to handle. He thinks we’ll scare you away. I already told him he was wrong.”

I walked over and sat on the edge of the bed next to Kelvin and took his hand in my own. “Well, that sounds interesting. It’s obvious some of your family members fail to realize how much I love you. There’s no scaring me away. So, what are you guys talking about?”

Mikey and Kelvin glanced at each other, then Kelvin looked at me and spoke again. “We’re just trying to figure out how we’re gonna do it.”

“Okay.” I replied. “How you’re gonna do what?”

Kelvin glanced down at the bed momentarily, then his eyes popped back up to me. “How we’re gonna kill Ivan Baskov.”

When Nestor Gavlik walked into the dining room, he looked around and made sure he recognized every man sitting at the large dinner table. Once he felt comfortable, he realized that someone was missing.

“Ivan’s not here,” he said as he took his seat next to Ilia.

“No, he’s not,” Ilia replied with an intense glare. “And there’s a reason for that.” Ilia took his eyes off of Nestor and began making eye contact with all four of the men who were in the room. He wanted them all to know that he saw them—that he loved them. “Tonight, we stop disappointing Ivan. As you all know, we’ve had an ongoing problem lately, and it’s hindering our ability to grow as a family—our ability to expand. So, until this problem is taken care of, our family will stay stuck in the same place, and just like Ivan said, we’re
all
burdened with this now. So, even with Viktor down, we’ve been keeping tabs on our little problem, and little does he know, that the next time him and that little bitch of his makes a move, we’ll know all about it, and we’ll be ready.”

Ilia took a moment to draw in his audience, and then he stood up to help emphasize the importance of what they were about to do.

“We’ve waited a long time for this,
brat’ya
(brothers). Tonight, we’ll put an end to all the waiting. Tonight, we’ll advance our family forward and remove the shackles from around our ankles. Tonight, we stop disappointing Ivan.”

Then, Ilia reached down into his pocket and pulled out a disposable cell phone, waving it in the air for his family to see.

“When this phone rings, we’ll know exactly where he’ll be, and when he’ll be there. The time has come
brat’ya
(brothers). We end this tonight.”

It’d been two days since Kelvin and I had left the hospital, and we hadn’t stepped foot outside the house since we got here. Mikey and Kelvin’s Aunt, Lauren, had been especially hospitable and were seemingly going out of their way to make sure that we had absolutely everything that we needed. We barely even had a need to ever leave the room, especially since it had a bathroom in it already.

Lauren, who was the perfect combination of light brown skin and light brown eyes, seemed love the idea of having two houseguests, and was taking advantage and cooking for us for almost every meal. I felt like I’d gained ten pounds in just the couple of days we’d been in the house.

Kelvin was also starting to get some of his strength back in his arm. Lauren and Mikey had called a home nurse to come in and check up on it, and swap the bandages out. Now, Kelvin was able to move around for the most part, but the nurse told him to keep his arm in the sling she’d provided. Kelvin was extremely hardheaded, however, and seemed to want to prove to himself and everybody else in the house that he didn’t need the sling by taking it off as often as he could, only resorting to wearing it when his arm got tired and started to ache again. As much as I admired his attempts to “man up,” there was a much bigger part of me that wished he’d just wear the sling all the time until his arm was completely healed. Men and their egos.

I especially wanted Kelvin to heal because of what I knew was about to happen in the very near future. There’d been very little mention of the conversation we’d had two days ago about killing Ivan Baskov, but the topic did come up, it was obvious that Mikey and Kelvin had schemed pretty deeply and had someone watching Ivan’s house, tracking his every move. Apparently, the plan was to track Ivan and eliminate him at their earliest convenience, but Ivan was a smart man. He never left the house at the same time every day, nor did he take the same route to the little Russian restaurant where he and his brothers would go to have meetings. Other than that, Mikey and Kelvin hadn’t been able to find anything on Ivan that they could use to try to set him up. But, I knew that wouldn’t last forever.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about the idea of killing Ivan at first. I suppose I felt fear initially, and then that fear turned into worrying about Kelvin or Mikey being arrested for murder. Then, however—after two days of thinking about it—I found myself coming to grips with it. No, I didn’t think it was right to murder anyone, however, this situation seemed to be a special case. Ivan Baskov and his family had already killed Kelvin’s brother, and now they’d tried to kill us both three times in the past two weeks. So, I came to the conclusion that it was either him or us. We all knew that Ivan wouldn’t stop trying to kill Kelvin until he finally did it, and that he didn’t care if I died in the process. So, were we supposed to just sit around and wait for the next time Ivan would try to kill us, and just hope that he‘d be unsuccessful once again? The truth was that the chances of surviving another attempted hit were slim to none, and if we didn’t do something about it, Kelvin and I were going to die. So, when I heard Mikey’s cell phone ring, I was prepared. I’d already accepted it, and I was ready.

After a ten minute conversation in his bedroom, Mikey finally came speed walking down the hall, into our temporary room. His face was completely serious, and he had a bead of sweat on his forehead like he was nervous. Kelvin and I looked at each other, signaling that we knew what was about to be said, then we both turned to Mikey.

“I just got a call from my guy,” Mikey said nervously. “He said he overheard something today, and I think we need to talk about it.”

Kelvin sat up in the bed and swung his legs over the side, resting his feet on the soft, white carpet. “Okay. What is it?”

“My guy says he followed Ivan out to Freeport today, where he stopped at a jewelry store. After Ivan was in the store about ten minutes, my guy got ballsy and decided to go in and see what was going on. When he got there, he saw Ivan at the counter, talking to the cashier about a ring he wanted to buy, so my guy steps closer—acting like he’s looking for jewelry himself—and starts to eaves drop on their conversation. He overhears Ivan telling the cashier that tonight’s his two year wedding anniversary for what is his third marriage. He says he’s buying the ring and plans to give it to his wife tonight when he takes her out to dinner at Alinea over in Lincoln Park. He even told the cashier that they had dinner reservations at eight, which is three hours from right now.”

Kelvin looked over at me with a worried expression. I could tell that he was waiting for me to say something about backing out, but I didn’t, and I knew I wouldn’t. Then, he leaned over and kissed me softly on the cheek.

“I never meant to get you involved in any of this crazy shit that we have going on with my family. I also never knew that I could love someone the way I love you. So, if you want to, we can decide against this right now. We can say that we’re above this kind of shit, and try to move on with our lives as normally as we can. We can say no. All you have to do is say the word, Baby.”

I thought for a minute about what Kelvin said. It sounded nice—the idea of saying no to this and trying to act as if this threat of the Baskov family didn’t really exist, but we both knew better. It would never end for us. The fear of someone coming out of nowhere and attacking us would always be in the back of our minds, no matter where we went, or how much time went by. They were after us, and they weren’t going to stop. Ivan Baskov had already made this decision for us.

“You know we can’t do that, Kelvin,” I replied, lifting my hand and rubbing his face gently with my fingers. “If we don’t do something about this, he won’t stop. He won’t stop until we’re dead. I refuse to lay down and wait to be killed. I never imagined being in this position, and this is something that I wish we didn’t have to do, but this has to be done. We have to do it, or we’ll never be free.”

Kelvin stared at me for a second, and it was like I could see pride in his eyes as he smiled at me, and then leaned over to kiss me once again. Then, he turned his attention back to Mikey, who was still standing in the doorway. “Can you get everything lined up in the next three hours?”

“Of course,” Mikey replied with a grin of his own.

“Okay,” Kelvin said. “Then let’s do it. Set it up, Uncle Mikey.”

“With pleasure,” Mikey answered as he turned on his heel and started to walk out.

“Oh, and Uncle Mikey,” Kelvin said again, stopping Mikey in his tracks. “Make sure this doesn’t get back to my dad. We’ll figure out what to do about him once this is done.”

I think it finally hit me the moment Kelvin zipped up the back of my dress. It was black, with very thin straps, and I thought for a moment that if I didn’t wear a pretty hefty jacket, I was probably going to freeze to death in this Chicago cold.

When I called Kelvin over, he stopped buttoning the sleeves on his white shirt to come help me.

“This dress is beautiful, Babe,” he said as he placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me around, which would normally prompt naughty thoughts—but not tonight.

I heard the zipper sliding up, and I felt the dress grow a little tighter around my body, then Kelvin rubbed my shoulder as he walked away and went back to what he was doing. That was when it hit me.