Russian Mafia Boss's Heir (16 page)

Chapter Twenty

Tori was trembling when she knocked on Mikhail’s study door. She could hear him inside, yakking on the phone in Russian. He was saying something about needing to keep an eye on the lower ranks, the men who were still struggling to become made men and gain their boss’s respect. Mikhail was openly speculating—probably to Dimitri—that one of these men would tattle to Stanislas about Mikhail’s plan.

Pushing the door open, she stepped inside and shut it behind her. She wanted privacy for this interview. At least, she thought she did. There was always the possibility that Mikhail was going to be resistant to this idea, maybe even to the point that he wouldn’t want to hear what she had to say at all.

“I’m going to have to let you go,” Mikhail said into the phone. He was staring at her as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to her at all. “I’ll be there in an hour. Maybe less. Just keep a lid on things until then.”

That cryptic statement caught Tori’s curiosity. What lid was he referring to?

Once Mikhail hung up, she couldn’t resist asking. “What’s going on?”

“Apparently we were correct in thinking that Stanislas would lose his shit.” Mikhail sounded grim. He folded his hands on the desktop and leaned forward. “He’s already ordered Alexei’s execution and yours.”

“Nice.” She thought of the list she carried in her hand. “Although I have a weird feeling that this is not the first time he’s done this sort of thing.”

“Meaning what?”

“Did my stepfather ever get suspicious of his men?” she wondered out loud. “I’ve thought about this a lot in the last thirty minutes. But I was kept pretty much outside of business as usual, so I don’t think I would have noticed if the men behaved in an unusual way or not.”

Mikhail appeared to think this through. His handsome features arranged themselves into an expression of skepticism. “I wouldn’t say there was anything out of the ordinary. Why?”

“Because I found out what was in my mother’s journals.” She cringed when she said it.

“All right.” He waved his hand, indicating that she should go on.

Tori swallowed back her nerves. It was now or never. “The first two are very boring. Although there’s some comic relief when she talks about Alexei and I. Apparently we were straight up awful.”

Mikhail’s dark eyes sparkled with amusement. “I believe that.”

“Anyway,” she said, sticking her tongue out at him. “The rest of those journals were really detailed descriptions of totally mundane stuff. At least it looks mundane until you look at the third journal.”

“The gibberish?”

“Yeah. That one.” She set it on the desk. “I went ahead and decoded it. There was a cipher.”

“Seriously?” His eyebrows shot up in obvious surprise. “You mother was journaling in code?”

“They’re names and dates.” Tori swallowed. She had to tell him the rest. “I looked online. Each one corresponds to a murder.”

“What?” He blinked. She didn’t have to hear the words to know that he thought she was wrong. “That’s impossible.”

“No. I don’t think so.” She put one of the other journals on the desk. “If you look in here, there will be an entry that corresponds with each murder. My mother was cataloging everything that Stanislas did on those days, trying to find out if he was responsible, I think.”

“No.” He was shaking his head. “Surely not.”

“Mikhail, he was murdering the families of his men and his enemies to keep them under his control.” Tori hated being the one to tell him this. “And your mother and sister are on that list.”

“No.” Now his voice was utterly flat. “I’m not going to believe that.” Mikhail shoved himself away from the desk and stood up. “What purpose would there be in that? Why would he do such a thing? You’re talking about women and children!”

“What better way to keep people under your thumb?”

“That makes Stanislas the most brutal man on the Boston council.” Mikhail was whispering now.

“You wondered why they would put up with his bullshit. Maybe that’s why,” Tori suggested. “The man was willing to murder the wives and children of his rivals.”

“We don’t involve women and children,” Mikhail said in a low, angry voice. “We don’t do that.”

Tori wasn’t going to point out the obvious, which was that they obviously
did
involve women and children. Her stepfather had just ordered her execution. She was a woman carrying a child. Obviously Stanislas’s paranoia was far more important to him than the woman he had called daughter since her infancy.

“I have to go.” Mikhail strode toward the doorway, refusing to look at her. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Don’t go anywhere. You’ll be safe here. Outside the house, I can’t guarantee anything right now. Please don’t go anywhere. All right?”

“Fine,” she agreed. “But you have to take that book with you and at least promise me you’ll look into it. If I’m wrong, that’s good. I’ll be thrilled! If I’m not, you might find the answers you’ve been searching for all along.”

Mikhail grunted something beneath his breath and then finally made a frustrated noise somewhere between a groan and a growl. “Fine! I’ll look into it. But that’s all I’m promising.”

Tori didn’t say anything else. She let him go and listened to his boots in the front hallway and then the slam of the front door. Somewhere in the house Mrs. O’Connell was puttering about. Tori caught the scent of fresh bread and knew the woman had been baking. The rest of the place was silent.

Then the doorbell rang, and she got a very bad feeling in her stomach.

“I’ve got it, Mrs. O’Connell, thank you.” Tori waved the housekeeper away and flung open the front door.

There was nobody on the front steps, but there was a package waiting. She picked it up and carefully opened the box. It hadn’t been sealed. Inside was one of Alexei’s gauges from his ear. She recognized it instantly because of the intricate Celtic design. It was covered in blood as if it had been ripped out of her stepbrother’s ear.

Tori was ready to throw up, but she needed to see the note. She had to know if this meant Alexei was alive or dead. The note said only one thing. It gave the address of an old warehouse in downtown Boston by the harbor.

Tori already knew she was going. It was very clear that she had no other choice.

***

MIKHAIL SAT DOWN at the computer terminal in Stanislas Vasiliev’s office. He had Tori’s little black book of horror in hand and had every intention of trying to find some corresponding information in Stanislas’s personal files. He was just hoping to discover something that would exonerate the man who had been like a second father to him for so many years.

It wasn’t that Mikhail didn’t respect Tori’s intelligence or her ability to ferret out information that had been hidden. She was actually very good at that sort of thing. Mikhail just wasn’t ready to believe that Stanislas Vasiliev had been responsible for the murder of Mikhail’s mother and sister.

Mikhail double clicked the icon for Stanislas’s personal files. They were ordered by year going back nearly twenty years or more. Mikhail glanced at the entry Tori had highlighted in her mother’s cipher. He found the corresponding entry in the regular journal. The entry was completely mundane. Stanislas had been away that day on business, presumably visiting his businesses in the warehouse district near the Neponset. That was in the Allston area. The journal mentioned something else rather cryptic, which was that Stanislas had sent Mikhail’s father on a long errand upstate. There was also a sentence that said simply, “Stanislas suspicious of Boris Ivanov.” Had Stanislas been questioning Mikhail’s father’s loyalty? Why?

Feeling confused, Mikhail clicked on the computer file. He found the date and opened that document. To his shock, it was a journal entry from Stanislas, who apparently kept electronic journals.

“Mikhail,” Stanislas said, entering the office. “What are you doing?”

“Right now?” Mikhail couldn’t help it. He glared at the man who had been his boss for so long. “I’m looking at an entry in your personal journal that speculates that my father was very likely conspiring against you with two of your other men who were also his best friends.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Stanislas waved his hand. “That was decades ago. There is nothing in that journal that suggests anything other than suspicion.”

“You’re right,” Mikhail agreed. “Or at least you would be if it weren’t for the fact that my mother and sister were probably murdered that night by those same two friends of my father’s. The three of them never spoke again, and I don’t think my father ever left town again. Not even when ordered.”

“What are you suggesting?” Stanislas scoffed. “That I had your mother and sister murdered? That is preposterous!”

“Is it any more preposterous than you ordering your men to execute my wife this morning?” Mikhail snarled the words, no longer caring about keeping up the pretext of respect. “She’s carrying my child. You would be murdering yet another mother and child. What is so different about that?”

The man had the nerve to wave his hand as though he didn’t care at all. “Does it matter? They’re all just a means to an end. Women and children are nothing more than the instruments by which men like us are murdered.”

“You’re insane,” Mikhail said bitterly. “You need help, Stanislas. You do. Let us help you. Let us take you someplace where you won’t be paranoid all the time. You’ve driven away your son, and now you’re trying to murder your stepdaughter. You’ve been like this for decades. Don’t you want to stop?”

“Stop what?” Stanislas pulled out a gun. He leveled it at Mikhail and pulled the slide to put a bullet in the chamber. “I really cannot have my men talking about the sort of insubordination you are responsible for starting. You’re stirring up trouble and making bad decisions, Mikhail. I thought better of you, but I was wrong.”

“Were you?” Mikhail was letting his hand inch toward his own gun, which he’d foolishly left on the corner of the desk. It was within reach and yet so very far away. “Because I was under the impression that I was keeping the drama very subdued in our syndicate. You’re the one who consistently makes it worse. You’re paranoid. You believe all of the bad press and more. Worse, you murder people without reason just because you’re sure they’re conspiring against you!”

“It’s time to stand up and forget about that weapon, Mikhail.” Stanislas waved the barrel of his weapon. “Besides, you don’t want your wife to worry about you, do you? She’s already waiting for you. If you go quietly, you’ll be with her very soon.”

Mikhail’s heart leaped into his throat. Stanislas had Tori? How? And how was Mikhail supposed to be able to decide if the crazy man was bluffing or not? Mikhail couldn’t afford to take that chance. He had to cooperate. He could only hope that by doing so, he somehow found a way to get past the loony
mafiya
boss with the gun before the man completely lost his mind and started killing more people.

“Move along then,” Stanislas said with an inordinate amount of glee. “We’ll go get in the car and take a little drive. Just the two of us.”

“You don’t want to bring Dimitri?”

“No, I don’t.” Stanislas made a sound with his tongue. “That boy is next on my list of those who must be tested. I don’t believe he’s loyal to me at all.” Stanislas glowered at Mikhail. “In fact, I believe you’ve turned him completely against me, Mikhail. So he’ll have to go. I’m sure you understand.”

Chapter Twenty-One

“Hey! Can you please answer just
one
question?” Tori shouted at the men lounging on the other side of the warehouse.

They ignored her. Or actually they
continued
to ignore her. She had no notion of time since they had taken her cell phone away, but it felt as though she’d been held inside this cold, cavernous space for hours.

There was no telling time here. Perhaps time didn’t exist. The only thing that did exist was the persistent dripping of water from a large overhead beam to the cement floor of the warehouse, and the murmur of voices speaking in Russian. The temperature was cold. The New England fall weather was quickly winding down, and soon the brutal winter would be upon them. Tori could almost believe it was already here. She expected to see frost on the inside of the windows high above the floor.

Her fingers were numb. Of course, that was likely due to her awkward position and not the cold. She hung from a chain that had been thrown over a beam high above the warehouse floor. Her wrists were shackled, and her toes barely touched the floor. Her shoulders and back were screaming in agony as soreness and muscle cramping set in from remaining for so long in that painful position. Too much longer and she would probably sustain permanent nerve damage.

The thought made her angry. “Hey!” She spoke in Russian. “What right do you dogs have to hold me here without even telling me who you work for? This makes no sense! I’ve done nothing! What’s my crime?”

She continued to rail at them in Russian, scraping her toes on the floor to try and lift her body just a little bit higher and ease the tension on her hands. The worst part was that after she managed to succeed, the blood rushed back into her fingers and wrists and the throbbing began.

Tori finally lapsed into silence. She forced her brain to think rationally. Mikhail would be coming for her. Eventually. Right? He would notice that she was gone. Mrs. O’Connell would call him. Or he would try to contact her and then want to know why she wasn’t answering her phone.

In the meantime, she needed to find out who these goons worked for. She didn’t recognize them at all. There were two skinny ones, a really overblown guy with big shoulders, and a fat one who looked as though he could eat his way through an entire donut store in an hour without batting an eyelash.

“Hey!” she called to the fat one. “Blini boy! Who hired you?”

Finally.
Finally
. The man glanced over at her, a sour expression on his face. It was apparent that she’d hit a soft spot, which gave her an idea. “What?” she taunted. “That’s what gave you that belly, right? Did you eat all the blini you could find? Or does your mother still cook all your meals made to order with an extra side of fat?” Yes. That pretty much qualified as mean.