Page 2 of Devil's Retribution

“You made it in this madhouse!” Tolya came to greet me, the others trailing behind him like migrating geese. “The others are arriving soon, but tonight’s jazz quartet is delayed at the airport.”

“Mm.” It was a small hiccup, I’d hoped for a live performance to impress my most important guest with, but it would have to wait. “Good enough. That will give us some time to speak with Dimitri before the first performance.” And find out whatever it was that he had refused to tell me over the phone.

I walked to my table, a round marble-topped affair surrounded on three sides by a ring-shaped booth in royal blue, deep burgundy, and gold. In the absence of balconies, it offered the best view of the stage. And Dimitri was quietly waiting beside it.

He was a tall, lean older man, clean-shaven and sharp-faced, who outdressed me with the kind of skill that came from having decades more experience at the game of impressing others. The silk of his evening suit was an indigo so deep its color only showed when it caught the light. The emerald in his tie-tack was the exact shade of his eyes. We shook hands and nodded to each other before sliding into seats across from one another.

“Leadership looks like it’s done you good,” Dimitri commented.

I nodded and signaled for Tolya to bring over the bottle and a pair of glasses. “I have settled into the role.”

The last time we had spoken face to face had been three months after my uncle’s funeral. He had been a friend of both my father and uncle, and though he never would have admitted it directly, I had known he was checking on me. But since then, he had mostly kept a quiet distance. Not tonight, though.”

Tolya brought the bottle, he opened it and I poured. Two fingers each, we saluted each other and savored a few sips before I got down to business. “So… what brings you to my club this evening?”

He hesitated for just a moment, green eyes tracking away from mine in a way I instantly didn’t like.

“It’s about Leon.”

I almost dropped my glass.

“You don’t say,” I responded, recovering my composure. My hand shook a little as I set the glass down. What did Dimitri have on Leon? Was it what I had been searching for?

Leon, my beloved younger brother, my best friend our whole lives. Or at least, for the whole of his life—which had been brutally shortened.

Leon, my brother with his smile like a summer day, dark and bearded like me but with dancing brown eyes. Always cheerful, especially in his younger years. I had been neck-deep in the Bratva as soon as I had been old enough to run messages for them on my bike, but by the time Leon had come along, we had been established enough to send him off to college.

He could have lived his whole life in the ordinary world, well away from the organization that had been our father and uncle’s life and was becoming mine. But after my father’s death, he had been determined to help me. Become part of the family business.

And then it had killed him.

We had been at a family Christmas party, for pity’s sake, at his condo over in the Hollywood Hills. We had just brought out the eggnog, a whole punch bowl’s worth, another feat of Tolya’s, the crowd already swarming toward it with hopeful eyes. My brother had been standing at one of the large picture windows overlooking the city, empty punch glass in hand, back to me.

I had just turned away from him to have Tolya pour me a drink when I had heard the sound of something shattering behind me. A quiet sound, so quiet that I had thought he had simply dropped his glass. But when I had turned, the glass was just falling from his hand.

I had been a little drunk, a little dizzy from revelry and the chance to relax for the first time in a week. For a moment the anomaly didn’t register. But then he had sagged, and his head had drooped, and he had collapsed to the floor right in front of me—revealing the spreading cobweb of cracks in the window in front of him. The bullet hole in the center.

I had run for him, too late—too late. I had rolled him over to see his blank, startled face, one eye a pit full of blood and the other wide open and empty.

Screaming. Chaos. Every man shouting but me, kneeling there holding my brother. Every man stirred into action, going to hunt for the sniper, while I had held Leon, rocked him, and felt him go stiff and cold in my arms long before the paramedics could possibly have gotten to him.

We’d never caught the sniper. And Dimitri knew just how much I would give to get my hands on the man responsible. At my brother’s wake, surrounded by murmurs and quiet sobs from friends and family, I had told him as much.

And now, here was Dimitri, with news.

I pulled my head out of my memories and nodded distractedly, forcing my eyes to focus back on his. “Tell me.”

Dimitri reached inside his jacket and produced a thumb drive. “I have a paper trail that will be of interest to you. It indicates that a local billionaire was very likely involved in your brother’s murder.”

I accepted it mutely and looked over at Alexei, who hurried off to my office to fetch my laptop. “What’s the name?”

He shifted uncomfortably, probably having some idea of the Pandora’s box of vendetta he was unleashing by handing me this. “Charles Nathan Graves.”

My chest hitched uncomfortably. “Graves?” Easily the richest man in Los Angeles who wasn’t part of the movie business. Son of an old money billionaire, he had beaten the odds by not being completely useless. He had doubled his father’s estate in under five years and had his fingers in every pie from pharmaceuticals to diamond mining.

“The information will speak for itself.” He saw the look on my face and swallowed down half his glass suddenly, not pausing to savor it. “It won’t get you the name of the assassin, but it will make his involvement and current circumstances plain. I imagine you’ll be able to get the name of the sniper out of Graves directly.”

“But why the hell would he even want my brother dead?” It felt like I was on the top of a mountain suddenly, the air my lungs were taking in felt too cold and thin. My head swam. “What possible reason—”

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