? ? ?
After assuring myself I didn’t have a tail, I checked myself into a five-star boutique hotel on the outskirts of Stanford. It was a place no one would expect me to stay in either my professional or undercover life because of the price tag that came with the room. But I had fond memories of this hotel from a childhood spent traveling the globe with my mom and grandmother.
I pulled out a disposable phone I kept for my personal calls. Using a burner meant I could smash it and toss it if I thought I’d been made but still allowed me to keep in touch with Mom. If I didn’t, she’d fret, thinking I was dead somewhere. It was the part of my job I hated, causing her to worry about things we both knew could come true in an instant. I took a selfie with the room and the view as a backdrop and sent it off. Her response with the code name I used for her was almost instantaneous.
MOM: What are you doing in the Bay Area?
ME: Assignment. Here for a night.
MOM: You need more than a night away. Make sure you get a massage from the spa.
ME: That’s the plan.
Having a brief moment where I could put aside all of the masks I wore and just be me was exactly what I needed—craved, even. A chance to unwind my tightly coiled muscles and lose myself in the music that had been my entire world before duty had become my calling.
MOM: Nan says she wants to see you soon. I’m performing in Austin this weekend. Maybe you can come and see us?
I’d just about kill to spend time with my mother and grandmother, to spend several days listening to her R&B and Nan’s jazz and soul music, but I doubted it was going to happen. Not with shit hitting the fan in ways I hadn’t even figured out yet.
ME: Probably not. But I’ll meet up with you soon.
MOM: I’ll be back in New York after that, but in July I’ll be going upstate to record at La Musica de Ensueños Studios.
I frowned, flipping through my file cabinet of a brain before I came up with the information I needed. The studio belonged to a country-rock singer who I’d been tasked to help with a stalker issue right in the goddamn middle of the case I’d been building against Tsuyoshi Mori and the Kyodaina.
ME: Brady O’Neil’s place?
MOM: Yep. It’s nice and quiet there. Maybe that’s what you need.
Upstate New York in the summer would hardly be my pick for an ideal vacation spot, but I needed time away from the job?and soon. Today’s almost fuckup with Gennady was a clear sign.
ME: I’ll see what I can swing.
MOM: Love you. Be safe. Be happy. Be loved.
ME: Right back at you.
My chest ached a little at her words. The image of her smooth brown face with a riot of jet-black curls held back by a patterned headband was embedded in my memories. She hadn’t changed much in the last decade. She was timeless, just like her mother who she was the spitting image of. Other than my size, which I got from my half-Hawaiian father, I took after both the women with intense, oval-shaped eyes, dark lashes, a dense mesh of curls, and skin so brown our teeth stood out like a beacon in the sky.
I tossed that phone on the bed and pulled out my secure, FBI-issued burner. Nolan, one of a handful of people on my team who actually knew what the hell I was doing, had sent me a link to a secure file about Petya Leskov’s death. A CIA source outside of our regular channels had sent it to him in exchange for a bottle of brandy and a future favor we’d both hate giving.
An image emerged on the screen of Leskov slumped over at a table in some expensive restaurant in St. Petersburg. The gold and red décor behind him was a stark contrast to his snowy hair, pale-white skin, and black suit, like a black-and-white image had been layered against a color photograph. The CIA file listed poison as the suspected cause of death even though the official medical report called it a heart attack. I had to agree with the CIA. Leskov was a health addict who didn’t do drugs and drank very little alcohol. He had a strenuous workout routine designed by some of the world’s top trainers, so while it was possible his heart had given out, it was highly unlikely.
I flipped to the other images in the CIA file. Leskov had been at the restaurant with his son, wife, and Rurik Volkov. Volkov ruled the bratva in St. Petersburg and around the globe with a diamond-clad fist. An emperor giving commands that were felt around the world. While Petya Leskov didn’t exactly work for Volkov, he did act as the Russian mafiya’s peacemaker. He’d brokered more than one of the treaties that had ended the gangland wars tearing Russia apart in the nineties.
I flipped from the images to a video clip. It showed a distraught Manya Leskov, Petya’s wife, coming out of the same restaurant. She was shouting at someone obscured in the shadowy light of the doorway, her words inaudible over the noise of the street. She beat her chest, sagging and clutching her stomach. As she collapsed, you got a clear view of her face, makeup running down in dark rivulets along her white skin.
The Leskovs’ son, Malik, was at her side without a single tear. Instead, there was a sneer on his face that seemed a permanent fixture in every image I’d ever seen of him. He had a lanky grace, like a ballet dancer, with black hair that flopped forward over his brows and a trim goatee hiding a severely angled chin. He had his mother’s litheness and none of his father’s solid bulk. In a world where brute force and cruelty were what got you admired, I wondered how Malik had ever risen to the position he had in the bratva.
When the video stopped, it was zoomed in on Manya’s distraught face again. The woman was a taller, older version of her blonde-haired genius of a daughter. The FBI file on Manya went back to her teen years when she’d modeled for world-class magazines before cocaine and marriage to her Ponzi-scheming first husband had sent her scuttling back to Russia with her U.S. privileges revoked.
My gut clenched at the stark pain on her face. The agony sculpted across her features tore at me as much as her similarity to the daughter I’d been sent to retrieve. My nightmare came back to haunt me for real. Every undercover agent’s nightmare?being attracted to a member of the criminal family you were sworn to bring down. But lust was just a chemical reaction, and I knew all about chemistry. After all, I’d double-majored in it and foreign languages in my time at Bonnin University. The key to preventing a chemical reaction was to find its counteractant. That was all I needed to do?find the right ingredient to keep the fizzle of energy I felt when Raisa Leskov was nearby in check.
My third phone rang. Another burner phone I’d been instructed to lose every five days as part of Gennady’s team. A new, clean, and untraceable one would magically appear from his tech team at set intervals. It wasn’t just his paranoia over the Feds, Russian FSB, or Interpol listening in on our conversations. He was even more terrified of his competitors getting an edge.
“Woods,” I answered.
“Do you have her?” Gennady’s voice was gravelly from years of smoking.