Page 30 of Emperor of Wrath

An icy skewer pierces my heart. I quickly try to shove it away.

“W-what do you mean?”

“I’ve been poking around on the dark web, talking to some people I know.” Her face pales even more than usual. “Word is, he’s putting out serious feelers. He’s seriously pissed about what happened.”

God-fucking-dammit.

Like I said, I rarely make mistakes. But aside from Kenzo, Ulkan Gacaferi was one of them.

It was a few months ago, right as I was being reunited with my sister after so many years apart. I know we shouldn’t have, especially for a psycho like Ulkan, but Frey and I took on a job.

Hindsight is a motherfucker. When I look back on this particular job, it had all the red flags I usually walk away from. But I was so focused on the Taylor thing, and the money was so stupid good, that I said yes without thinking.

Ulkan Gacaferi, a notorious Albanian crime boss and general psychopath, hired us to steal a car—a brand-spanking-new, neon yellow Lamborghini—from the parking garage of an ultra-exclusive condo building in Midtown.

He was willing to pay a lot: three hundred and fifty grand for the car itself, plus another hundred k for our time.

I mean, that’s the dumbest, quickest almost-half million you can possibly make. And Freya and I stole hundreds of high-end sports cars for buyers in Dubai and China in our day.

So we said yes. There was some concern about the money part, but he paid half up-front and spun us this tale that it was a joke on a friendly rival of his. That they played pranks like this on each other all the time, and everyone would have a big laugh about it later.

So we stole it. It took all of nineteen seconds, and we were on our way to the drop-off point when I thought to check the trunk.

That’s when the record scratched and the music stopped.

Inside the trunk, there was what looked like a hundred and fifty pounds of cocaine, maybe two million in cash, and a couple of very illegal-looking machine guns.

Unbelievably, that wasn’t the worst part.

The worst was that all of it was marked as belonging to him.

My devil. My demon. The man who almost killed me and snuffed out a part of me in the process.

The man I’d finally managed to escape, and now we’d just stolen a fortune from him.

Valon Leka.

That’s when Freya and I made a game-time decision. We ditched the car by the Lincoln Tunnel, wiped it of prints, and walked the fuck away.

Obviously, Ulkan’s people reached out demanding to know where the car was. We responded using Freya’s anonymous messaging service, saying that the job had been presented to us in bad faith and that we weren’t interested in stealing from Valon. Ulkan wanted his deposit back, but it was clear he wanted it to come accompanied by our heads in a bag.

So we ditched the burner accounts we’d used to talk to him and put the whole thing behind us.

Or so I thought.

“Shit,” I mutter. “How exposed are we?”

Freya makes a face.

“I mean, it’s a low number. But I’d like it a whole lot better if it was zero.”

My brows knit as I tick off our options. “There’s The Broker. But…obviously not.”

The Broker is a dark web guy that specializes in setting up jobs like this. He’s the one that reached out to us with the job offer from Ulkan. But he’s incorruptible. I mean incorruptible.

“There’s the guard.” Frey’s face is worried.

I shake my head. “No. He didn’t see me.”

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