Page 7 of Crowned

Only nothing happens. No sweet sense of retribution. No absolution from the horrors that I subjected Lilia to.

It wasn’t Vasily who tortured Lilia.

It was me.

I hurl the bloodied, broken bottle into the bath with a roar of pain, and it smashes into a thousand pieces.

The door opens and Konstantin casts his gaze over the blood-streaked bathroom and our blood-spattered faces and bodies. Kirill’s face looks like a horror film. I can barely see the tattoos on my arms beneath all the gore.

“The hotel manager has been at the door. He reminds us to keep it down for the comfort of the other guests.” Konstantin takes in Vasily’s mangled corpse and the puddle of crimson that’s flowing toward the drain. “So, we are sure that he was the informant and Lilia was telling the truth?”

I swipe my forearm over my bloody face, my gaze burning. “I swear it on my life. Lilia Aranova is innocent.”

Thoughts are flickering behind myPakhan’seyes. Dark, angry thoughts.

“We will get your diamonds back, Kostya,” Kirill assures him. “She can’t hide from us forever, and she can’t sell pink diamonds. Not on her own, and she has no one to help her.”

My insides twist at the thought of those diamonds. Konstantin doesn’t forgive and forget, and if he doesn’t get that tiara back, he will want Lilia dead. It doesn’t matter that I’m in love with her. He will insist she pay for her crime in blood.

Konstantin braces a forearm against the doorway, still staring at Vasily’s mangled corpse. Finally, he says, so low it’s more to himself than to us, “She can’t sell them? I wouldn’t be so sure about that. After all she’s done, I’ll put nothing past Contestant Number Eleven. I wonder who made her this way.”

Kirill and I exchange glances, but he looks as perplexed as I feel.

“Kostya?” Kirill prompts, frowning.

Our boss rouses himself and meets our eyes. “Get yourselves cleaned up and let’s get rid of this corpse. I need to meet Aran Brazhensky.”

2

Konstantin

It takes us two grisly hours to process Vasily’s corpse. We snip his fingers off with bolt cutters, pull his teeth with pliers, and pare the tattoos from his flesh with a knife. After wrapping the body in black plastic bags, Elyah and I load it into a spare suitcase while Kirill uses the showerhead to chase every drop of blood down the bathroom drain.

The whole business is messy and bloody, but we’re professionals, and there’s not a visible spot of blood left anywhere in the suite when we’re done. The bathroom wouldn’t pass a luminol test, but as long as no detectives are called in to investigate a crime, no one will ever find out what happened here.

At four in the morning, we’re all dressed in fresh suits and we’re wheeling our luggage through the lobby, three foreign businessmen on our way to catch an early flight. Harder and meaner than any Americans who are staying in this hotel and too scarred and tattooed for any legitimate business, but money gives us all the respectability we need. I hand over my platinum credit card to the hotel desk clerk and he falls over himself to say that he hopes we had a pleasant stay.

The valet brings us our rental car and helps us with our luggage. When he takes Elyah’s case from him, his muscles strain as he lifts it into the trunk of the car.

“What have you got in here, dead bodies?”

We all laugh, and Kirill grins as he passes him a twenty. “Only one.”

“I will drive,” Elyah says, and catches the keys when I throw them to him.

I sit in the back seat, the upper left part of my face throbbing. The scarred part. It used to be that I was barely aware of my injury, but ever since the pageant came undone, the scar tissue aches like a fresh wound.

As always, the moment I stop doing anything, my mind returns to Contestant Number Eleven. I see her again just as she was the first time I laid eyes on her, unconscious in the passenger seat of Kirill’s black Ferrari. Pale. Helpless. Unintimidating. A woman with morals so loose that she would sneak around her husband’s back with his driver and then sell him out to the cops.

How I despised her. Women like her should be dragged outside and shot in the back of the head before they can wreak chaos on your existence.

But I was magnanimous. I allowed her a few extra days of her worthless life, for Elyah’s sake. He needed to understand why she had betrayed him or he would never move on. Elyah is a brutal killing machine, but at his core, he’s not like Kirill or me. He’s ruled by his heart, not his mind. It’s not a weakness. It’s Elyah’s strength. He senses things that Kirill and I don’t because we look with our eyes and listen with our ears and believe what they tell us. Elyah is attuned to something beyond his five senses, and I brushed aside his warnings at my peril. He saved my life eight months ago. He warned me that Lilia Aranova was as dangerous as a viper, and yet I still believed I had bested her when I had her at my feet.

Now I’m paying for my foolishness.

She’s not innocent, as Elyah claims.

She’s far from fucking innocent.

---