Page 39 of Vasily the Nail

“There’s more,” I say. “Dump body on my land.My land. Why? You knew her, her family. You stage this.”

“It wasn’t personal, I swear.”

“Da, was. You have dumping ground but no use. Use my lot.” I kneel down next to him, grab a hank of his brown hair and force his head to the side so I can whisper against his ear softly so no one else can hear me. “O’Connor told you to do this. She did reject you, but not this time. You’ve been holding a grudge, and O’Connor knew this would start a war. You doped her and attempted to strangle her. Maybe you thought she was dead, but I doubt it. You knew she was still alive when you pushed her out of your car. You drove fast enough to kill her, so she bled out on asphalt. But she knew. She knew you would murder her. She attacked first. Her broken fingernails, your blood, flesh.”

“I loved her,” Ian sniffles. “If she’d just loved me back, we would have been fine. I was gonna marry her.”

He was never going to marry her. He didn’t even love her, not really. And if Hector really cared about her, she wouldn’t have ended up here. Kseniya got into trouble enough, she’s a free spirit who could not be stopped, so we always knew where she was when she was younger, just to track. No interference, just tracking.

I pull the drop cloth off of poor Renata, who didn’t deserve any of this and just needed someone to watch out for her. Maybe she would have still gone down a bad path, maybe she would have still found the junk like I did. Some balls just can’t bestopped once they start rolling. But she would have had a better chance of getting out of it if someone had just loved her enough.

Ian sobs at the sight of her corpse fully exposed once again. That’s how he left her to be found. That’s on him.

I reach into my bag, grab a shirt.

Grab my gun, my pristine gun that I wear gloves for whenever I clean it, with the shirt.

Jam the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger before anyone can stop me or even move away. But the cops won’t notice the odd shadows in the splatter of blood, bone, and brains from people standing around him. They’ll just see it on Renata’s body.

He lands next to her, and once his hand stills, I nudge the gun into it. Murder-suicide.

“You leave, we call in,” I yell to the rival gangs. “Hector, I see your women, my streets, I call in, too. Keep them on your turf.” I don’t need more dead Mexican sex workers. Fuck.

“You just killed one of ours,” shouts an IRA guy. I recognize him as one of the ones usually shadowing Daniels, the leader in these parts. “What do you plan to do about that?”

“Tell Daniels he want war, he fire first shot.”

Day 6

Vasily

Twelve hours later,I’m in a classroom in Phoenix.

It’s been six years since I was last on a college campus, and it was the community college in Flagstaff, so I enter this room with some lofty notion of what sort of place a Mafia princess would attend. But it’s the same tiny, scribbled-on desks and linoleum floors, an old podium and a dry-erase board that doesn’t fully erase. It smells like cleaning products and sweat, and there’s a fan that I’m fairly sure is spewing more dust than air as it oscillates in the corner.

Students are rearranging desks from a circle to the more traditional rows and leaving as I walk in. Three are at the podium in a line to speak to the professor. Reggie Harris, according to the syllabus I scanned as Ana begged me not to come here. I wait patiently by the door as the students plead their cases for the same thing I’m here to plead Ana’s case for. They’re all dismissed, giving Harris the air of a formidable opponent, but he’s wearing a beige turtleneck, and I’m pretty sure Kseniya could take him in a fight.

Granted, she’s scrappy as fuck.

He doesn’t notice me until the students are gone and he’s packing his stuff up. He gives me barely a glance and says, “You can wait to clean until I’m done.”

Asshole just called me a janitor. Not that I personally look down on janitors, but beige turtleneck obviously does. What a fuck.

“I’m here for you, actually,” I tell him, keeping my tone pleasant and aggressively American.

“Well, I’d certainly remember if you were one of my students, and the last day to drop was last week. So if you’re one of the students who enrolled but never showed, it’s too late now.”

“I’m not your student. Analiese Lombardo is.”

He finally scrutinizes me. His eyes go down and back up. I didn’t dress to intimidate him, but even in track pants and the hoodie Ana was wearing yesterday when I got home, I’m enough to make him nervous. His throat bobs as he adjusts his glasses.

“Lacey’s missed two classes without contacting me and had an assignment due today. She’s a good student. One of my favorites, actually. But she knows the rules.”

He tries hard to maintain his confidence as he speaks, and it’s obvious he’s a washed-up actor from the way he projects, but it’s not enough to hide his nerves from me. I approach him slowly, doing nothing to be overtly menacing, but it’s enough to have sweat beading on his upper lip by the time the only thing between us is the podium.

“Analieseisa good student,” I agree. I saw her transcripts on the long ride down here. “Circumstances are outside of her control. She will make up missed work.”

“She won’t,” he counters, and I have to give him credit for standing his ground. He seems to have realized he shouldn’thave taken his initial tone with me and is still fighting for what he believes in. “I don’t make the rules, Mr. . .”

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