Page 24 of Ten

Kostya speared me with a glare. “Are you always this argumentative?”

“Worse.”

His mouth quirked with a smile that faded as soon as he spoke. “Child pornography.”

I reared back with disgust. “What? Is that why Ten beat him?”

“Part of it,” Kostya said evasively. “There was a kid involved. His mother worked at Samovar so it was a family situation. You understand?”

“Yes,” I said quietly. “Who was it? The man he killed. Not the kid involved.”

Kostya seemed taken aback. “Tony. Didn’t you know that?”

At a loss for words, I sat there, mouth agape. “Ten killed Tony Guerrero? But I thought...? It was a drug deal gone bad. That’s what they said.”

“Who said?”

“Uncle Nicky.”

“I’m sure he did,” Kostya agreed. “You were not in a good place mentally. Imagine if he’d told you that a friend you had trusted and known was part of a pedophile ring operating right here in town?”

“I would have ended up on a 72-hour hold.” I wasn’t kidding or being hyperbolic. There was no way I could have handled a life-shattering discovery like that so soon after losing my baby, learning my husband was a serial killer and playing the role of star prosecution witness in his trial.

“It was hushed up by the police and the cartel and everyone else on the street. That was a secret so heinous no one wanted to spread it. Once Tony was dead and Kiki went to prison?” He slashed his hand through the air. “It was done and buried.”

“Yeah, but what about Adrian?” I had always wondered about Kiki’s longtime partner. “He went missing around that same time, right?”

“He did.”

“Chess reached out to me, asked me if I knew where he was or where he might be hiding.” She had been in a similarly bad place as me at the time. Pregnant. Seventeen. Alone. Abandoned. Her story had a better ending than mine, though. “I didn’t know anything, and I felt so bad for her.”

“Things turned out fine for Chess.”

“And Adrian? Did he go home? I always just assumed he must have tucked tail and ran back to Russia.”

“Yeah, that’s a fair assumption.”

I suspected that was as close to confirmation as I would ever get. “I can’t imagine how stressful that is for Chess. Having to wonder if Adrian is going to pop back up in her life and ruin everything.”

“The odds of that happening are almost zero.”

I hoped so for Chess and Callie’s sakes. Another thought struck me. “Wait—was Adrian like Tony?”

“Adrian didn’t get off on hurting kids the way Tony did, but he enjoyed the money he made filming it.”

“What?” I swayed with shock and horror. “They filmed the crimes?”

“We always suspected they were part of a bigger operation, probably international.”

“If Tony was...? Was Tony involved in Kiki’s crimes? I mean. The police would have...? Right?” I couldn’t finish a single thought. My brain couldn’t make sense of these new details. “Were they working together? Hunting together? Killing together?”

“Nobody but the men who were involved know what really happened.”

I thought back to the days following Kiki’s arrest, as I recovered in the hospital. The memories were fuzzy, but many of the questions I had been asked by detectives had been repeated at later dates. After Adrian had gone missing, after Tony had died, I had been visited one last time by detectives. “There was a murder they asked me about,” I said, my gaze fixed on the chair in front of me. “A boy from Carrizo Springs.”

“Derek Miller,” Kostya said, jolting me out of my daze. “He was fourteen. A hitchhiker. Runaway. His body was found dumped by the Rio Grande not far from—.”

“Laredo,” I murmured, mentally building a map. “That was one of their stops on the circuit.” I glanced at Kostya. “Of course, you already know that.”

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