Page 147 of Lethal Alliance

His mouth twists. “Inger was smart,” he mutters, looking away. “Smarter than Nikolai.”

“You thought you could use her to get what you wanted,” I say. I’d laugh if it wasn’t so pathetic. “But in the end, it was her who played you, although not to Orlov. She hated him, did you know that? He raped her several years ago. Even for someone without a conscience like Inger, rape isn’t a crime you forgive. You were right about her being smart. Inger went to the one person you all overlooked: Vera.”

Yuri spits on the floor and avoids my eyes.

“Vera hasn’t been happy these past few years.” Yuri sits in sullen silence as I speak. “Dependent on me for her credit card usage, confined to the London house. I never tried to constrain her spending. And that house is hardly a prison. But none of it was enough for Vera. She always liked the fine things in life, always wanted more. Maybe that’s why she and Inger got along so well. Vera saw a way to ensure she had endless wealth for the rest of her days, and who knows—maybe, if Fedorov had succeeded, she would have. But I doubt it, Yuri. Fedorov was a cold, ruthless fuck.

“Which brings us to Nikolai.” I sit back in my chair and pour two more glasses, sliding Yuri’s across the table to him. “Do you know,” I say meditatively, “I think Inger actually loved Nikolai? It makes sense, when you think about it. Inger was a narcissist. She needed constant affirmation that she was beautiful, lovable. Nikolai genuinely believed those things about her, was maybe the only person who did. She might not have been certain that you would prioritize Nikolai’s life—after all, she lost Mikhail as a result of your wars. But she did trust Vera. And who knows? Maybe Vera genuinely thought that Fedorov wouldn’t harm her son.”

I swallow the vodka, relishing the burn as it slides down my throat. I don’t feel remotely inebriated. The alcohol simply clarifies every word I’m saying, each piece of the puzzle gleaming cold and hard as ice in my mind.

“Drink,” I say coldly.

Yuri does.

“Your wife is safe.”

His head jerks up, his eyes narrowing.

Is it really possible that he still thinks there’s hope for him?

“I hope she enjoys the Swiss spa, because she won’t ever leave it. I’ve paid them an extremely generous amount to ensure she does not. Enough to hire an extremely good security team, which a good friend of mine will be providing. Vera will be made comfortable for the rest of her life. But her passports are gone, as are her bank accounts. In fact, Vera Stevanovsky officially died yesterday. There’s even a funeral being held for her in London as we speak. Unfortunately, none of her grandchildren are able to attend, since they are still grieving the deaths of their mother and uncle. Everyone understands, of course.”

Yuri’s face crumples into a pinched, resentful scowl. “I had nothing to do with this. It was Vera—”

“Yerunda.”I cut him off brutally. “That is bullshit, Yuri. You’ve been planning this for years. You know it, and so do I. But that all ends today. Your grandchildren will never know the truth of what you did; I will spare them that. They will grow up surrounded by love and honorable men. People who won’t risk their lives or trade them to sadistic fucks for gain.”

“And you truly believe that bullshit?” He sneers at me across the table, all trace of surrender gone. This is Yuri the viciouspakhan, who built a business on the back of girls and drugs, and held it through torture and intimidation. “You truly believe you can take care of business in our world with all that touchy-feely bullshit, Roman? The truth is that your family won’t ever be safe. Not that Petrovsky slut you knocked up or the bastard she’s carrying. Her father will take everything you have. And her brother is a psychopath, from what I hear—”

This time, my laugh is genuine. “It’s funny you should mention psychopaths, Yuri.” I pour us both a shot of vodka and cover them with my hand. “Another psychopath, Zinaida Melikov, gave me a piece of advice a long time ago. She said I should ask myself why you took me in, what you had to gain. Do you want to know what else she said, Yuri?”

He stares at me, white-faced and silent.

“She said I should kill you before you got me killed. She told me that weak men die—and take others down with them.”

I slide his glass across the table. “Our world is dangerous, that much is true. But it is our job to protect our children from that world for as long as we can, and then to prepare them for it. That’s what good men do, Yuri. Weak men get greedy, and then they get caught. They abandon their children to wars that aren’t theirs and sell them out for money.

“Our world might be dark. It might be brutal. It might demand that we are able to be both brutal and dark when those things are required. But to survive that world, we need to be better than what surrounds us. Smarter. More honorable. We need to be a light that others follow, not the darkness that kills anything good.”

His mouth twists in contempt. “You sound like a fucking preacher, Roman, not apakhan.”

I smile coldly. “You forget, Yuri. The Bible is the most brutal book there is.An eye for an eye, for example.” I nod at his glass. “Drink.”

He makes no move to take the glass. “Here?” he says skeptically, looking around the bare concrete walls. “You think you can kill me here and just walk away from it? There’s no amount of money you could pay to make an entire prison guard look the other way. Weren’t you the one telling me I needed to be more careful?”

“But that was you, Yuri.” I touch the metal of my pistol, feel its comforting weight at my hip. “This is me, now. And I don’t have to be careful. Not here. Not anywhere. I don’t just own the guards. Or the warden. I own the men who own the prison. I own the men who they answer to. Let’s just say that in five minutes, I will walk out of here, and an entire prison of people will swear under oath that they’ve never so much as heard my name, let alone laid eyes on me.”

I nod at the glass again. “Za pososhok,”I say quietly.One for the road.

Yuri grabs the glass and tosses off the vodka.

“My father always taught me that it’s bad manners to offer a man a drink after that toast.” I raise the pistol. “So I won’t.”

I walk out of the prison ten minutes later, Yuri’s brains still sliding down the concrete wall.

Nobody says a fucking word.

45

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