Page 82 of Devious Kingpin
I locked eyes with the Pakhan. My gut warned me there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“Spit it out, Illias.”
“The deaths of both men happened to take place on the days that your wife met them.” He dropped the bomb, the insinuation clear in his voice. “And no, I’m not stalking your wife. I had one of my men dig up a list of any individuals that these men came in contact with over the last two years. Your wife’s name was the only one that was common to both men. She met Brandon Dole in New York. That same night, he was murdered. The same thing happened with the other.”
A memory flickered in my mind. That day I watched her through the window of a cafe in Central Park having lunch with Brandon Dole. Did she kill him the same night?
“Did her brother meet them too?” I demanded to know.
“No. She met them both alone.”
A secured file came through to my phone and I opened it. Gruesome images flooded my phone. Flesh skinned. Limbs cut. Blood painting every single inch of the surface and then an image caught my attention.
A drawing of a dick in blood on the single window of the makeshift torture chamber.
It was the same exact drawing Juliette had left on my grandfather’sHudson Convertible Coupe.
CHAPTER35
Juliette
The next day, I browsed the information that Kian had emailed me while seated comfortably in Dante’s living room. Correction, our living room. It was our home. I texted Dante a few times asking whether it was okay if I used this or that but then he had reminded me it wasourhome.
“Do whatever you want to do inourhome,” he had texted back more than once.
So that was exactly what I was doing, relaxing in our living room. I’d earned some downtime. I sliced up the man I killed and he vanished without a trace. Burned to ashes. Poetic really, if you thought about it.
It was important to get rid of the evidence, although I had no doubt that Sofia Volkov would know her guy was gone. That woman was a mystery. It was impossible to get to her. I suspected that even when all the names on the list were eliminated, she’d still be out there somewhere.
Hiding. Living.
I reached for the remote and turned the television on. It defaulted to the last channel watched. The news channel. Just as I was about to switch it,Breaking Newsflashed on the bottom half of the screen. The newscaster went over the details of a gruesome body found. Tortured. Mutilated. Unrecognizable. A glimpse of a crime scene that turned even my stomach.
I looked away, hoping the body belonged to an evil person. I hated the idea of someone innocent experiencing something so brutal. I could stomach bad guys being tortured, but the good ones—it broke me every single time.
Letting the news play in the background, I returned my attention to my phone and reread Kian’s email for the fifth time. It was business as usual. No inclination that we’d met. Which led me to believe he didn’t know it was me back in Vegas.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that he didn’t have the information on the rest of the men who caused my parents' untimely death.
I wasn’t really sure why it was so important to me that I handled them all. Maybe I wanted to see justice served. It was hypocritical considering Liam, my adoptive father, was part of the underworld, but he didn’t kill innocent women and children nor burn them alive.
Our parents died. My brother and I lived.
It fell on us to avenge them.
Since I’d learned of our history, sometimes I wondered if my brother’s scars ran even deeper than I could fathom. He was good at keeping it all hidden. For the first twenty-one years, Killian hid all his demons so well that I never connected the dots. But now, I could see them.
The nightmares. His hatred of fire.
He didn’t exactly fear fire, but it fucked with him. Kind of like having a man on top of me fucked with my head. It was a panic and terror that rendered you immobile.
I wondered how Killian handled his trauma. Duh, I knew. By keeping himself separated from everyone and everything. He hid it all under his cold exterior, but underneath it all, I knew the embers burned just as hot as the flames that killed our parents.
Beep. Beep.
The news pulled my attention back to the television. “The body has been identified,” the blonde newscaster announced, her tone full of suspense. “It is none other than Travis Xander…”
