agathokakological
(adj.) composed of both good and evil
RONAN
Albert occupied the chair in front of my desk, his careful gaze and silence on my skin. He had a good reason to be cautious. It was a while since I’d been so angry my hands shook—three months exactly, when I found Pasha’s body mutilated by Mikhailov hands.
The irony of the situation was one of the reasons I’d forced myself to sit here and wait for the rage to cool before I shot my men one by one to find the traitor in our midst. The other reason . . . well, it made me a little nauseous. It was the idea Mila’s soft eyes were almost permanently snuffed out by a cup of tea. The burn in my chest whenever I thought of it reminded me of the time I fought for air in an old Volkswagen filled with icy water.
I wasn’t sure why I shared that story with Mila considering I didn’t even tell my brother after walking into our apartment later that night dripping water on the cracked linoleum floor. I didn’t often dwell on the past, but the odd sense of . . . relief Mila would live reminded me of my first breath after breaking my head through the surface of the Moskva.
“Where have you been?” Kristian asked me in Russian, pulling his gaze from the tiny TV with rabbit ear antennas that sat on the floor.
“Swimming,” I answered.
Momma was passed out in the apartment’s single bedroom. Dark hair covered her face, and an arm hung off the bed, a cigarette dangling from her fingers. I used to think she was pretty, but now, at eight, all I saw when I looked at her were burned silver spoons, empty eyes, and a heat in my gut that expanded further every day.
I grabbed the baggie of crack rocks off the table and flushed it down the toilet. There’d be hell to pay for that later, but I doubted it would be worse than another night of my momma smoking that stuff. It made her act crazy, and she’d say things that didn’t make any sense.
After I stripped out of my wet clothes, I plopped down on the stained mattress next to Kristian and stole the remote from him.
“You don’t know how to swim,” he said, keeping his eyes on the TV.
I flipped the channel. “Do now.”
“It’s March.”
My brother could be so annoying. He kicked me in his sleep, watched boring shows, and thought he knew everything. The fact he was mostly right irritated me even more. I’d also punch any kid who was mean to him. Momma’s friends were mean to him the most. They never bothered me, but still, sometimes, an angry red mist covered my eyes when they were here. Those men were too large for me to hurt now, but someday, I’d be big enough.
“Everything’s still frozen,” he said.
I wouldn’t admit I’d held onto a piece of ice until I reached the shore even if Kristian saw me at it. With a shrug, I said, “I got hot.” In fact, I was feeling a little sweaty from the shaky nerves and my cold skin. I wiped sweat from my chest onto his cheek. He glared at me and rubbed it off with a hand.
The room went silent, the dark room lit by the TV with a broken speaker. “We should go there,” he said to the TV, to a scene of New York City. “To America.”
I shook my head. “I want to stay here.”
His eyes came to me. “What are you gonna do, sleep on this mattress all your life?”
“No, dimwit, I’m gonna be like him.” I nodded to the TV as a political commercial came on.
“He’s the president,” Kristian said.
“I know.” I didn’t know that. I just liked the way he looked in expensive clothes, with an audience in front of him.
After a moment, he said, “You could be the president if you wanted to be.”
“I don’t want to be the president.” I rested a sweaty arm on his shoulders. “I’m gonna be something better.”
“Like God.”
The old lady next door invited me and Kristian over sometimes. We went for the tea and biscuits while she read us passages from the Bible. So many “thou shalt nots” and pointed looks over her glasses.
“Kind of like God,” I said, and after a moment of silence, a smile touched my lips. “But I’d rather be the devil.”
I took a drag from my cigar. My mother didn’t remember what she’d done until the police knocked on the door the next morning and asked why her car was in the Moskva. She talked—or, rather, fucked—her way out of it, and then she made me and Kristian syrniki. The decent meal was almost worth it.
“Viktor is questioning Anna,” Albert said.
I stared at him, not knowing who the fuck Anna was.
“The girl who’s been serving your meals for the past three years.”
“Ah,” I mused. “The little mouse.”
She was the most obvious suspect. Although, I had my doubts. I only needed to look in the girl’s general vicinity, and she’d tremble with fear. It annoyed me so much, I ignored her presence like she was a frightened, stray dog. If she poisoned Mila, she didn’t do it alone.
“How’s Mila?”
My eyes narrowed at the concern in Albert’s voice. “Alexei’s daughter is fine.”
Kirill was confident she didn’t ingest enough poison to be in a critical condition.
Thank fuck I called the girl a whore. Otherwise, she might not have destroyed the rest of the poison in her teacup, and I would have lost my collateral. But the thought of my revenge slipping through my fingers didn’t explain the tight sensation inside each time Mila’s look of betrayal flitted through my mind.
“You know she doesn’t belong here,” Albert said.
Darkness spilled through me. “You got a new mind-reading ability you haven’t told me about?”
“If Alexei hasn’t relented yet, he’s not going to.”
I held his gaze. I hadn’t told anyone but Kristian her papa was ready to trade himself in. The knowledge of that getting out would make me look weak, as if Mila had actually dug her Mikhailov claws into me. She hadn’t. I just wasn’t finished with her yet, and I knew if I let her go now, I would end up dragging her back to finish what we started. That felt too close to monogamy for me to stomach. Not to mention, it would probably be a much more difficult task to get her into my bed with her father’s head as a centerpiece on my table.
“We could have followed Alexander,” he told me.
“We didn’t need to follow him.”
He raised an annoying brow.
“Alexei will come to heel soon enough,” I said shortly, finished with the conversation.
“It would probably move things along if you sent him a finger or two.” He was baiting me. I wasn’t going to cut off Mila’s fingers, and Albert knew it.
“Go make yourself useful somewhere,” I said, eyes hard. “Like finding the fucking rat in my home.”
I swore, the bastard fucking smiled as he stood.
He hadn’t even stepped out of the room before we found the traitor. In fact, she threw herself at my feet and confessed in a flurry of Russian and tears. The little mouse was actually a rat. Viktor stood in the doorway. At least one of my men was making themselves useful.
I lowered my gaze to the trembling girl dripping tears to the floor. “I want names,” I said quietly. “The names of who helped you. The names of anyone who even heard a whisper of the conversation.”
“I—it was just me,” she cried.
“Look at me,” I demanded, and, rigidly, she lifted her gaze to mine. “You’re going to tell me the truth sooner or later. And the longer it takes, the more time my men will have to make good use of you.”
I really didn’t want to torture this slip of a girl, but I didn’t get to my position by being forgiving.
Anna swallowed, fighting an inward battle, and then she gave me three names. She didn’t say them with sadness or loyalty, but fear. The girl was afraid of her own shadow, so it didn’t mean much to me.
I nodded at Viktor. He grabbed the girl’s arm and dragged her from the room. Two of the men she’d named were here, the other—Abram, her papa—in Moscow.
Another annoying family affair.
Pasha wasn’t the only casualty instigated by Alexei’s hands. Abram’s uncle was killed last year in a hit-and-run. He was old enough he’d have probably died of heart failure if he got the chance.
“Find Abram,” I told Albert, who still stood by the door. “Put his son and nephew in the basement until then.”
Three hours passed, the sun high in the sky, before the four were lined up in the snow. The girl stood on the end, gaze to the ground, shaking in the basic white dress she wore every day.
“As I already told Albert, I didn’t have anything to do with it.” A drop of sweat ran down Abram’s face and glistened in the sun.
I raised a brow. “You don’t even know what you’ve been accused of, so how do you know you didn’t do it?”
“Because,” he sputtered, “I’ve been loyal to you from day one.”
“You want to know what I hate more than traitors?” I stepped closer to him, a gun lax in my hand. “Liars.”
“I’ve never lied to you.” His gaze flicked to the right exactly like a liar’s would. “Catch me in a lie, and I swear, I’ll let you shoot me in the head right here!”
“Hmm,” I drawled. “We’ll get to that.”
My eyes slid to the other two men, the son and nephew. One of them was just released from prison for raping a housewife. If I did background checks before recruiting, I wouldn’t have a single employee to my name, including myself. The men both flicked subtle glances at Abram, clearly the lackeys in his master plan.
“So you didn’t have anything to do with poisoning the Mikhailov collateral in my home?”
“What!” Abram had the audacity to act shocked. “Of course not!”
A dark chuckle escaped me. “Your acting skills could use some work.”
“I don’t know how I got wrapped up in the middle of this, but if it was the whore beside me who gave you our names, you should know, she’s just trying to take us down with her.”
“You mean, your daughter,” I corrected, gaze flicking to the girl who held her arm to her stomach like it needed support.
“She isn’t my daughter,” he spat. “Especially after this.”
I ignored the words. “Do you beat your daughter often?”
Something in my eyes made him lie again. “Nyet. She’s just a slut who likes it rough.”
I let the ridiculousness of his statement fill the air for a moment. My boots crunched in the snow as I walked toward the girl and stopped in front of her.
“Are you? A slut who likes it rough?”
She didn’t lift her eyes as she shook her head. Her papa’s face reddened, and then he kicked her leg, spitting an enraged accusation at her. With a whimper, she dropped to the ground. A hot rush of irritation expanded inside me. I kicked Abram’s knee so hard a crack sounded, and as he fell, my boot slammed into his face, planting him on his back in the snow. He groaned, blood spurting from his nose.
“If you do that to your daughter in front of me,” I growled, “I’d hate to see what you do to her behind closed doors.”
“I don’t do nothing to the girl!”
He’d just admitted his guilt with the double negative. I was growing a little more furious each second I continued to employ this man.
I lowered to my haunches in front of the girl who sat on her knees in the snow. “Who gave you the poison?”
Tears running down her cheeks, she flicked a frightful gaze to her papa for direction. She was terrified of him even now, with death on the horizon. Abram watched her with cruel eyes and a hand on his bleeding face.
“I—I did it alone,” she stammered.
“See! I told you.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Albert growled.
After putting my gun in my waistband, I ripped the girl’s dress open. Buttons fell to the snow. She sobbed, probably with the belief she’d be gang-raped to death. Her lack of bra wasn’t the most obvious sight. An assortment of old and fresh bruises covered her torso. One of her ribs looked inflamed, most likely broken, and bite marks marred her small breasts, some deep enough to be open wounds.
She might have been involved with the poisoning, but, clearly, she didn’t have much of a choice. Having been the underdog many, many years ago at my own mother’s hands, one could say I had a soft spot for the situation.
“Go,” I told her.
Her eyes lifted to mine, confusion within. After a second of staring at me, she stood, pulled her dress closed, and ran to the house.
“What the fuck?” Abram snarled. “She did this!”
I rose to my full height.
“She’s a whore! A lying whore!”
I aimed my gun at Abram’s head.
“Wait—” He didn’t get to finish whatever lie he was about to spew.
One after another, three pops cut through the air like a knife.
