Chapter Thirteen
BAD EGG
I can’t sleep— my brain is far too crowded with thoughts to power down for the night, despite the fact that Conor is snoring softly beside me. His face is the picture of exhaustion. There are deep circles beneath his eyes and a tension that never fully leaves him, even in sleep.
Not wanting to disturb him with my restless tossing and turning, I slowly untangle my naked limbs from his and slip out of bed. I grab his shirt off the floor and tug it over my head, smiling as his scent washes over me. Breathing it in like a drug. I smile even wider as I remember the moment I ripped it off his body earlier, when we stumbled into the bedroom after dinner.
He made for a delicious dessert course…
I walk out of the bedroom and shut the door behind me with a soft click, grinning at the thought. Passing through the dark living room, I make my way to the kitchen and flick on a light. My eyes widen when I see the state of it.
When I suggested cooking dinner together earlier, I figured it would be a fun way to pass the time while waiting for an update on the Petrov situation. I didnotforesee our foray into homemade pasta-making would descend into a full-on food fight, complete with spattered egg yolk grenades and hurled handfuls of flour — most of which has now congealed into a sticky, lumpy mess that coats the floor, the countertops, the walls. Even some of the ceiling.
What a mess.
It’s going to take a small eternity to clean. Still… it was worth it. I laughed more today with Conor than I did in a decade with Paul. And after our fight this afternoon, it was refreshingly normal to simplyhang out. Like a real, actual couple, rather than two people thrown together in a high-stakes game of Russian roulette, running for our lives. It was almost as if the gods smiled upon us, as though someone up there decided to grant us a one-day-furlough from the madness of our situation.
Thank you, I toss vaguely upward into the great unknown, not even sure who I’m speaking to.For giving us today. And… for giving me him.
Shaking my head at my uncharacteristic show of faith, I grab a roll of paper towels and a bottle of bleach spray, then set to work scrubbing down the disaster zone that used to be a kitchen.
* * *
By the timethe kitchen is clean, it’s well past midnight and my arms are aching from hours of swabbing the decks. I collapse onto the couch in the living room with a deep sigh. I don’t want to risk waking Conor by turning on the TV, but I know any attempts at sleep will be useless.
I’m still too wired.
My curious eyes slide to the files on the table. Before I can talk myself out of it, I pull one into my lap and start to read. And thus begins my proper education on the life of Alexei Petrov.
I read about his childhood in an orphanage outside Moscow, where he and his sister Ekaterina were placed together after the death of their parents. I read about his wild teenage years on the street, how he fought his way up from a skinny runt of the litter to the top dog of the most notorious gang in the city. I read about his first forays into the criminal underworld, running drugs and weapons over the Ukrainian border for an aspiring mafia boss he would one day surpass in both power and ruthlessness.
From what I can tell, his rise through the underbelly of the Bratva was damn near meteoric. By the time he was thirty, Alexei Petrov — a street rat from the gutters of Moscow — was the most feared man in all of the city. Maybe all of Russia. His lack of anything resembling a conscience was well-documented and highly effective when it came to eliminating his existing enemies and preventing new ones from cropping up. Few challenged him for control of his ever-expanding crime syndicate… and those who did were simply never heard from again.
Honestly, it has all the makings of a classic coming-of-age novel. An origin story for one of the world’s biggest super-villains.
Keep your pretentious Russian literature, your Tolstoy and your Dostoevsky… the story of Alexei Petrov is far more interesting than anything I’ve read in ages.
My eyes devour file after file, stunned by the level of detail. It’s excruciatingly thorough. Decades worth of research. A million facts and figures and anecdotes, all at my fingertips.
It’s the ultimate binge-read.
And I’m undeniably hooked.
I learn about Alexei’s propensity for expensive prostitutes and fancy hotels. I even learn about his favorite food —borscht, how very proletariat of you, Alexei— and his favorite place to vacation —a villa on the Baltic Sea— and the name of his first two wives —both, coincidentally, called Natasha.
By the time I reach for one of the last folders in the stack, my eyes are drooping closed. Deciding to call it quits and head to bed before I go blind, I toss the folder back onto the table. Thanks to my halfhearted aim, it skids off the top of the pile and hits the floor instead, exploding in a flurry of papers and photographs.
Damn it to hell.
Heaving a heavy sigh, I bend to pick up the scattered contents and start shoving them haphazardly back into the folder, vowing to reorganize them first thing in the morning using more care. I’m rising to my feet when I see one last sheaf has fluttered to a stop beneath the legs of the coffee table.
Dropping back to my hands and knees, my fingers close around a glossy black and white photograph. I glance fleetingly at the picture as I prepare to shove it away, expecting yet another image of a suspected mob-hit, some bloody crime scene or gruesome murder.
Instead, I see something highly unexpected.
Something that sends my pulse spiking like a seismograph in the middle of an earthquake. Something that makes absolutely no sense at all… and yet, somehow, provides the exact solution I’ve been searching for all this time. The answer to the question we’ve been asking ourselves over and over and over for the past week, like a riddle with no remedy.
Here is the remedy.