“Good luck with that,” I said, smiling at the thought that someone in this mess was blissfully happy and in love. And I liked Clementine, his assistant/wife/ fiancée. It was kind of confusing, but it worked for them. “I’m probably going to make it an early night anyway,” I said. “Just head back to the apartment and crash.”
I ended the call on that little lie and headed out to my real destination.
My family thought they’d convinced me to come to LA to both lay low and also help them with their current problem with some street gangs who were obviously the puppets of someone much higher up the food chain. Mostly true.
Helping crush a new enemy was something I was happy to do, but I wasn’t just in LA right now to hide out from the Yakuza. Hell, they were rife in this massive city, just currently keeping a low profile. I had a good thing going in Tokyo, and I would still have been ignoring threats and gaining ground there, except that at the same time, my overly concerned daughter and nephew showed up to rescue me, and I woke up to find a joint bank account completely drained.
A little over a cool million gone without a trace. And only one other person had access to that account, so I knew who took it. The problem was, my longtime best friend and business partner was also gone without a trace.
What little I could find out led me to believe that Grigor Kanatova, a man I thought I could trust with my life, and certainly my money, was working with the Yakuza. Which meant he also wanted me dead. Not an easy pill to swallow. Once I learned that Grigor might have headed to LA, the fury had me on the next flight out with Rurik, Clem, and Sofiya, all of them believing I was doing what they wanted.
There was no reason to worry Sofiya further, or break her heart that someone she viewed as an uncle had completely screwed me over. Let them believe I was heading to safety instead of more problems, because this one couldn’t be ignored.
It wasn’t the money. If I had lost a mill to Grigor in an honest bet, I would have been laughing my ass off, biding my time to win it back. We went all the way back to the nursery together and had fought side by side. Money was important, yes. But not as important as loyalty and honor. In the Bratva, betrayal was worse than a bullet.
By stealing from me and joining forces with the Yakuza, Grigor had done worse than merely putting a slug of leadthrough my skull. And why? What for? I had come to LA to try to find out, and if there was no good answer, I was going to do what everyone in my family did when someone betrayed them.
It wasn’t easy nosing around with Sofiya hovering the last week, and I was heading to being pretty severely sleep deprived, but the lack of sleep and skulking around the city had paid off. Now I was certain the Yakuza was indeed involved with the war against my American nephews, and I suspected they were the ones actually pulling the strings. Which meant if Grigor was helping them, he wasn’t just stealing from me; he was putting my family in danger.
Not good. Not good at all.
With Sofiya insisting on being with me every waking moment while she stayed, I didn’t have much time, and I kept running into dead ends. Frustration and anger had led me to finally enlist a few of my nephews—Aleks was the head of the organization over here and had a right to know who he was fighting—and thanks to their intel, I finally had a location to stake out.
I arrived at the innocuous building, set at the end of a street on the outskirts of the busy downtown area. Nobody would look twice at the place, as anyone who had any reason to be in the area was trying to get into their own buildings as quickly as they could. The neighborhood wasn’t exactly what any real estate agent would call inviting.
Vagrants wandered around aimlessly about a block away, a scraggly, halfhearted tent encampment was set up further down the main boulevard. But the side road leading to this particular building was devoid of any pedestrians. The place was as locked down as Fort Knox, and I was careful to stay out of the range of cameras I’d spotted on the nearby fences and thefew shopfronts I suspected were also owned and operated by the Yakuza.
No one who didn’t belong got in or out of that building, and when I had the chance to stake it out, I had been carefully taking pictures of everyone I saw to add to my database. I even got lucky and was able to get a tracker on a car belonging to one of the top men, and had it set to alert me whenever it was heading this way.
I would have loved to get some answers from Riku Yoshida, the deadly and power-hungry eldest son of the crime family who put the original hit on me in Tokyo. There was no way that wasn’t connected to this little war they were stirring up with my family here, and now Grigor was involved and possibly making it easier for them with his vast knowledge of the Fokins.
Now that I had unfettered free time to gather information, I could get serious about nabbing the guy, but I had to be careful. I didn’t want to make things worse or involve my nephews more than I already had. Riku was well guarded and dangerous as hell, even when he wasn’t. Underestimating him would make me break my promise to Sofiya, and that wasn’t going to happen.
God, stakeouts were hell, worse since I was operating on little sleep. My family was treating my visit as a vacation, and even while we were fending off attacks, we were going to my nephews’ many clubs and restaurants. As much as I loved meeting the newest generation and doting on all their kids, I meant to cut that out now and get serious.
My eyes were drifting shut when something red caught my eye at the opposite corner where I had parked. I jerked to attention and gaped at what I saw. Blinked, rubbed my eyes, andlooked again as the vision headed toward little Fort Knox at the end of the short side road.
No fucking way she was here right now. But even though I hadn’t seen her in more than a year, there was no doubt in my mind who I was looking at.
Tatiana Kanatova, Grigor’s only child, was sashaying toward the Yakuza headquarters like she belonged, her petite figure wrapped up way too tightly in a red blouse and ridiculously short black skirt. She tossed her long, dark chestnut hair behind her shoulder, causing the shiny fabric of her top to cling to her lush curves.
I blinked a few more times, but she didn’t disappear, and why would I be dreaming up Grigor’s daughter anyway, even if I fell asleep while on watch? This was the last fucking thing I needed, and now that I was certain it was her, my fury at Grigor doubled.
Why the hell was Tati here right now? Didn’t she know whose territory this was? It seemed she did as she stopped when the guard came out the door. I trained my binoculars on his face. His wary look disappeared as his eyes slid down her body. My hands clenched around the binocs, and I swore under my breath. When did she get so damn gorgeous?
Tati and Sofiya had gone to school together, but since they were complete opposites, they hadn’t been very close friends. Grigor’s daughter was shy, unassuming, a bit of a mouse, usually keeping to herself even when she was invited to one of Sofiya’s parties. Grigor was determined from the day she was born to keep her out of the Bratva life, even more so when his wife was murdered when she was six.
She didn’t know shit about what we did, so why was she flirting with the guard at the Yakuza’s stronghold in a citythousands of miles from her home? Was everything an act? Grigor’s friendship, Tati’s disavowal of the Bratva?
I scowled, still muttering low curses as I watched her throw her head back and laugh while she reached out to touch the guard’s arm. I stiffened, expecting her to end up on the ground or in a chokehold, but the guard only laughed along with her.
Did they know each other? There was no way. Not sweet, innocent Tati, who blushed beet red when anyone looked at her for more than two seconds.
My phone pinged, and I ignored it until it made the distinctive noise again, pulling me out of my trance of trying to figure out why the hell Grigor’s sheltered daughter was dressed up like a freaking bombshell and practically hanging all over one of Riku Yoshida’s guards.
Fucking hell. That was the alert attached to the tracker on Riku’s car. I dropped the binoculars and pulled up the map to find out that he was less than a mile away. Within minutes, he was going to drive around the corner to that secluded street and lay eyes on Tatiana.
It was easy to determine that she had no one with her. I had the best hiding spot in the area, and there were no other places for guards to hang back, no matter how well-trained and discreet they might be. Tati was on her own here, but why? Why the hell would Grigor put her in such danger?