Manuel adjusts the phone closer to his mouth, breathing heavy into the other line. “Do you know where my daughter is?”
What a fucking joke. He is a vile cunt of a man, and if there wasn’t inches of glass between us, I would jam this phone through his skull until his brains decorated the floor.
He wants to play stupid, so I’ll humor him for now.
“You tell me, Manuel.”
He closes his eyes and sighs. “I can’t believe she would do this to me. It’s you. You have turned her against me.”
I silently pick apart his words, attempting to find logic in them. But I know that it can’t be right. He can’t be implying what I think he is.
“A fucking rat. My own daughter.” His mood swings from violent to hysterical in the span of two seconds.
“Are you trying to tell me that Tanaka flipped?”
He levels me with vacant eyes. “It’s fucking Gianni. My own man. I trusted him, and he was a goddamned fed. He’s been playing me all along. They both have.”
My fingers turn white around the receiver as Manuel comes unraveled on the other side of the barrier. He’s losing his mind, but there is still some substance to what he’s telling me. I just don’t want to believe it.
I tap on the glass. “Pull yourself together. I need to know where she is, Manuel. Who took her?”
“Fucking Gianni,” he roars. “It has to be him.”
I shake my head. It can’t be right. He’s out of his mind. He’s delusional.
“You’re next,” he says. “She will flip on you too.”
“That won’t happen.” Tanaka wouldn’t turn on me. Or maybe it’s only what I want to believe.
“You know what you have to do,” Manuel tells me. “I can’t pay the debt. The feds took everything, so you have to take it from her. I just beg of you, be merciful.”
I smile at him through gritted teeth. “As merciful as you were to my mother? You remember her, don’t you?”
He blinks, unsettled, and I can see the gears turning in his mind. He is trying piece together which one she was, but I’m content to remind him.
“Irina Lemeza.”
The color drains from his face, and his palm comes to rest on the glass, sticky and desperate. “No.”
“Yes, Manuel.” I lean toward him. “You know the Russians are fond of an eye for an eye. I know you worry about your daughter, but there’s no need. She won’t be the one to pay the debt. I think for once in your life, it’s time to do the honorable thing, don’t you?”
“Nikolai is here to see you,” Magda says.
Alexei is slumped against his desk, drunk again. And though I have spent the past four weeks helping him slaughter every man he deemed remotely responsible for his wife’s death, it has done nothing to ease his pain.
It has, however, come as a welcome distraction while I seek out Nakya.
“Send him away,” Alexei murmurs.
“Too late.” I step into his office so that he can see me. “I have something I believe you will want to see.”
His eyes move to the drive in my hand, and for the first time in weeks, there is a spark of life inside him. He takes my offering and rouses the computer from sleep, bringing up countless images of his wife on the wall-to-wall monitors.
Alexei glances at the images, haunted, and breaks down all over again. I take it upon myself to bring up the surveillance video from the club. The same video of the day he was humiliated in front of his Vory brothers. When it begins to play, he makes an effort to watch.
“I had Mischa look at it.” I bring the cursor to a time stamp on the screen and click on it. “It’s on a loop. Whoever it was knew what they were doing. They were fast, and they came prepared.”
“How long?” he asks.
“Thirty seconds maximum. You couldn’t have noticed it, Lyoshka. It was very well edited.”
He falls back into his office chair as reality settles over him. Someone wanted him to believe it was Talia who betrayed him, but in truth, it was one of his own Vory.
I take a seat across from his desk. “There is something else.”
“What is it?”
“Katya’s guard mentioned that she visited a security store a few months back. He didn’t know what she purchased but found the trip out of character for her.”
“Then we need to talk to her.” Alexei nearly stumbles over himself as he tries to stand.
I signal him to sit back down. “I already tried. She was found dead this morning, bratan. Hanging from a rafter in her ceiling.”
Alexei flops back into his seat and reaches for the bottle of cognac, only to realize that it’s empty.
“She wasn’t working alone,” I tell him. “Someone is cleaning up loose ends. Katya is not smart enough to set up that slideshow, and she was not in the building that day.”
My words settle over Alexei like a dark cloud, and it doesn’t take him long to draw the same conclusion I have. He sinks back, eyes darkening as he utters the name we have both come to hate.
“Sergei.”