Page 57 of Vows of Blood
“Thanks,” I tell the bartender and I walk out of the bar. Once outside, I pull out my cellphone to open the car service app. The screen changes in a flash. It’s my father.
“Hello,” I answer.
“You missed him,” he growls at me in Russian. “You missedandyou were almost caught?”
I have a couple of ways I can answer this. I wasn’t supposed to be there unless it was to kill him. After all, it was me that he gave the order to.
“And what the hell were you doing there anyway?” He goes on. “You could have sent Pavel or Dmitri to do this. Or better yet,Anya. She’s a better shot than all of you put together. Why would you try to do this yourself?”
“It wasn’t me,” I confess. He needs to know that we have a renegade among us. Better now that later. “Someone else acted without orders, Papa.”
He goes quiet for a moment. “No one would dare act without my explicit order. Or yours. Why are you trying to cast off the blame? Is it because they saw you and now know you were the one to try and take him out?”
“It wasn’t me, Papa.”
“Then why the hell would you be there in the first place? What other business could you have had with Tony Pecora?”
I was thinking I’d warn him to keep what happened from actually happening, that’s all.“I was on my way there,” I lie. Dammit. I know he always sees through me when I try to deceive him. It’s not getting through to him, though. “I just parked the car when I heard the commotion, so I got out to check to see if everybody’s all right. Then they came after me.”
He goes quiet, and I can already see the veins popping in his forehead in my mind’s eye. It’s a weak lie and we both know it. “Is that what you want me to believe?” he says slowly, like a screw turning. “My son, who I trained, let someone else get the drop on him? Is that the story you’re going with?”
An icy chill turns my already nauseous stomach. I can’t respond. Nothing I say can make this better.
“For your information,” he says, “Tony Pecora went to the nearest hospital for his injuries. You’d better hope that hedoesn’t make it. It might be the only thing keeping me from wringing your neck for fucking this up.”
A flash of anger rushes through me, but I clench my teeth to push it down.
“But make no mistake now, Alexei. We are at war with the Pecora family. I would suggest you head home and make sure your wife stays right where she is. Things might get dangerous for her if she’s on the streets today.”
That sounds like a threat and I don’t like it. Before I can stop myself, I say, “Are you threatening her?”
He chuckles, and it’s a low kind of sinister rumble. “In the old days, somebody would have to pay for this kind of fuck up. Fingers and toes might be lost. Sometimes, wives and children would come up missing.”
“This isn’t the old days,” I tell him.
“No. No, it’s not. Just the same, I would keep an eye on her right now. It would be a true tragedy if a stray bullet took another one from you.”
He hangs up before I can respond and I almost throw my phone. I grip it instead and kick the tire on my dead car. Then I take a few breaths and open that app for the car service.
No matter what, I need to get home to Isabella. Things are about to blow up.
21
ISABELLA
I’ve been sick since I came back from my dad’s house. I thought it was just nerves, but now I’m starting to think that maybe I might be coming down with something.
That would just be perfect. With everything going on, I don’t think I can afford being sick right now.
Or, I don’t know, maybe I can. At least if I’m sick, I’ll be in bed for a few days and Alexei won’t have to worry about my going off half-cocked. I’m sitting on the side of the toilet, my back against the cool tub ledge. I just heaved up my breakfast and maybe part of last night’s dinner. Maybe this is food poisoning. I’ll bet Alexei is somewhere sick as a dog right now.
I get up, rinse my mouth out, then brush my teeth. I’ll make myself some tea and get some rest and wait for Dad to call me when he’s somewhere safe. Maybe if Maxim and his people can’t find him, then this whole stupid thing will finally blow over.
I start to think about the story Anya told me about Maxim’s act of vengeance in the name of his older brother. He wiped out an entire family—criminal and otherwise—over her father’sdeath. Like, he committed a mini genocide in the name of honor or revenge or whatever. Even though Alexei swore he wouldn’t let harm come to me, now I’m starting to wonder if we’re all in danger over this. A man who would do something like that would be pretty hard to stand up to.
Alexei’s a big, brave man. I have no doubt that there are very few things in this world that can hurt him, truly. Maxim… well, he’s way scarier than my husband. Still, I had to try and warn my father. If something happened to him and I did nothing, well, I’d never forgive myself.
I hear the front door open as I turn off the water in the sink. Alexei’s home. I’m kind of hoping there’s some good news. Maybe he talked some sense into his father.
