Page 143 of Boardroom Ties
The public defender mutters to me, “Sorry. We’ll appeal. We can… Well. We’ll see what we…” He doesn’t finish the thought before he’s shuffling around in place and flipping over to the next file in his stack.
The ADA clicks her tablet closed with a satisfied little snap. A bailiff puts a hand on my elbow and starts to guide me to another set of doors.
I twist my neck. Dani is on her feet, both her hands clapped over her mouth. Her eyes are spilling over and she is mouthing something at me that I cannot quite read.I’m here,maybe. OrI love you.OrI’m sorry.
All of them. Or none of them. Doesn’t change much either way. Besides, the bailiff is turning me before I can be sure.
Even though I know it’s a useless exercise, I still can’t stop myself from scanning the pews one last time as the bailiff spins me away. I find exactly what I expected to find: nothing.
No Matvei.
No dark coat in a back row.
No blue eyes burning at me from a corner.
No tall, still figure leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, watching, waiting, ready,here.
The courtroom doors swing shut behind me, and the last thing I see before they fully close is Dani—my Dani, my Danny Banany, the only person in this whole rotten city who has ever lovedme without an ulterior motive—sinking back down into the pew, alone in a row with room for two.
44
MAT
Afon and I go straight from the hospital to a meeting with Lukas and Kir. Lukas wanted me to rest before we met to plan next steps, but Susan’s murder—because that’s what the fuck it was, even if no one on the right side of the law will ever acknowledge it as such—has accelerated things.
We don’t have time for me to enjoy some undeserved R&R right now.
We need to fuckingact.
We pull into the underground garage at the Lazarev tower and take the private elevator up. Lukas keeps a conference room on the fiftieth floor that he uses for conversations he doesn’t want noted on a calendar. Kir is already there when we walk in, sleeves rolled to the elbow, with a grim scowl on his face.
Lukas, by contrast, is expressionless. The man has always been ice, and just because he’s now happily married doesn’t mean he walks around smiling all the time.
Especially not when things are this serious.
He’s seated at the head of a long walnut table by the window, his silver beard glistening in the fluorescent light overhead. He gestures at the two chairs across from him. “Sit,” he orders.
I take one chair and Afon takes another. I wince when I start to lower myself down and my ribs bark back at me. I have purposefully ignored my body over the last dozen hours. It’s no use dwelling on pain or senses when your hands are cuffed behind your back and there’s a canvas hood over your head, so I just turned off my awareness of those things while I thought and brooded.
Now, though, my body is demanding that I pay attention to it, because it’s fuckingpissed.My neck and face throb from being pressed into the floor of Raymond’s apartment by two hundred and fifty pounds of angry NYPD SWAT officer.
But I set that aside once again.
Across the table from me sits thepakhanof the Lazarev Bratva. He’s always been an aloof figure to me—furious and unapproachable in the old days, still somewhat mysterious now, like a mountain that prefers to hide its face in the clouds.
To his right is Kir, my best friend since he was a scrawny, wide-eyed kid whose mother had just been buried. He looks more like his dad than ever these days. It’s less of a physical resemblance than it is a similar aura they carry around themselves.
“We’re waiting,” Kir drawls. “This is the first time since I met you that you didn’t start talking right away.”
“The gift of gab hasn’t done me any favors lately,” I grumble.
Lukas doesn’t react to the joke, for which I can’t blame him, because it isn’t particularly funny. He simply folds his scarred hands on the table and waits.
So, after cracking my knuckles, I start talking.
I lay it out for them more or less the way I laid it out for Afon under the overpass, except shorter and cleaner, with the personal parts shaved off at the edges. Raymond. Vainakh. The Crispin. Bill in the woods, half a sentence shy of telling me something useful. The gas leak that wasn’t. The penthouse murder thatwas,but not by me. And, just now, Susan.
The stack of bodies is growing ever higher. I’d like very much to keep Cass’s off of the peak.
