Page 184 of Ruthless Sin
He’s alive.
My hand opens. Just for a second. The cross in my palm, the impression of it, the warmth of the wood. I close my fingers back around it.
He is alive and the man who killed Yelena is in that dining room and I am going to walk in there and name him.
I step off the boat onto the bank.
Renzo steps off beside me. He does not take my arm or lead. He walks at my left shoulder, slightly behind.
The cane field is in front of us. Past the cane, the oak alley. Past the alley, the house.
The man who killed Papa and Yelena and Mama and five years of my life is in the dining room.
Alive.
For not much longer.
I walk into the cane.
35
NICO
The front door of the main house goes down in one breath.
Marco’s team moves through it and I move with them and the front parlor opens before us and the two men in it are already down by the time I clear the threshold. I do not look at them. I look at the table by the wall. A soft-boiled egg in its cup, half-eaten. A spoon at the rim. A cup of coffee going cold. Chicory. The Bratva blend.
He was sitting here when we breached.
He heard us coming and he didn’t run.
That’s the first thing that is wrong.
The library is next. Weapons store now, the books replaced with cases. Two more of his men. Marco’s team has them before I reach the doorway.
I walk past without slowing. The corridor. Original wood floors, the boards loose in exactly the places Yelena said they would be loose. Yelena walked these floors. She mapped them in the Moscow safehouse, drunk on cheap vodka in the dark of the morning, telling me every board, every room, every sight line.
She got me here. She planned every step of this.
The corridor ends at the dining room door.
It is open.
I walk in.
The room is longer than I expected. The chandelier. The maps on the table. And then him, at the head of it, and my body goes very, very calm the way it does when something I have been bracing for finally arrives.
Alexei is at the head of the table.
Restrained. Alive. Silk robe over a white shirt and pants. The gray at his temples thicker than before. The hands bound behind the chair back. Two of Marco’s men at the corners of the room, one at the door.
The eyes have not changed.
That is the thing about Alexei Morozov. Everything else on a man changes. The face softens. The body slows. The voice loses certainty. His eyes have not changed in the years since I last stood in a room with him, and they are the same eyes that watched Yelena die and calculated, even then, exactly how much of what I was seeing he could use.
The smell hits me before I am ready for it. Damp stone and closed air, the concrete room flooding back, and I breathe through it before it takes me under.
In for four. Out for four. My hands are at my sides. My face is the Consigliere’s face. I have been wearing it since I was twenty-three years old and if I let it slip now, in this room, in front of this man, everything Yelena died for goes with it.
