Page 78 of Ruthless Sin
No.
No. It cannot be.
I go to my desk. I pick up the phone.
Izzy picks up on the first ring.
“I need a photograph,” I say. “Zakharov household. Saint Petersburg. Dmitri Zakharov, Bratva Pakhan, died approximately nine to ten years ago. His daughters. Both of them. Whatever you can pull from the intelligence files. Family photograph, surveillance, anything with faces.”
Silence on the line.
“Nico.”
“I know.”
“That’s the Zakharova bratva file.”
“I know what file it is.”
Another silence. Shorter.
“Why now.”
I watch the hallway where Mila’s footsteps went quiet.
“Three years ago I came home from Moscow and I told Dante the mission failed. I decided the younger sister was dead. Easier to carry dead than missing. Dead means the promise ended with Yelena. Dead means I didn’t spend three years failing a fifteen-year-old girl who got sold by her stepfather while I was sitting in New Orleans running protection rackets and eating Nonna’s food. I stopped looking. I need to know if I was wrong to stop.”
The silence on Izzy’s end is the longest she has ever given me.
“Nico.” Her voice is careful and quiet and full of something she is not going to say out loud. “How wrong do you think you were.”
I close my eyes.
“Send me the photograph, Iz.”
“Tonight,” she says. “Give me two hours.”
I hang up.
I sit at the desk.
I wait.
The photograph comes through at eleven.
The house is asleep. The kitchen light is on at its lowest. Somewhere upstairs a door is open. Hers or mine, I can’t tell from here, and I don’t go to check.
I open the photograph on my phone.
A family photograph. The kind that ends up in Bratva intelligence files when an organization is building a picture of a Pakhan’s household. A sitting room somewhere in Saint Petersburg. Formal. Backs straight, smiling, everything they are in every line of their bodies.
Dmitri Zakharov in the center.
A woman beside him I don’t recognize. The mother. She is smiling. So is he.
And the daughters.
Yelena on the left. Dark hair, sharp jaw, the eyes I watched go flat in a Moscow basement while a man who called himself her stepfather put a blade to her throat. I have been carrying her face for three years. I would know it anywhere.
