Page 73 of Till Death Do Us Part

“Why did you come all the way down to San Diego,” I asked, “and fuck with us? You should have stayed farther north.”

A few more taps of the keys and Rei brought up a picture of an apartment building. He showed it to Danill. “If you want her to live, you’ll talk.”

“I don’t trust you. You will kill her either way.”

His English had remarkably improved.

“You don’t have to believe us,” I said. “She’s dead if you don’t talk. That’s a promise. If you talk, we might let her work here at the club.”

Danill pulled against the bindings. “I’ll fucking kill every one of you.”

A laugh bubbled from my throat. “Do you think we should be kinder to women? That’s rich coming from the man who would have killed two innocent women if you hadn’t been stopped.” Andrés’s wife, Valentina, and his daughter Camila were both home during the invasion. I picked up my knife, walked to Danill, and aimed the tip under his chin as I’d done earlier to the guard. “Did you know that? Did you know you were ordered to kill an old and a young woman?”

With his chin held high, Danill shook his head.

“Liar,” I said, slicing across his neck, not deep enough to cause real damage.

Danill growled, letting out a breath and trying to assess his minutes of survival. “I follow orders. They said to scare, not kill.”

“Whose orders?”

“Pakhan’s.”

Now we were getting somewhere.

ChapterNineteen

Aléjandro

Now to learn from this piece of shit where this boss was hiding. “Kozlov?”

He nodded. “I can’t say more.” Snot and blood dripped from his nose. “Kira. They will kill her if they find out I gave up information.”

“Maybe you should have considered that,” I said, “before getting involved with Kozlov.” The truth was that Danill probably didn’t have any choice in his recruitment into the bratva. His fuck-up was attacking the Ruizes. Stay in the bratva’s territory.

The grown man alternated between curses and tears. The sadness wasn’t about physical pain. I could have chopped off his leg, and he wouldn’t tell the bratva’s secrets. It was the threats we made against his wife.

Vile.

Hideous.

Disgusting threats.

Four and a half hours after beginning our interrogation, we had Ivan Kozlov’s address in Hidden Hills. The bratva was doing well for him to have a home in such an affluent neighborhood. It was a drivable trip, but with weekday traffic, it would take us about three hours.

So much for getting back to my wife anytime soon.

“It’s going to be a long fucking day,” I said as we left Danill still breathing under Wanderland. If his information didn’t pan out, we’d need him conscious to extract more. Of course, that would involve a stop on our way back to get Kira Ivanov.

Seeing her picture, I had no doubt Nicolas would want her for the club. She’d bring in a line of cartel men waiting to fuck a Russian whore. It might be a better outcome than the bratva learning her husband narked.

The Russian cunt wasn’t my concern. Followingmi padre’sorders was.

Laying my head against the seat, I closed my eyes as Diego drove us to the hideout near the boatyard. Less than twenty-four hours ago I was upstairs being treated by the cartel doc. Today, with my arm throbbing, we were picking up a van packed with plastic totes. Thankfully, Em, Nick, and their soldiers had already followedmi padre’sdirections. The men’s bodies were chopped into pieces and placed inside the totes, ready to be distributed around Ivan Kozlov’s forty-million-dollar mansion in the mountains.

“You know his place is guarded,” Rei said as the four of us drove north toward Hidden Hills. “We could be walking into a trap.”

The permeating odor throughout the van was one of rotten eggs combined with rotting meat. Shouldn’t the plastic totes keep the stench inside?