Page 114 of Cruel Kiss
"Now," I say quietly, "you're going to tell me what's happening next. What Lev is actually doing."
"He's called askhodka."
Oh, goddammit.
Of course he wants to make this a nasty public affair.
"A formal Bratva sit-down," Crosby goes on, in case I've forgotten, which I sure as fuck haven't. "With the captains as jury. He's putting you on trial, Ronan, in front of your own men. He intends to accuse you of being a rat, forsaking the Bratva, killing Todd Bradshaw, exiling Pyotr… He's got all the frames ready. And he says—" Crosby swallows. "He says he's got one more thing. Something thatends you.His words. That when he lays it in front of the captains, there won't be a man in that room who'll stand for you."
I understand, instantly, exactly what Lev has. Pyotr, frightened and cornered and squeezed, would have given it up to save his own skin. It'll end me, not with a bullet but with a single declaration laid on a table in front of the men who decide whether I live.
Crosby doesn't understand it. I can see that on his face—he's just repeating what he was told, a courier to the last. He thinks it's some ledger, some laundering trail, some ordinary damning thing.
It isn't.
But I don't say so. I close the folder.
"Grigor," I say. "Mr. Hess is coming with us. Alive, comfortable, and in one piece. Itemize everything he knows and everything he's said. He's going to be very useful to me before this is done."
Crosby's head comes up. "You're not?—"
"No," I say. "I'm not my father, and you're not worth a shallow grave. You're going to sit somewhere quiet and remembereverything you've ever forgotten, and when the time comes, you're going to say it out loud in front of the right people."
Grigor takes him gently by the arm. Crosby goes without a fight, robe and slippers and all, a founding partner of The Akov Firm shuffling out his own front door into the dark.
I stand alone in his study for a moment with the folder in my hand and collect myself. Outside, the sky over Brooklyn has started to brighten. The color of an ordinary morning, even though today is anything but ordinary.
In the briefcase in my office, there's a letter that spells all this out. I never intended for it to get revealed like this, but a receipt is a receipt, and the final one in my life was always going to come due sooner or later.
I guess now is that time.
Fuck it.
Then I straighten my collar. Crack my knuckles. Then I stride out to get ready for war.
33
CALI
Ronan comes home just after six. I'm at the kitchen island where I've been since he left, the coffee gone cold in front of me, the casseroles still crowding the counter. I hear the vault door open and shut, hear him lock it, and then he's standing in the doorway gazing down at me, dark eyes clouded over.
"Well?" I ask.
He sighs. "It's complicated."
"That's what I do best."
He sits and fills me in on everything. He tells me all about Navi's secret folder, centered around a name I've heard exactly twice: Crosby Hess, his senior partner, the man who set the whole thing in motion by asking Ronan to meet Todd. He tells me Crosby was in the conference room at Whitmore Stearns when I laid my whole life out on a screen. Hewasthe leak. He had firm access, so he could pull real case numbers and forge a badge that almost worked. He wrote the codes that pulled the men off my house the night a man came up my stairs.
That's a lot to process. I have to sit for a second and think through how insane it all is. We've been looking in all the wrong places. We should've started with the obvious one: the beginning.
"Where is he now?"
"Grigor has him." Ronan rubs his face. "But he's not much good to us right now anyway. Lev's called askhodka."
"A what?"
"It's Bratva code for a formal sit-down. The captains form a jury and decide the next course of action for the organization. Basically, he's putting me on trial in front of my own men. The charges are pretty damning and pretty extensive. Rat. Traitor. Coward. Todd's murder, Pyotr's exile. He's got a story for all of it. And one more thing he says ends me."
