Page 124 of Cruel Kiss

They get just the receipt. Nothing more.

"It's true," I say.

Sergei's mouth drops open again. One of the older captains slumps back in his chair, stunned.

I keep my eyes on Cali as I say the rest.

"My father put my mother in the ground. Slowly, over the course of years, so no one would call it what it was: murder by abuse. I watched her get smaller until there was nothing left. And then one night I put him in the ground, too." I don't blink. I don't look away from her. "I've never lied to this family. Not once, in twenty years. And I'm not going to start for Lev."

The warehouse is dead quiet. The lights swing on their chains and throw the shadows back and forth across the floor.

Lev's smile has come back, wider now, triumphant, because he thinks I've just handed him the crown on a silver platter. Heturns to the captains and spreads his hands, a man resting his case.

"There," he says. "From his own mouth. He confesses. Now, you know your law. You?—"

"How much did he skim?"

Lev stops. He turns.

It's Cali who spoke. She's not looking at Lev, though.

She's looking at the old man in the folding chair.

"Pyotr," she murmurs in her gentle mother's voice, the one she uses on Isabella when the dark gets big. "That's your name, right? Pyotr. You kept the books. I know how that works; it's what I do for a living, too." She takes one step toward him, slowly, so the men in the shadows don't get twitchy. "You just heard me lay out eight things about Crosby Hess skimming off this organization. You buried those numbers, or somebody did. You'd know if I got them right."

Pyotr lifts his head.

"You'd know all the numbers," Cali says. "Wouldn't you? Every dollar. Where it went. Who took it. That's what Lev wanted you for. Not to tell an old story about a boy. He wants you to run the machine in your head, the one nobody else can see." She tilts her head. "He's been telling everyone he holds the keys to the kingdom. But he doesn't.Youdo. He just holdsyou."

Something moves behind Lev's eyes. The first crack.

"Don't answer her," he roars. "Pyotr, look at me! You don't?—"

"He fed me," Pyotr says.

His voice is a rasp, thin from disuse or from screaming, I don't know which. But it carries.

"On that chair," he says, and he means the one from before, though there's no chair like it now. "In this room. My daughter, my grandchildren… He gave me a marker and my life and told me to leave the country and never call." His clear eyes hold mine. "I did as I was told. I got as far as Istanbul." He stops. His hands are shaking in his lap. "Then Lev's people came through the door."

"Pyotr," Lev barks.

The old man ignores him. He keeps talking to me, and only to me.

"Lev wanted the numbers," he says. "So they took me and they hurt me and they said if I gave them what they wanted, I could still have my quiet ending." A dry, terrible laugh. "I'm too old to believe that. But they were going to hurt me until I gave it, and then hurt me anyway, so." He shrugs. "I gave them a little. Enough to keep the beatings spaced apart. I know how to do that. I've been buying myself out of rooms my whole life."

Lev is starting to get red in the face. "Pyotr,enough?—"

"You want to know a number?" Pyotr says. Now, finally, he turns his head and looks at Lev. There's forty years of fear in the look, and beneath that fear, there's rage. "Here is one."

And then the old man starts to talk.

He doesn't need a screen. He doesn't need Cali's laptop. He just closes his eyes and recites, in that thin, cracked whisper, a flood of numbers. Dates, amounts, shell corps. A dry cleaner in Bay Ridge that never washed a shirt, a marina in Red Hook thatnever held a boat, a percentage skimmed off the top of the gun money going back not just under me but under Igor. He tells the room where it went, and who took it. He unveils Crosby's skim, and then the second one that Crosby was a servant for.

Lev's.

"Lev Abaturov has been stealing from the Bratva for thirty years. Crosby worked for him. He is a parasite on our backs, and it's long past time that we plucked him off and threw him out."

The room has turned. I feel it go over, all Lev's support draining away.