Chapter 14

Emma

Half an hour later, I was starting to think we wouldn’t find anything incriminating or useful in Uncle Charles’s office. I had gone through file after file on his computer and found nothing that I could point at and say for certain that it was illegal or shady.

Meanwhile, Viktor had gotten very involved in some of the financial and real estate paperwork my uncle had left behind. I wasn’t quite sure why, but he kept glancing through those printouts and mailings and sometimes setting them aside, instead of putting them back. It was a small, thin stack, but getting larger.

At first, I was worried that he would punish me somehow if I didn’t find anything. He talked a big game about being honorable, and I was attracted to him, but neither of those things would stop him from doing us harm if he decided to.

But he hadn’t so far, and I couldn’t search through ten years’ worth of computer files while both shaking with fear and distracted by his nearness. Despite how he had come into my life, I couldn’t help but find Viktor likable, and given he seemed to be a man of his word I had to believe that he meant me no harm. I didn’t exactly convince myself to trust him, but I did manage to talk myself into putting my worries aside so I could do the work.

Ten minutes later, I stumbled on something strange. “That’s weird.”

I heard Viktor turn around. “What is it?”

“I’m seeing a lot of references to files that don’t actually exist on this computer.” I started looking around the desk, opening the drawers and poking through them.

“What does that mean?”

“Very likely it means that he’s keeping some of his files on removable storage. A thumb drive, a portable hard drive, maybe an SD card.” I kept looking. “Apparently he’s just a little more competent with computers than I thought.”

“Not too competent, I hope. His hard copies may help narrow down his location, but I haven’t run across any addresses. Or criminal confessions.”

I looked up at him with a slight frown. He was one to talk about crime. “I would have thought it was actually pretty rare for someone to leave evidence like that lying around, just for the taking. Right now, I wish it wasn’t.”

He nodded, then got up and walked around the desk, running his hands underneath its top surface and checking the back. “Let’s see if he hid it someplace.”

I nodded and started taking out the drawers, searching for false bottoms or hidey holes, I looked between his blotter and his desk, and inside his desk organizer, but found nothing. We rummaged around for another five minutes like that, until finally Viktor said, “Aha!”

He pulled away a section of desk trim that was loose, revealing a small cavity where a thumb drive rested. “I believe this may be what we were looking for,” he said as he held it up.

I smiled with relief. “Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

***

After thirty minutes of scrolling through files, what we had, were records going back so far that some of them were literally scanned copies of paper documents. The dates stretched back to when I had been a child. There were copies of our legal guardianship paperwork, amid a flurry of legal documents that I had to scroll through carefully. “It looks like he was in some kind of legal battle after my parents’ death.”

A frown deepened on my face as I read on. Viktor had gone quiet. After a few more moments of reading, I felt myself go cold.

“Oh God,” I mumbled, my heart beating fast.

“What is it?” He moved in next to me, eyes scanning the screen.

“It says here my parents’ will left everything to me and my sister. Every penny. He contested the will. At length. But they had been very careful about how they worded it, and he fought a long time and lost.”

My throat tightened. My parents’ estate came to over five hundred million dollars in early nineties money. Money that was supposed to be mine and my sister’s.

“Once he lost the suit...” I started clicking through to other documents. “That’s when he started working on the adoptions. Me, my sister, he- he never told us that was our money. He just took it and used it. And he got to because he was our legal guardian.”

My heart hurt as my brain did the math. Viktor saw the look on my face and glanced away, sympathy creeping into his expression.

“He adopted us to get our parents’ money. Then he built his financial empire on that cash.”

I reread everything, trying to come to a different conclusion, but I couldn’t. Uncle Charles had gone after my parents’ cash almost on the day of their deaths. The first of the legal letters had been sent out even before their funeral.

“He doted on you so that you would not suspect,” Viktor said quietly. “He manipulated you, and the whole time...”

“He was robbing us blind.”

Sadness, hurt, confusion... all the appropriate feelings of an innocent woman wronged suddenly melted away in a blast furnace of rage. I pushed away from the keyboard and covered my face with my hands, shaking with the urge to find my uncle myself and beat the crap out of him.

“That vulture. That absolute goddamned vulture.” My eyes were stinging, but I wasn’t worried about shedding tears. The anger made me feel like a blast furnace inside—like any tear that fell would evaporate instantly from the heat of it.

“I thought your uncle was already wealthy when your parents died,” Viktor started, stopping short when I laughed.

“Yeah, yeah, he was. But…” I wiped my eyes impatiently. “Apparently, he didn’t like sharing his own father’s fortunes with his brother. Or his nieces.”

Viktor let out a sigh. I looked up at him again and was surprised to see that he looked relieved. “What is it?” I demanded.

“One of the things I could never figure out was why he stepped in for you and your sister. I knew him as a greedy, evil man first. What he did for you stood out. It didn’t make any sense to me until now. I thought it had to be done out of kindness and love.”

“Guess it’s easy to fake kindness when there’s a half-billion-dollar payout attached,” I said bitterly.

I tried to push on with my reading, but the screen blurred in front of me and all the words on it turned into nonsense. It felt like I was being strangled. First, I lose my parents… then my sister… then my uncle turns out to be… this…

“You need a break.”

I looked up at Viktor in shock. “I can keep going—”

“Of that I have no doubt.” He took my hands and gently but firmly drew me to my feet. “I’ve seen you soldier on through terrible circumstances with poise. But you have been doing too much of that lately, and this particular revelation has to hit home.”

I gulped and nodded mutely. Don’t cry, I demanded of myself, trying to ignore the shaky, melting-snow feeling that ran all through me. I wasn’t going to waste tears on that man.

I let him lead me out of that room, away from all the evidence of my uncle’s greed and selfishness. I was sure now that there would be more. Viktor was right to warn me.

“Do you drink?” he asked once he’d gotten me sat down on the couch.

“Just wine. White, please. The cellar is off the kitchen.”

I put my face in my hands and listened to him potter around fetching glasses and a bottle from the chiller. I was suddenly parched for that drink. It was the only comfort I could reach for right now without risking myself.

Eventually I heard him come back. He settled onto the couch right next to me, I heard him set the glasses down, and then felt his hand settle on my shoulder.

Everything seemed to stop inside of me. My ambivalent, angry heart was suddenly distracted by that contact. The touch was soft, almost feather-light, but I felt the heat of his skin through my blouse and suddenly wanted him to touch me a lot more.

I looked up. He was offering the drink. I took it wordlessly, thoughts spinning in my head. His hand slipped away from my shoulder, and I felt its absence almost painfully.

The wine was wonderfully cold and crisp.

“That’s better,” Viktor said once I was halfway through the glass. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been kicked in the stomach a few times,” I said thickly. “And honestly this only made me have more questions. Why spoil us and keep such a close eye on us? It could have been guilt over taking our money, but it’s too much.”

“He’s ordered people killed, as well as stolen your inheritance,” he reminded me gently. “He has much to feel guilty about. And he was grooming you to be in his corner no matter what.” Something about how he said it, made me shiver.

“It was all calculated. But this is more than grooming,” I murmured. “My gut’s telling me so, but I can’t put my finger on why.”

“It may be guilt for something else. But you have faced enough of his horrors and betrayal for the moment. Now that you have unlocked his computer and helped me find that thumb drive, I can do the rest or get one of my men to take a look. I’ll have another job for you tomorrow.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Yes. I want you to interview your uncle’s staff. I noticed an information database on them in his computer. Phone numbers were included. They’re much more likely to trust you than some stranger.”

“That’s true. He didn’t like changing staff. Some of the people on that list watched me grow up.” They knew I was a basically good person, and they knew what I had lost. Viktor’s confidence in me wasn’t misplaced.

“Good. That will make it easier to get them to talk. Especially if they have some inkling of what he’s capable of.”

I shivered. “They may be just as fooled as I was. Or maybe he’s scared them out of talking.”

“I understand, but we still must make the attempt.” He took a sip of his wine, then sat back cradling the glass. “You really aren’t much of a drinker.”

“No. It’s caused deaths in my family. Believe me, I have plenty of reasons to keep my intake light. And part of that is that I’m raising Nick.”

“Hmm.” He lifted an eyebrow. “You said it caused deaths in your family?”

“My sister.” I felt my guts twist, the cold feeling inside deepening. “It’s an ugly story. I don’t like talking about it.”

“Never mind, then. I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable.” But his curious gaze slid over me. “I’ll not push on the alcohol, then. But it’s clear you need to unwind before we continue.”

“Yeah.” I took several deep breaths, trying to control my stormy emotions. “I don’t know what I’m going to say to Nick about all of this.”

“I advise you to say nothing until he’s considerably older,” Viktor advised quietly, staring into his wine before taking another swallow. He licked his lips in a way that caught all my attention. “He’s an innocent boy. He should be allowed to be so, for a while longer. Believe me when I say that the alternative is nothing he deserves to live through.”

The faint, haunted look on his face intrigued me. “How old were you when you started doing things for your organization?”

He looked up at me sharply, and for a moment the fading chill inside me came back in full force. But then he offered a smile that carried that same hint of sadness. “Too young. Our parents died too soon, and my father had been a member. Taking his place in what small ways I could was the only way to support my younger brother.”

I stared at him, remembering suddenly that this was a whole human being I was looking at—not simply a mobster, or our captor, or my uncle’s enemy. Before now I hadn’t even tried to picture him as a child at all, let alone a bereaved one.

“They didn’t just give me a gun and throw me out there as an enforcer or anything like that,” he went on, seeming a little relieved to talk about this. “No, first I was a lookout and a messenger, then I was carrying packages on my bike. By seventeen I was muscle at one of the Pakhan’s clubs. I would study for exams in the back, while they played that godawful nineties dance pop.” He pulled a face, and I found my smile.

“What happened if something went down?”

“The club was the hangout for anyone in the organization back then, regardless of which group. It was supposed to be neutral territory. Most people worked hard to keep it that way. But when you get a Russian man drunk enough and put his worst enemy across the room, things happen. Usually they didn’t involve guns, but fights in places like that tend to spread. So when they did, the call would go out, and we would get up and run out there to separate the two and get things settled down. It didn’t all go smoothly but I did all right.”

“And you were raising your brother in the meantime?” So strange to suddenly be handed access to him—his history, his internal world—in this way. It intrigued me, made me wonder if he wanted to draw me in. If my attraction to him might possibly be mutual. Why trust me with this otherwise?

Unless he was lying, of course. My uncle whom I’d known all my life had certainly done so. Why not Viktor who I’d known for a matter of days? While I knew he was probably spinning things in his favor as people do, so far he had been able to back up everything he’d told me.

Viktor sat silently for a few seconds, then nodded slightly. “I don’t imagine I was very good at it. But someone had to step up for the boy. Just making the effort did him good.”

I nodded slowly. “I understand a little. I had to do that for Nick. I’m guessing you already looked pretty deep into my background, but Nick isn’t mine. He’s Lucia’s.”

He nodded. “You took him in after your sister’s death?”

“Yes. One minute she was six years sober, full of hope for her future with Nick’s father. The next, he disappears out of her life and she’s drinking again. If I had only known she’d fallen off the wagon sooner, I might have been able to help. Fortunately, Nick was only a baby when it happened. But he knows his birth mom died, and that’s going to have some effect, even if kids are resilient.” I suddenly felt like I had to explain it all somehow. To justify myself.

“And his father?” His curiosity startled me, but I shrugged it off after a few moments.

“He disappeared on her. Might be dead, might have just taken the coward’s way out when he realized he didn’t want to be a father, but I know she was convinced he’d died.” I took another mouthful of wine.”

“When did he disappear?”

I gave him the closest thing to a date that I could. His frown deepened and he nodded. “Do you know what his name was?”

“Levan.”

“Levan?” Viktor asked, looking surprised.

“Yes, does that mean something?”

He shook his head, “No, not really, it’s quite a common Georgian name. It’s just I had an Uncle Levan.”

“I know almost nothing about him, to be honest. But Lucia was blonde, and we don’t have anybody with jet black hair in the family, so I figure Nick got his looks from his dad.”

Viktor chuckled. “The boy is half Georgian, like my family. That much is clear. People think of Russians as just Slavic, but we are a diverse people, I can see the Georgian in him.”

That caught my attention. “Really? I thought about gifting him a DNA test at some point, so he could learn more about where he comes from.”

“Have you thought about tracking down the father?”

I shook my head. “I wish I could, if he’s still alive. But I don’t actually have much to go on.”

There was something relieving about talking about this with Viktor. In context, that was insane. The man was still our captor. But he was so strangely easy to talk to.

It’s charm. He’s a killer. He could turn on a dime.

But if that was true, really true, how could I possibly be comfortable enough around him to be having sex dreams about him?

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I have done much to cause you trouble that, as it turns out, was unnecessary. I still need your help, and I must still keep you from returning to your normal lives just yet. I can’t change what I have done, and I will not change my ultimate goal. My brother must be avenged.” Something flared up in his eyes briefly that sent a fresh shiver through me—but it was gone again just as quickly. He hid that part of himself behind a smile again, and continued, “But I can at least compensate you in significant favors for what I have done, and for your continued cooperation.”

I stared at him, the irony hitting me like a brick. The scary gangster who had kidnapped us, whom I knew was capable of things I could barely contemplate, talked more like a rational adult than most people I had ever met. It was hard not to be persuaded by him. Not just by his silver tongue, but by the way he took responsibility as well as control.

It was like talking to some Medieval king who knew he had our fates in his hands, but wished to actually try to be noble and just, even in bad circumstances. And something about that made me even weaker in the knees around him. Once again, I started wondering if the whole surrealness of the situation was affecting my judgment. But my choices were limited. Playing along with this idea looked like my best chance to improve our circumstances.“What kind of favors are you talking about?”

His smile widened perceptibly. “I will help you find the truth behind the boy’s heritage, and his father, if he still lives. I will also help restore to you your fortune, along with whatever profit your uncle has made from it. In return, once your term of service to me has ended, you need merely keep the matter secret.”

It was tempting. But then something hit me that nearly killed the deal for me right there. He’s going to—

“Before I answer, I need you to be straight with me about something.” He nodded. I went on. “When you find my uncle, you’re going to kill him, aren’t you?”

His smile faded. “It seems there is no hiding the truth from you.”

“Not with my job description. Uncle Charles fooled me because I never wanted to look too deeply into his past or his motives, but I refuse to be fooled again.”

“I understand.” There was a note of respect in his voice. “I will not deceive you. Charles was dead the moment he chose to have my brother murdered. His running has merely delayed the inevitable.”

While I knew my uncle ran in fear of his life, that didn’t excuse him throwing me and Nick under the bus in the process. Did I hate my uncle enough to help his killers? I didn’t have much choice if we wanted to survive. But the idea of taking back what was mine from Uncle Charles by spilling his blood repulsed me. I hated him, I wanted my money back, and I wanted vindication. But not death.

Could I accept an inheritance soaked in my uncle’s blood?

I was certain that he’d do the same to me, it seems. But that didn’t make it right.

“I’ll need some time to think about this,” I admitted, though in the end there was little to think of. My destiny was in Viktor’s hands. The relief I felt when he nodded assent was mixed with fresh desire.

I didn’t want to think too hard about what that said about me.