Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

Elian

She was clearly in a little bit of shock.

Even when the doctor was talking to her, her gaze seemed a million miles away.

It wasn’t until I said the words Russian enforcer that she seemed to snap back to the present moment.

Her gaze slid to me, those pretty cornflower blue eyes going wide.

“Oh,” she breathed out, her shoulders slumping.

“Are you involved with them?” I asked, feeling like shit for peppering her with questions right after a traumatic event. But I wanted to get answers out of her before she had a chance to try to formulate a convincing lie to feed me.

“No,” she said, head shaking infinitesimally. “No, but I think my boss is,” she said.

“Your boss,” I repeated. “Who is your boss?”

For a beat, I thought she wasn’t going to tell me.

But then she said something that confirmed a lot of my family’s suspicions about what the Bratva was up to. “Senator Michael Westmoore.”

“Sena—“

“We’re going to get you all patched up,” Dr. Conti said as he came back pushing a small metal rolling tray covered in a bunch of supplies.

If he looked nervous to her, it was because he was.

Our family didn’t have their own medical professional on staff for shit like random shootings that we didn’t want to send us to the hospitals where the cops would get involved. Which meant, most of the time, we were pulling bullets out of each other, and doing some seriously shoddy work on stitches without any local anesthetics.

It was like fate one day when we realized a certain doctor was in debt to our family for almost fifty grand that he was never going to be able to pay back with his bleeding heart job at a clinic in a low-income area.

So, we’d… made him an offer.

Which was a nice way of saying that Renzo leaned on him until he agreed to allow any of us to come into the clinic whenever we needed treatment. Without anything ever ending up on paper or in their systems.

As far as I knew, this was the first time we’d needed to use his services. Hence his anxiety. Maybe he was worried that if he screwed up, it would be his kneecaps we came after.

I stood back, letting the doctor work on the woman, Elizabeth’s, arm as I wrapped my head around what little information she’d given me.

She worked for a senator.

That slimy bastard who had too much filler in his face, tanned himself to leather, and wore hilariously obvious lifts.

And, for some reason, she was the target for assassination, not the senator.

“Okay. You are all fixed up,” Dr. Conti said, snapping off his gloves. “I put in dissolving stitches, so you don’t need to come back to get them removed. You should try to keep them dry for the first day or two. And try to keep them covered in sterile gauze,” he went on, getting little nods from Elizabeth, but it was clear to me that everything was going over her head; she was too overwhelmed for instructions. “After that, you can gently wash them for another day or two. After that, just wash as normal.”

“Okay, thank you,” she said, nodding.

“Does she have to worry about infection?” I asked.

“If she keeps it clean and covered, probably not. But keep an eye for any puffiness or especially any sort of oozing. If you see that, come right back in to see me, and we will go from there.”

“And pain?” I asked when she continued to just sit there, a little zoned out.

“Over-the-counter meds will likely be enough,” Dr. Conti said. “But if you don’t feel that it is,” he rushed to add, eyes going wide, “let me know. Anytime.”

“Okay. Thanks, doctor,” I said, jerking my chin toward the door.

He took the hint and left.

“Don’t they need my insurance card?” Elizabeth asked, looking over at me with scrunched brows.

“No, it’s all covered,” I assured her.

“That makes no sense,” she decided as she started to slide off the table.

“Whoa,” I said, rushing forward to grab her arm when she teetered on her feet. “Let’s get you out of here, okay?” I asked, holding onto her as I led her back out of the clinic.

“Thanks,” she said numbly as I got in the car and pulled away from the curb.

“Elizabeth, we need to go somewhere to talk. Where do you want to go? A coffee shop? Your apartment?”

“Shouldn’t I be talking to the police?” she asked instead of answering, her gaze looking out the window, seeming a million miles away.

I reached into her purse, finding her wallet, and checking out her address on her license, then heading in that direction while she continued to zone out.

“Miss Riley,” her doorman greeted her, all affability as he went for the door, until he saw the blood on her clothes. “Are you alright?”

“Brian,” Elizabeth said, forcing a painfully fake smile. “Yes. Just an, ah, accident,” she said as we moved into the lobby of her building.

It was a luxe place with wide-plank slate floors, a wooden front desk with massive, pristine mirrors, a seated area with rounded couches, and a bunch of lush greenery that actually looked real.

This kind of place cost a pretty penny.

I didn’t know what, exactly, Elizabeth did for the senator, but she seemed to be paid well.

She led me to the elevators, pushing the button for the sixth floor, clearly still not fully herself, because I couldn’t imagine she would normally just bring a stranger right into her apartment.

It was a nice apartment, too. New hardwood floors, views of the city, a balcony, a nice-sized living room that melted into an all-white and marble kitchen.

Down the hall, it looked like there were two bedrooms.

Elizabeth liked to keep the place light and bright. The windows only had sheers, and they were pulled wide to allow the light to stream in on her off-white living room furniture, and giving lots of sunlight to her giant houseplants.

She had a framed TV across from her couch and chair set, the screen set to switch between different John William Waterhouse paintings. Below it was a line of white bookshelves with glass doors, all the spines turned inward, so all you saw were the cream pages.

The only things in the whole apartment that didn’t fit her very clean aesthetic were the cat scratch post, cat tree, and several beds.

“Nice place,” I said, because it was.

“Thanks,” Elizabeth said numbly, walking to her kitchen to turn on her pricey-looking latte machine. “It’s expensive,” she admitted as she pumped what looked like cookie batter syrup into a mug, the ritual seemingly grounding her, bringing her back to herself. “But it has a lot of amenities,” she told me. “When I did the math on what it would cost to get a cheaper place and pay for all those things separately, this just made more sense. Can I get you a coffee?” she asked as I walked over to the cat who was lounging in the sun near the sliding doors to the balcony, soaking up some rays.

“Sure. However you take it is fine,” I told her, even if I generally didn’t drink flavored coffee. If it helped her relax to make it her way, I would choke it down.

“His name is Kevin,” she told me as the cat purred. “He was my grandfather’s. He’s ancient and mostly deaf, but sweet. Do you have any pets?” she asked, bringing me over the first coffee, then going back to make another.

“Thank you. No. I work too much,” I told her.

“I do too,” she admitted. “But it was me or a shelter,” she went on. “I figured this is better.”

I heard the rattle of a pill bottle and looked over to find her in one of her kitchen cabinets that seemed to serve as a small pharmacy. Catching me looking, she went to shrug, forgetting her stitches, and winced. “Life is a constant battle of trying to decide if it is a migraine that I can manage with some over-the-counter pills, or if I need rescue meds. And then there are the vitamins that are supposed to help,” she said, waving at a line of bottles with matching labels but different words. Calcium, Magnesium, Zinc, Riboflavin .

“My mom used to get debilitating migraines,” I admitted. “If we came home from school to find her in bed with all the lights off, we knew we needed to keep it down. Luckily, they seemed to go away after menopause.”

“Only about twenty more years to see if that works for me too,” she said, giving me a shrug as she took a long sniff of her coffee before taking a sip.

She walked over to the living room, waving toward the couch as she took a seat in one of her chairs. “I’m assuming you’re here because you want to talk.”

“About your boss, it seems,” I agreed, taking a sip of my coffee to put her at ease. “Wow,” I said, brows going up. “This is surprisingly good.”

“I know, right?” she asked, shooting me a small smile. “I used to pay, what, eight dollars for one of these a few times a day. Until I realized that just buying that latte machine actually saves me a lot of money.”

“So, you work for Senator Michael Westmoore,” I said, watching as she took a deep breath.

“Yes,” she said, her tone tight, making me think that it was definitely the senator who seemed to be chewing her out on the phone with before the shooting who seemed to be chewing her out.

“And he’s involved with the Bratva?”

“The Bratva?” she repeated, brows pinching.

“The Russian mafia,” I told her.

“Oh. Oh ,” she said, eyes widening. “That… that makes sense, I guess.”

“How so?”

“Last night, I was working late at the office, and I overheard a conversation my boss was having with a man named Dimitri,” she told me.

“What were they saying?”

“It seemed like a veiled threat,” she told me.

“Over what?”

“Someone who has been arrested for human trafficking.”

That tracked, since it seemed likely that the women at the ‘massage parlors’ were probably not there willingly. Especially in these days where it was easier—and more profitable than ever—for someone interested in doing so to run their own sex work service. Without even needing to sleep with men if they didn’t want to.

“And your boss is supposed to try to get them out?” I asked.

“Yes. And if he doesn’t, well, the Dimitri guy made it sound like there would be, you know, consequences. I guess… we learned what kind today.”

“Are you that valuable to your boss?”

“I’m probably the only person who can get him reelected,” she admitted. “But… I doubt he even realizes that.”

“He seems like a real dick,” I said, getting a surprised laugh out of her.

“He is,” she admitted, nodding. “But I never thought he would be involved with human trafficking.” She sat with that a second, then shook her head. “Why would he get involved with the… Bratva?”

“Money,” I said. It always traced back to money.

“But how?”

“The senator votes in ways that loosen laws on trafficking, or imports, or things like that. Or they work their connections to get police or district attorneys to look the other way. In turn, they get a cut of the money that comes from the Bratva’s business endeavors.”

“You mean trafficking,” she said, face going tight. “Of women and girls.”

“In this case, yeah, I do mean that, unfortunately.”

“He’s profiting off the exploitation and rape of innocent women.”

“Yes,” I said, understanding the horror on her face. I felt it myself each time I had to go anywhere near those massage parlors. “Does your boss know you overheard his conversation?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I was behind the door in the bathroom. I had a migraine, so I was in the dark,” she admitted. “He had no idea. And he was… his usual self today.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?” I asked.

“Because who the hell would believe me?” she asked, snorting. “I, ah, I decided to try to see if he would open up to me. Because I could record it then.”

“And it would be admissible in court.”

“Yeah. Or, I figured, if I couldn’t make that work, I would just record him on the phone with them, and drop it off to a news station who wouldn’t have any qualms about sharing it.”

“Could the Bratva have learned of your plans? Did you tell friends? Family? Boyfriend?” I asked, the last word having a strange bite to it for reasons I didn’t exactly understand.

“No. I don’t have… anyone,” she admitted. “I mean, I have family. But they’re across the country. And we’re not close.”

“Friends?”

“I work too much for friends. And too much for boyfriends,” she admitted. “I didn’t even search anything online. Maybe I wasn’t the target today,” she said, sounding hopeful.

“They were aiming right at you,” I told her.

“Maybe they thought my boss would come out.”

“I don’t think so. These are professionals. They don’t fuck up a hit.”

“How do you know so much about them?” she asked, finally zeroing in on the strangeness of my presence.

“Because I’ve been watching them for a few weeks.”

“Why?”

“To figure out what they are up to.”

“Are you a private investigator?” she asked.

“No, sweetheart,” I said, shaking my head.

I watched as her gears turned, those cornflower blue eyes keen when they pinned me again.

“Who do you work for?”

“Renzo Lombardi,” I admitted.

“Why does that sound so… oh,” she said, eyes going round as her posture stiffened. “You’re… in the mafia.”