Page 22 of Pageant

“Looking for Lilia. I am at Ivan’s house. Have you seen her? All her things are gone.”

“Get out of there. Forget that bitch.”

“What?”

Vasily suddenly explodes in anger. “She sold us out! She’s been meeting with the fucking feds.”

My blood turns cold. “Lilia would never do that.”

“I have proof. She betrayed her husband. Maybe she hates him. Maybe she did it for her father. There was always something strange about Aran and Ivan getting involved. She killed her fucking baby from the stress. I doubt she even wanted that baby.”

Vasily is raving like a madman and I shout over him, “What are you talking about? Do not say shit like that.”

“Ivan suspected her! He was having me follow her.”

Even though I saw Ivan die with my own two eyes, panic and guilt slices through me. “You have been following Lilia?”

Vasily takes a deep breath and says in a quieter tone, “I didn’t tell Ivan about the two of you.”

It’s tempting to bluster and pretend I don’t know what Vasily’s talking about.She was just dropping off my jacket. I would never lay a finger on the boss’s wife.

“You were not really hungry yesterday, were you?”

“No, brother,” he replies.

I pinch my brow, trying to comprehend everything that Vasily has said. “You said you have proof she was speaking to the feds. What proof?”

“This morning Lilia went to a park and got into another man’s car. They talked for twenty minutes. I took pictures. Hang on.”

My phone buzzes. Vasily has sent me three photographs. Lilia, sitting in the passenger seat of a black SUV. She’s talking with a sandy-haired man in his late forties with a mole beneath his right eye.

Recognition slams through me. It’s the fed who tried to arrest Ivan.

I stare around the room, and my eyes land on a picture of Lilia in her wedding dress next to her husband, beaming at the camera. This is a dream. This is a fucking nightmare.

I hear Vasily’s voice, tinny and distant, and I put my phone back to my ear. “Elyah, are you there?”

“Why did you not warn Ivan?”

“I tried to! I drove around all fucking morning. I went to the house. The gym. The restaurant. The office. Where the hell were you?”

“Ivan had a meeting downtown. You should have—”

“Called? I should have called Ivan while the feds were listening? I shouldn’t even be talking to you right now, but they already got the man they wanted. Ivan’s dead so we’re all finished. I’m leaving and so should you. Lay low for a few months. And Elyah? Forget about that bitch.”

The line goes dead.

This can’t be happening. This can’t be real.

I stare at the pictures of Lilia in the car with the federal agent, trying to find an innocent explanation.

No one in the mafia or married to the mafia has an innocent conversation with the feds. Lilia sold out her husband. She sold out all of us, and she didn’t warn me. I laid my heart at my feet and she kicked dirt over it and turned away.

I’m nothing to her.

Less than fucking nothing. She sent me in there to die or to be arrested.

I wrench the clothing rail out of the wardrobe with a roar and swing it at her dressing table mirror. Glass explodes everywhere. I smash all the mirrors on the wardrobe doors and the framed photographs of Lilia and Ivan’s wedding day. Every piece of her perfect life deserves to be destroyed.

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