Page 66 of Between Us

Sasha ignored him. “If I think better about it, maybe we should deliver her corpse to her father instead. We can still blame it on the Armenians.”

“That's not the plan.”

“Fuck the plan. I’d love to see that bastard's face when he finds her on his front porch chopped into tiny little pieces.”

Alessandra listened to their conversation as miserable tears fell down her cheeks.

In that moment, she hated her father with a passion. His sins were catching up to him, and unfortunately for her, she was about to pay for them with her life.

If she could have screamed, she would have. Asuseless as that was, she really would have.

But shock and the crazy pounding of blood in her ears had rendered her as quiet as a tomb.

Instead, she watched numbly as the monster in front of her crouched down and fisted her hair roughly. A heavy blow landed on her cheek, making her head spin.

She closed her eyes and braced for the worse.

26

The morning dragged on too slowly. He'd promised Alessandra he would be back by three, but by the way things looked, Roman knew chances were slim that he would make it home on time. Standing by the hostess station in the restaurant that had just opened for the day, he checked his watch impatiently. Dimitri was late. As always.

After surveying the handful of people that had sat down at a table near the windows, Roman turned to the hostess. She was new, her pretty blue eyes and perky tits a welcome distraction for the male patrons frequenting the restaurant—a good portion of them either in the Bratva or associates of the organization. “I'll be in the office. Let Dimitri know when he arrives.”

The girl—he couldn’t even remember her name—gave him a smile, fluttering her lashes at him suggestively. “Sure thing, Mr. Leskov.”

Irritated by the delay to his plans, Roman made his way down the corridor until he reached the massive oakdoor. Pushing it open, he headed straight for the desk and reached inside the top drawer for a stack of papers that needed his attention. Might as well get some things done while he waited.

Halfway through the second page of a delivery contract, his focus was derailed by his cell phone.

“What is it?” he answered, clicking his pen absentmindedly, his eyes still poring over the document.

“Your wife is not answering the door,” Andrei said. “I knocked, rang the doorbell, nothing.”

Roman stopped clicking the pen. Maybe she was in the shower or listening to music on her headphones, though hedidtell her to be ready at eleven-thirty. A quick glance at his watch told him it was twenty minutes to noon.

“Let me call her.” He put Andrei on hold before scrolling through the list of recent calls and dialing Alessandra. When it skipped straight to voicemail, he frowned and resumed the call with Andrei. “She's not answering her phone. Did you try the door?”

“I did. It’s locked. I even tried the back door.” As Andrei spoke, a sudden and unwelcomed feeling of unease settled into Roman’s stomach. “It’s too fucking quiet. I don’t like this, boss.”

Roman pushed to his feet, tossing the pen on the desk and shoving the papers back into the top drawer. There was no reason for him to worry, and yet… a small voice at the back of his mind whispered that something wasn’t right. He made an effort to sound calm. “Break the door and get inside.”

“I'll pick the lock. It will only take me a minute.”

While Andrei did that, Roman found himselfwalking out of the office, almost as if his feet were carrying him that way before he’d even made up his mind about it. As he headed toward the restaurant's front entrance, he ran into Dimitri who was on his way to see him.

“You're coming with me,” he snapped, the cell phone still glued to his ear.

Dimitri looked surprised by the command and the harsh tone, but followed quietly nonetheless.

“I'm in,” Andrei said over the creak of a door opening in the background.

“Check every room. I'm on my way.”

Climbing into his Mercedes, he connected the phone to the car's audio system. Dimitri slid into the passenger seat, giving his boss a curious look.

Roman put the car in reverse and eased out of the parking lot, his heart doing a strange thing inside his chest. It fluttered awkwardly like the wings of an insect clinging to life after being hit by a truck.

“I just checked the first floor. There's no one home. No sign of struggling either.”

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