Page 74 of The Prices We Pay
Sebastian types on his laptop, pulling up the file. Scanning it, he adds, “Ended in a shootout. Killed seven gang members. I wound up placing an anonymous tip with the FBI because there were so many weapons. That one?”
“Yes.” Enzo sits forward. “But guys, it was in Brighton Beach?” Seb and I look at one another, our brows pinched in confusion. “Fuck’s sake.Brighton Beach.Who runs that entire area of Brooklyn?”
Seb and I think for a moment. And as if our brains are operating at the same speed, we both finally pick up on what Enzo is hinting at at the exact same time. “Fuck,” we both mutter in unison.
“It’s called Little Odessa for a reason,” Enz clarifies.
“The Russians,” I answer roughly. I can’t believe I never thought about this.
“Do we know who we killed in that shootout?” Enzo asks me, and my eyes immediately lock with Sebastian’s.
“Not now, but I will.” Five anxious minutes later, after realizing the bodies were sent to the local precinct’s coroner’s office, Sebastian is combingthrough the local authorities’ case file. He pulls up the list of the names of the seven men we killed that day, and I recognize the name we’re looking for before he even says it out loud. Clasping my hands on top of my head, I lean against the back of the couch and let out a heavy sigh. “You’re seeing this?” Sebastian clarifies.
“Yeah, I’m fucking seeing it.”
“Who is it?” Enzo asks anxiously.
“Aleksandr Novikov,” I tell him regretfully.
Enzo closes his eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath. “Aleksandr Novikov, as in the eldest son of Andrei Novikov and heir to the Bratva.”
“The one and only.”
39
Enzo
“Son of a bitch,” Sebastian snaps as he goes back to typing on his computer. “How did I not think of this?”
“Think about what?” Luca asks. Seb doesn’t answer. Immediately noticing the tension rising in Sebastian’s shoulders, Luca gently wraps his hand around the back of his neck and strokes the sensitive skin with his thumb. “Mio Re… think about what?”
Sebastian’s laptop dings, and he points at the screen aggressively. “That. That right there.”
Forgoing my blankets, I scoot across the sectional so I’m sitting next to them and can see what Sebastian’s pointing at on his screen. “Remember, like two months ago, we got hired for another job out in Brighton Beach? But we showed up to the target’s apartment, and he was gone? I looked for him everywhere, but it’s like he never existed.”
Do I remember? The entire thing was fucking weird. I mean, if The Horsemen are coming for you, odds are you’re the type of person who isn’t well-liked by many. So it wasn’t necessarily a surprise that the guy suddenly dipped. However, what was a surprise was that everything Seb found on him was suddenly gone too and—“Ohhhhhh, holy shit.”
“Yeah, holy shit,” Seb agrees.
“What? What am I missing?” Luca asks urgently.
“Baby, we tracked that guy for days. I watched his comings and goings on hundreds of cameras across the city. I had bank records. Phone records. All of it. And we showed up right where we were supposed to do the job, and he’s just… poof. Gone. Everything I had on him disappeared from every database. There’s no more camera footage. Nothing. Hevanished. People don’t just evaporate like that unless—”
Luca finally realizes what Sebastian’s getting at and finishes the sentence for him, “It was a fake job. They hired us.”
“And the hit requests come through on an encrypted server. I can’t trace back who hires us to do jobs unless they offer up the information.” It really was smart on Seb’s part. It’s the whole reason people feel comfortable hiring The Horsemen for jobs. And honestly, the less we know about the person who pays for the hit, the better. Sebastian always does his due diligence to make sure everything is legit, but beyond that… nothing else is important. All that’s important is that we know the person we’re after deserves things far worse than a prison cell, and we make that happen. “After we found him missing, I looked for days,” Sebastian continues, shaking his head in astonishment. “I traced the IP address and countless databases and reviewed hours of camera footage, but he was just gone.”
Luca sighs heavily and says, “And when we tried to send the money back, the bank account it came from was closed.”
“My best guess is they chose some low-level Bratva member, created a fake life for the guy as far back as they could, ordered the hit, and had us show up to that fucking apartment under the knowledge the guy was a piece of shit. Then they got rid of him, got rid of his fake life just so they could watch us show up to the hit and confirm that we are The Horsemen,” I say.
“How did Andrei even figure out it was us?” Luca asks.
“The girl,” I remind him. There was a woman at the warehouse that night six months ago. She was a pale-skinned woman with bright red hair. The moment we came crashing through the door, the three of us could instantly tell that she wanted to be literally anywhere in the world but where she was. She jumped off Aleksandr’s lap as quick as lightning, and you could see it in her eyes. She wanted to run as far from him as she could. So we made a snap decision and let her run.
Obviously, she didn’t run far enough.
“Fuck. We never should have let her go,” Luca snaps.
