The Bratva's Heir (Underworld Kings)

“Arghhhhhhhh!” Wicker screams.

I hold the tooth up to the light so he can see it, ivory colored with long, bloodied roots.

“Now,” I say quietly. “I know you think that hurt. But let me assure you, the pain you just felt is nothing compared to the agony you’ll experience as I take this drill and apply it to your raw, open nerve. Men have killed themselves over a toothache, do you know that? They’ve blown their brains out when there was no dentist to give them relief. I’m no dentist… but I know exactly where to put this…”

I pick up the dentist’s drill, revving it like a car engine.

Wicker screeches. He’s gone past denial, past bargaining, all the way to pure desperation.

“Who killed Roxy?” I say, once more.

“I don’t know!” he screams, his words mushy since his lips can’t meet. “But wait wait wait! I did hear something.”

“What?” I say, impatiently.

“It wasn’t a cop—it was a lawyer. A senior prosecutor.”

“What?” I say, even less patient this time.

“I heard him say something about an alliance. With the Russians and the Irish. How it couldn’t go down… they couldn’t let it go down.”

I frown. “When was this?”

“I don’t remember exactly—November! I know it was November,” he adds, hastily, as my fingers clench around the drill.

I exchange glances with Emmanuel, who looks stunned and tense.

No one should have known about the alliance all the way back in November. Definitely nobody in the DA’s office. My engagement to Roxy hadn’t even been formalized yet.

I glare at Wicker, brandishing the drill.

“That doesn’t make sense. How did they know?”

“I really don’t fucking know,” Wicker gurgles, blood dribbling down from his jaw. “He said there was a source. But I swear to God he didn’t say who.”

“What about the blow?” I say, swiftly switching tactics. “Where’d you get that?”

Wicker shifts in the chair, not wanting to answer. A flick of the drill toward his cranked-open mouth gets him talking real quick.

After several repetitions caused by the difficulty of speaking around the spreader, I gather that Wicker found out the higher-ups were stashing something juicy in the police vault. He broke in with a stolen key, hoping to liberate some of the booty for himself. He was surprised to find sixty keys of coke, an unusually large volume even in Desolation. He was only able to smuggle out a single brick, and when he went back for another, the rest had vanished. Nothing was ever written down in the evidence log.

I’ve never seen that black seal before, and I would have heard if there was a player that big in town—especially if they lost such a massive shipment to the cops.

“You have no idea where it came from?” I ask.

Wicker shakes his head, making spit and blood fly from his mouth.

“I believe you,” I say, quietly. “But there’s only one way to be sure.”

With that, I shove the drill in his socket and bear down hard.

The screams shake the slaughterhouse to its foundations.

An hour later, I’m washing my hands at the sink.

Emmanuel watches me, pale and slightly shaken.

“Been a while since I watched you work,” he says.

I dry my hands on a fluffy white towel.

“Thought I lost my touch?” I ask.

Emmanuel shudders. “Obviously not.”

Yury cracks open the back door, stepping through with the brick tucked under his arm.

“Tested it. Purest product I’ve ever encountered,” he says.

“How can that be?” I frown. “How can there be a new supplier in Desolation with sixty keys of premium-grade snow seized by the cops, and we don’t hear a peep about it?”

Yury shakes his head, equally mystified.

I don’t understand what the fuck is going on.

But there’s no way in hell this is all a coincidence.

Chapter 20

Clare

I hate it here. How this was ever a place I called home seems impossible now.

A perfectly manicured front lawn landscaped to within an inch of its life welcomes me. A large, nearly ostentatious wreath adorns the front door, a pathetic attempt at making the sterile home inviting. A curtain flicks, telling me my mother’s resumed her typical peeping view of the front lawn and neighborhood.

And of course, the camera crews are already here, too.

When I was younger and attended private school, I’d occasionally have friends over. When I was much younger, anyway. “Oh, I wish I lived here,” they would say, eying the glimmering pool out by the deck and the lounge chairs, my massive room decorated in pinks and purples, the heart-shaped vanity I’d sit in front of. But appearances can be deceiving, and they didn’t know how miserable it actually was.

My childhood was stifling, and my friends who envied the patio and deck didn’t know what it was like living here. How my mother would scold and nag me if a single thing was out of place, a single smudge on a glass or crumb on the floor. Her endless cleaning frenzies before the cleaners came, and the way she and my father would fight about the money she spent on the upkeep of the house. To my mother, appearances are everything.