Without Remorse

Usually Alexei would have stopped to help and ask if she was okay, but not when his dad was on the warpath. Dimitri had to be handled very carefully when he was in this state. Any demonstration of mercy at such a time would be seen as weakness and failure.

Now that Nicholas had “failed” his test of loyalty, all of them would be on tenterhooks for the next few months until something else came along to distract the old man. It would be uncomfortable to say the least.

Alexei stood straighter. They could weather it. He’d weathered his father’s storms before. They’d make it through this one, too.

And it couldn’t last forever. That was what Alexei told himself more and more lately. He didn’t know what he had to do to convince his father to retire and enjoy a life of leisure, preferably on a non-extradition island somewhere far, far away. He didn’t think it was disloyal of him if he wanted to take the empire his father had built and make it beyond anything Dimitri had ever dreamed of.

Dimitri could only dream in the millions of dollars. Selling drugs and guns, laundering money. It was all old school.

The things Alexei and Bo were doing could bring in billions. The real money was in the dark web. Shit nobody could trace. At least when you had a goddamn genius hacker like Bo behind the keyboard.

Alexei had tried to explain it to Dimitri in terms he could understand: it was extortion for the new millennium. And it could make all of them rich beyond their wildest fucking dreams. Without dealing with the feds constantly breathing down your necks. They could be invisible and operate from anywhere in the world. They could get out of this tiny stinking beach town borough that his father liked to pretend he was king of and go live in fucking Ibiza if they wanted.

For just a second, he let himself imagine it: him with Veronica on his arm, soaking up the sun on a real beach. Blue see-through waters as far as the eye could see. White sands. Her sipping something cold and fruity and him with a whiskey in his hand. Living good. Not this constant rat race, always on eggshells navigating his father’s temper.

“What the fuck do you mean, you can’t find him,” Dimitri screamed down the phone beside him, making Alexei wince. Goddamn but the man had never learned to use his inside voice.

“GPS shows the vehicle’s stopped,” Bo said from where he was sitting in front of the computer. “On Avenue Y just before East Third. Looks like in the parking lot of Betty’s Sprinkle’s?” Bo looked up from his computer screen. “Seems like it’s an ice cream place?”

“Well I doubt he stopped for fucking ice cream,” Dimitri yelled at Bo, looking more and more pissed by the second. “They said they’re there. In the parking lot of the fucking ice cream shop and there’s no SUV.”

Bo looked bewildered. “I don’t know what to tell ya.” He pointed to his computer screen, where the map was zoomed in exactly where he said, a red dot beeping like a beacon. “That’s all I’m getting.”

Dimitri threw his phone across the room. “Will somebody tell me what the fuck is going on and how two people could just fucking disappear right out from under me when I’m supposed to have the highest goddamned tech security money can fucking buy! What happened to the girl? I thought she couldn’t step the fuck outside!”

Bo sat up straight and immediately brought up footage of the alley and the bakery in a split screen, rewinding both back several hours.

The video of the back alley was blank, just an unwavering shot of the alley. In the bakery, they watched Veronica move in speed-reverse, eventually getting to her looking around as if alarmed, then finally her initial arrival when she got to the shop and found it unlocked right as the rain let up, shaking off her umbrella and putting it away. Luckily there was no one in the shop.

As they went further back in the tape, they watched a couple of people wander in and then back out when there was no one to serve them. They looked like tourists. Only in gentrified America, Alexei thought. They didn’t even try to steal anything.

Either way, it was almost twenty minutes of rewound tape time before they finally saw Nicholas’s wife, standing at the back door. Bo had initially rewound too quickly past it and then he pushed play so that they were watching in real time.

She was so still that at first Alexei thought the tape had paused. But then he realized that no, she was just standing there frozen, hand on the doorknob. With indecision? With fear? Alexei had never witnessed her agoraphobia firsthand, but he’d heard about it from Nicholas and the men who’d been there the first day she’d arrived. Even his father had believed it was real.