Year of the Scorpio: Part One Read online

  “What? Where is she?”

  “Where the fuck d’you think she is, shit-for-brains? She’s here, hiding under the bed to make us think she’s escaped. You think it’s funny, fucking with us, bitch? I think it’s time I showed you what fucking is really like. Get out here, you little shit.”

  “B-but the light went out and I’m s-scared of the dark.” Actually, I loved the dark. The dark and I had become good friends. It was Gravel Voice I was scared of, and that fear had me stuttering as he thrust a hand under the bed, grabbed hold of my shirt front and yanked me toward him so hard I got a decent case of floor-burn. But at that moment I didn’t feel it as I concentrated on aiming my twisted corkscrew-like weapon straight toward his eye and lunging forward with everything I had.

  The momentum of being yanked toward Gravel Voice alone probably would have done the trick. But with the extra muscle I put in behind the stabbing motion, it was a wonder the jagged metal corkscrew didn’t punch right out the back of his skull.

  His scream was unbelievable in the small space, and he instinctively threw me from him, the thing that had hurt him, even as I felt something wet and warm splash over my hand. I landed on my butt no more than a foot from the door, and in a heartbeat I was on my feet and across the threshold.

  Wait, wha—” Sneezy Gino’s idiotic words were the last I heard before I slammed the door shut and leaned against it, my heart thudding so hard it almost drowned out the screams from Gravel Voice.

  Almost.

  A scream of my own burst out when someone—probably Sneezy Gino—crashed against the door, and I whirled to make sure the lock was secure. When I’d assured myself that they weren’t going to get out any time soon, I looked around wildly and saw the front room was just that—a single room that had a little kitchenette. A card table for a dining area was placed in the center of the room, and there a small TV on the counter, along with dirty dishes, a box of ammo, kitchen matches for the ancient gas stove and one of those cool new phones that flipped open and had an antenna on it.

  Another closed door was directly opposite me, and I could hear my brother yelling frantically on the other side. I ran on trembling legs as fast as I could to the door and popped the lock, crying so hard out of sheer terror that I could barely see how to work it.

  Then the door was open and Nizhy, my wonderful Nizhy, was there. I hurled myself into my brother’s arms even as he surged out, his heart thumping wildly in my ear.

  “Dash? Jesus, Dash.” He squeezed me so tight I was sure he cracked a rib, but since I was holding onto him just as fiercely I didn’t have a right to complain. “Where are they? Where is he?”

  Somehow I knew he meant Gravel Voice. “I locked them in. I stabbed the bad one in the eye, but he’s not dead. We need to go, Nizhy, we need to go now, before they get out. They’ll kill us if they get out, we have to run.”

  “No. Oh, no, no, no.” My brother’s voice was strange—not the broken strangeness I’d heard earlier of a boy so hopeless he’d somehow gone back into young childhood. This was a breathy, high-pitched, excited voice that trickled down my spine like ice water. “We don’t run, Dash. We make sure they don’t get out. Not at all. Not ever.”

  I was so scared, I was sobbing. “Nizhy, please, I wanna go h—”

  “Shut up.” He shoved my squeezing arms away from him and went to the kitchenette, his unkempt, dirty coffee-black hair falling over his equally dirty face as he rummaged around. The moment he spied the gun, he grabbed it up and checked to see if it was loaded—something we both knew how to do since our father had made sure we were familiar with guns from the time we were in grade school. He stuffed the gun in the back of his filthy, stained jeans, snatched up a can by the stove, turned to the locked door through which we could still hear screaming and thumping, and splashed the can’s contents under the door gap.

  What the heck?

  “Nizhy?”

  “Bacon grease,” he muttered, turning back to the counter. There was a bottle of alcohol next to the fridge with a picture of a plant on it, and my brother paused just long enough to read the label before nodding in apparent satisfaction before he poured the whole thing under the door as well. Tossing the bottle aside, he went one last time to the counter to grab up the box of kitchen matches.

  Oh.

  Oh.

  “Good.” The single word ripped my throat raw as the truth hit me hard. This was the only way. We had to make sure they couldn’t come after us again. They could never be allowed to come near us again.

  Ever.

  That weird, silent calm settled over my brain once more. I welcomed it with open arms before moving to grab up the box of bullets and the flip phone. Then I turned back to Nizhy, who was looking across the room at me, as if he needed the reassurance that we were in this together. I nodded once, then looked at the closed door when the screaming and thumping suddenly stopped.

  They’d noticed.

  They understood.

  Good.

  “Listen to me, kid—”

  “Shut up.” It felt good, so good, to finally be able to say those words without fear of death. “You made up the rules to this game, jerkface. This is how you wanted things to be, so okay. That’s fine with my brother and me. We know how to play this game just as well as you. It’s us, or you.” Of course we knew how to play. We were the children of Borysko Vitaliev.

  They should have known better.

  “Look, we’re your only ticket outta here, you understand that?” It was Sneezy Gino at the door. Gravel Voice was probably still too preoccupied with the fact that he was now a Cyclops to be able to hold any sort of decent conversation. “We’re in the fuckin’ woods, miles from anything except the Wisconsin border, and then you’ve got hundreds of miles of nothing after that. You understand what I’m telling you?”

  “I understand that when my brother and I are together, we’re unbeatable.”

  “Unbeatable,” Nizhy repeated softly, no louder than a whisper. It was like he was memorizing the word. “That’s what we are. Unbeatable.”

  “Look kid, you’re gonna die out there in the wilderness, don’t you get that? You need us. A little thing like you will get gobbled up by bears if you don’t have us there to protect you. If you get eaten, you’ll never see your daddy again.”

  “I’ve got your phone, asshole.” The words screeched out of me, and I loved how they felt. They felt like triumph. “One call and we’re safe. But you? Not so much. You know why?”

  “Kid—”

  “Because my brother found the matches.”

  “This is gonna feel good, Tony.” Nizhy spoke suddenly, resting his cheek against the door as if he wanted to get closer to the horrible monsters inside. That breathless, excited voice was back, and it scared me almost as much as anything I’d endured so far. “Ooh, yeah, this is gonna feel real good. Suck on that, baby. Suck on that and like it.”

  “Nizhy, come on, just light the match and let’s go, okay? Let’s go.”

  It was as though my brother didn’t hear me as he closed his eyes and rolled his forehead against the door’s surface. “You know what? I’m gonna enjoy this sooo much. You won’t, but I will. Remember saying those exact words to me, Tony? You also said something else. What was it?”

  “Nizhy, please...”

  “Oh yeah. Now I remember.” Stepping back, Nizhy plucked a match out of the box and lit it, and the sound of it was deafening. “Feel free to cry. I like it when my bitches cry.”

  I stared at my brother’s back as he began to laugh a frightening, hysterical laugh.

  Nizhy...

  Sneezy Gino’s voice rose, panicked. “Wait, please, I got nothin’ to do with that perv—”

  “You kept me here with him. You didn’t stop him. You have everything to do with him.” Still laughing, Nizhy backed up another step and tossed the match, then upended the rest of the matches by the door even as the stuff he’d poured out ignited.

  The yells and cursing behind the closed door
quickly turned into screams.

  It was a nightmare, and I was sure this was what hell must look like. I should have been scared. Horrified. Crying my eyes out. But I wasn’t. That weird, icy calm had my brain on lockdown while smoke billowed from the door and the frame around it as the fire licked up the dry wood. But all too soon that icy numbness morphed into worry when the flames raced up the wall to the ceiling like a living thing.

  Wow.

  Who knew that fire could move so fast?

  “Nizhy.” The heat was becoming unbearable. It dried out my eyes and shriveled up my lungs, and I looked to my brother in growing alarm. “We need to get out of here.”

  “I love listening to him scream, Dash. It’s so beautiful, don’t you think? The most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”

  The whole wall was on fire now. Soon it would be the entire cabin. “This place is made of wood, and I’m standing next to a gas stove. If we don’t get out of here we’re going to die.”

  “No.” My brother’s eyes were terrifyingly blank, as if hypnotized by the building fire. But it was the mad glee of his smile that told me Nizhy had no real understanding that we were on the verge of burning up along with the men inside. “I have to hear him suffer, Dash. I have to hear him scream. And scream. And scream.”

  “Nizhy.” Helplessly I stared at him, not recognizing him in that moment and genuinely too afraid of him to bodily pull him out of there. I searched my brain for something that would get him moving before I realized I still held the box of ammo in my now-sweating hand. “What if they’re escaping out the window while we’re standing here? It had bars on it, but they’re strong men, Nizhy. What if they’ve pulled the bars off? Shouldn’t we go and make sure they didn’t get out?”

  Those blank eyes turned to me, and the reflection of the fire dancing there made him look insane. “Make sure?”

  “You have the gun.” I held up the box of ammo. “I have lots and lots of bullets. We can stop those bad guys if they’re trying to get out. Or we can hunt them down if they’ve already gotten away. But we need to see where they are to make sure they can never hurt us again.”

  “Yeah. Good thinking.” He blinked, and like magic he became my wonderful Nizhy again. With a smile, he held out his hand. I thought he wanted the bullets so I handed them over, but he transferred them to his other hand before grabbing up my fingers to give them a gentle, reassuring squeeze. “Let’s go outside and play, Dash.”

  Relieved that I had my big brother back and this nightmare could finally be put behind us, I returned his smile with all my heart. “Okay.”

  Chapter One

  Sixteen years later

  A cheap plastic Guinness lamp hung over the poker table, spotlighting the mountain of chips piled high in the center. A grizzled old guy who looked like an escapee from a pirate ship with his leathery face, a shock of white hair and black eye patch over his right eye, sat statue-still, his gnarled but talented hands flat on the table where everyone could see them next to the card shoe. The guy, Golightly, was the official dealer for this showdown, and well-known in Chicago’s illegal gambling circles as more of a straight-shooter than most. That meant he could be as trusted as anyone in the room.

  Of course, that wasn’t saying much.

  “Over to you, Ms. Vitaliev. What’s it going to be?”

  “Keep your shirt on, Golightly, I’m thinking.” I took another peek at my hand, though I didn’t have to. I knew what a full house of two dimes and three kings looked like. I just liked looking at their pretty faces. “Okay.” I threw chips into the pot. Ten grand was a decent statement. “Call.”

  To my left, a paunchy, jowly-faced Asian man whose bald pate was covered in liver spots carefully counted out his remaining chips as if he expected their number to change. When they didn’t, he threw down his hand. “Out.”

  The man next to him was a long-time acquaintance of mine, Leo Bangs. We’d gone to school together—private schools all the way, and he’d always gotten picked up in a Bentley. Then again, I’d always gotten picked up in a similar kind of car, but I doubted Leo Bangs’ Bentley had been armored like a Russian tank and fitted with bulletproof glass. His father had built an empire in the world of insurance. Mine had built an empire in the world of crime.

  Similar occupations, in my opinion.

  Leo Bangs seemed to think otherwise. He’d always had an air of superiority whenever our paths crossed, like he thought he’d been born better than me. I wasn’t sure if it was because of my immigrant gangster father, may he rest in peace, or because Leo was an unmitigated dick.

  Personally I leaned toward the latter theory.

  Unmitigated dick or not, Leo was a damn fine poker player. I’d sat across the table from him several times in the past, and I’d be lying if I said I’d never had my clock cleaned by him. But his better-than-you-since-always arrogance didn’t help him when it came to winning the major pots. If anything, it seemed to hamper him like a gun with a faulty trigger.

  Like right now, for instance. At the moment there was almost a quarter of a million dollars sitting in the middle of the table—not an unusual thing when it came to this particular illegal high-stakes floating poker game that appeared in a different part of Chicago every couple of weeks. But this was the by far the biggest hand of the night and there was a weird, uneasy tension humming around the room. Yet Leo seemed almost uninterested. How he could pretend there wasn’t an adrenaline-infused whiff of expectancy in the air, I didn’t know; it took all I had not to fidget in my seat. But I kept my ass nice and still, since I knew the seemingly distracted Leo would be on any nervous tells like white on rice.

  Unless...

  I could make him think I had a weak hand.

  Without turning my head, I scanned the room. It was your basic urban-blight shithole of a venue, though tonight’s location for the floating high-stakes game was more dramatic than usual. Literally in the shadow of the White Sox stadium—formerly Comiskey Park, and would be so named in the hearts of true Chicagoans for all time—stood a crumbling Victorian-era building that had once been an all-boys prep school. Now it housed floats for the St. Patrick’s Day parade and banners for the Chicago marathon, and various other things the city dragged out of the mothballs whenever it was needed.

  The three poker tables that had been used throughout the night were set before a ginormous figure of St. Patrick that looked remarkably like Santa, if you ignored the green cloak and snakes at his feet. St. Paddy had one hand up as if to bless this gathering, but apparently the blessing hadn’t worked. No luck of the Irish had been bestowed on the players tonight; two of the three tables were now empty, and the survivors of the night’s carnage had come down to this final game of five players—me, Leo, the Asian guy, a rail-thin older woman who’d dropped out almost before the cards were dealt, and a bald-headed, sunglasses-at-night dude any Chicago Bears fan would have recognized.

  But we weren’t alone in the room. Not by a long shot.

  A few of the defeated had lingered to watch the action. A few more hung around to get some action of another kind. At least, that was what my best friend and bodyguard, Konstantin Medvedev, was aiming for, if his sensually smiling attention to the bottle-service attendant was any indication.

  That was Kon. His motor never stopped.

  Konstantin had come out of the womb flirting, I was sure of it. Though, to the horror of his family, his flirtatious ways were aimed solely at other men. His personal tastes veered toward the quieter sort—delicately pretty young men who had no doubt suffered their whole lives because they weren’t what “men” were supposed to be, according to the vagaries of current culture.

  I suspected that was part of what drew Kon. He hated bullies. His old man, Pavel, was Moscow-born, as hard as that city ever dreamed of being, and was totally flummoxed by his youngest. As a result he’d been tougher on Konstantin than his five other sons combined. Kon’s older brothers had followed Pavel’s lead, and while I thought it was clear Pavel loved hi
s youngest, I wasn’t so sure about Kon’s brothers. To say that his five older brothers could have treated better was putting it mildly.

  One thing I did know—once the towering, thickly muscled force that was Konstantin Medvedev decided you needed protection, that was it. You were going to be protected, by damn. Shameless pampering went hand-in-hand with that protection, since Kon loved to shower gifts on his multitude of love interests, and those gifts were always accompanied with a card that read, “Nothing but the best for you.”

  Okay, so my best friend was an unoriginal cornball. But what he lacked in unoriginality, he made up for in romantic gestures. That was why I had no doubt the doe-eyed bottle-service guy with the graceful long limbs and pale skin was headed for the time of his freaking life.

  It was a blessing that my taste in men ran the exact opposite of Konstantin’s. We never got territorial when we were scoping out guys. I couldn’t seem to resist the dangerous bad boys who didn’t know the meaning of playing it safe. In fact, if Kon’s door had swung my way, he would have been just my type, in a menacing, ultra-violent kind of way. Being gay was a happenstance of birth, but being a member of the Medvedev family—historically the muscle of the Vitaliev Bratva—was a matter of passion and pride. And while his often-exasperated dad and five older brothers made uncomfortable noises about him, Konstantin was still held in the highest esteem professionally. In the underworld, if a man had the ability to snap a person’s bones without breaking a sweat, his choice of bed partners didn’t matter.

  It was Kon’s talent for efficient brutality that had won him the position as my personal bodyguard from the time I was twelve. He might have only been seventeen at the time, but everyone knew Konstantin Medvedev was more than capable of crippling or killing anyone who even looked at me wrong. In fact, the only person more ruthless in the Vitaliev Bratva was none other than my other bodyguard, Scorpio, also known as Marco Polo Scorpeone.