Chimera (The Korsak Brothers #1)(10)
When the man disappeared up the trail with Lukas, I was left with nothing but a throat torn to silence, a jaggedly bloody slice along my jaw, hands scraped raw, and a burden of guilt far heavier than the dead horse across my legs.
There were times, even ten years later, when I woke up in the middle of the night and still felt Harry weighting the lower half of my body down against the mattress. Tonight was one of those. Considering the news Saul had broken to me at lunch, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Brushing a hand over my legs, I almost felt the rasp of horsehair against my palm. “Sorry, Harry,” I murmured.
Pushing against the invisible weight, I sat up and slid out from under the sheet. The clock on the bedside table read just past three a.m. Not your usual digital alarm, it was a fancier, chrome-and-silver-chased timepiece. A gift of my last girlfriend, Natalie, I’d wondered whether it had been her way of telling me our time was running out. In the end, I never got the message, as it had stayed longer than she had managed to. She was the exception. I wasn’t much on long relationships. Blaming it on my “work” would be easy enough, but the true bottom line? The search for Lukas took up so much of my resources, including the emotional ones, that I simply didn’t have enough left over to live a life.
So I screwed around with the type of women who didn’t mind my unpredictable hours or what I did with that time. Most were dancers at the club or friends of girlfriends of the guys I rubbed shoulders with. Consequently, most had a moral elasticity that more than rivaled mine. They weren’t any more invested in me than I was in them. Screwing around was the right term on both sides. Our kind weren’t into relationships. Natalie though . . . Natalie had been different. I’d gone to college with Nat and even dated her off and on my sophomore and junior year. When I ran into her three years later, we had picked up where we’d left off without missing a beat. There was the same banter; Nat had a wit sharper and more delicately cutting than glass. There were the same habits of late-night pizza and early-morning runs, which was one helluva sacrifice for me. Sleeping late wasn’t just a hobby; it was a God-given right. Only Natalie could’ve prodded me out of bed as quickly as my frequent nightmares did, but her way tended to be much more pleasant. Long red hair, that natural kind almost as orange as a carrot, laughing blue eyes, and freckles that bloomed like tiny scarlet poppies across the tops of her milk-pale breasts, she was beautiful, intelligent, quick-tempered, and honest to the bone—so honest, in fact, that she became the first woman I lied to.
It was pretty much a doomed effort from the very beginning, and I knew it. But the weeks we had together gave me a glimpse into a life that might have been . . . if I hadn’t lost my brother . . . if I hadn’t fallen in with thieves out of sheer apathy . . . if I’d been a man instead of an obsession-driven tin soldier. Wind me up and watch me go, blindly marching down a path without end.
Nat had found out soon enough what my life was all about. Obsession she could’ve lived with, I think. But dishonesty and only a passing acquaintance with the law-abiding world, that wasn’t a life she would embrace—or tolerate. She had loved me, but she’d loved something else more . . . her soul.
At least she left me the clock.
Giving up sleep as a lost cause, I padded in bare feet over to the living room window to watch moon-spangled waves. I had a lot of planning to do, and watching the tide’s hypnotic show helped my brain disassociate to do its job. Saul was my first thought. I needed his help, his expertise, and he wasn’t being too cooperative. At the restaurant he’d slid back in his chair, held up his hands, and shook his head adamantly. “Sorry, buddy,” he had said in a tone remarkably lacking in apology. “I found him, just like you wanted. My job is officially over.”
Maybe it wasn’t such a leap for me, but it was something of an assumption for Saul . . . being so certain that this boy was Lukas. The sight of that compound had unquestionably put him on edge. Whatever was going on within those walls, he obviously wanted no part of it. But if my less-than-distinguished career had taught me anything, it was that everyone had their price. The look he’d stolen over his shoulder at me as he’d left the restaurant had shown a darkly annoyed glimmer. Yeah, he knew it wasn’t over between us.
Folding my arms, I leaned toward the window and rested my forehead against the cool glass. Five stories down I could see empty tide-washed sand. There were no dead horses, their legs curved slackly in a running position; no little boys with pale and limp starfish hands. “Lukasha,” I murmured, the nickname still natural on my lips after all these years. “You out there?”
The moon continued to pass through the sky and I imagined for the very first time that I might actually hear a reply.
Chapter 4
Konstantin had many favorite restaurants, but not a single one of them was Russian. Too much borscht and cabbage as a child had humbled better men. I’d seen the sight of a beet cause Gurov’s left eye to twitch uncontrollably. Embracing the favored local cuisine wholeheartedly, he ate more Cuban food than Castro himself. Payasada was his most frequent choice, and I was more than familiar with the setup there. The front door, the fire exits, the back door through the kitchen; I’d checked them all out on more than one occasion.
“You look like dermo,” Konstantin observed coolly after sipping Cuban coffee from a tiny cup cradled in his palm. As strong as the drink was, I was surprised it didn’t dissolve the china between itself and freedom. I was working. The glass of iced tea before me was for appearance only. I kept my hands below the level of the bright red and yellow tablecloth and my eyes scanning the lunch crowd. “Noisy neighbors,” I replied blandly, shrugging my shoulders lightly under my jacket. Lukas was my business and mine alone. Anatoly had made that clear.