In For the Kill (McClouds & Friends #11)(11)

It wasn’t fair. Sam deserved someone less f*cked up than she was, even if she weren’t leaving the country. Even if he didn’t have checkmarks next to every characteristic she could not possibly accept in a lover. He was a homicide detective, like her father. He was addicted to danger, he liked bourbon, he had multiple bullet scars.

That, she did not need, on top of her other complicated shit. Thanks, but no. It would be like painting a target on her chest that said, Yes, hurt me, please. Go ahead. I was genetically engineered for it.

Hell with that. She wasn’t going to play out that sad, sick drama. No matter how deeply she’d been programmed to do so.

Maybe she’d just skip sleep from now on. Maybe she could just stay awake forever. She ran her fingers through her hair. Found two pins that clung to the remnants of her updo and twisted the thick rope up again. A temporary measure. It would tumble down soon enough.

Sam never gave up, never lost interest. His laser focus was unnerving. A normal man would have written her off by now. His focused intensity cut through her defenses, to secret places she’d forgotten were there. But she was not that terrified twelve-year-old, locked in stinking darkness. She did not appreciate being forced to feel like that again. Remembering it was painful. The way the little ones had clung to her. Needing her to be strong, needing her to love them. She’d hated herself for lying to them, even as she soothed or reassured them.

But she had, by God, learned how to put on a good show.

Sam brought those feelings back. No defenses. Back to the wall.

Not that Sam was cruel or frightening. On the contrary. It was the rawness she could not endure. It hurt, to be so bare. Buzzing with lethal voltage. She couldn’t breathe, think, function in this condition. She would melt down, go nuts, totally lose it. Not even during her long, historic crush on Josh had she felt like that, but she’d been too clueless and innocent at the time to know the difference.

She’d drawn some conclusions about sex, pre-Sam, after her hopes for Josh had come to nothing and her college dating adventures had gone nowhere. What she’d taken away from it all in the end was that there were far more important things in life to fuss about.

It made her squirm, to hear Sam echo that private conviction back to her. Who gave him the right to know something so intimate about her when she’d barely articulated it for herself? She couldn’t let someone so deep inside her head. She’d watched that dynamic play out between her parents. It had not been pleasant watching, even before Zhoglo’s revenge, her abduction, her father’s murder.

Even finding her daughter alive had not saved Sveti’s mother. She’d become unbalanced and paranoid. Had begun making bizarre claims about mass graves. People being murdered in illicit experiments.

No proof of her claims was ever found, and eventually, they had locked her in a mental hospital. Sveti had been fortunate to have a safe place to be with her friends in America for that awful interval.

But even after she was released a few years later, Sveti had not gotten her mother back. Sonia had promptly run off to Italy and taken a new lover. Some rich, pampered, hateful Italian guy. Ick.

And then, without warning or a good-bye, she’d killed herself.

Sveti had been finishing high school in Cray’s Cove at the time, living at Tam and Val’s. Mama’s last letter had been to tell Sveti to cancel her plans to come to Italy to spend Christmas together.

Visit another time, she’d said. Right before she threw herself off a bridge.

Stupid, to think about this stuff at all. Old pain, dredged up to no good purpose. Her mother had seemed so strong, but it was all show. Like her own show, with the kids in the traffickers’ dungeon. Bombast and theater, and behind it, the ugly truth. Weakness, despair. Loss of hope.

And a long fall through the dark.

Love did that to a person. Grief drowned you. Or it ripped out your guts, as Zhoglo had done to her father. Or ripped out your heart, as Zhoglo had almost done to her. Call them life lessons or call them dysfunctional hang-ups, it hardly mattered. They were part of her now, like her bones or her blood. And speaking of dysfunctional hang-ups.

She pulled her phone out and logged in to the account she used to communicate with her best friend, Sasha, who had shared her ordeal. Sasha was the son of one of Zhoglo’s henchmen, Pavel Cherchenko. The man had fallen out of the vor’s favor, and Zhoglo had punished him by selling the man’s young son to the organ traffickers.

She and Sasha had been together from the very beginning. They had bonded in their captivity, although Sasha had stopped speaking, even to her, after a few months. The other children had been too small to talk. Several had been developmentally disabled as well. It had been so lonely. Sveti had almost forgotten how to talk herself, by the end.

Sasha had his own struggles these days. Depression, heroin addiction, and his extremely dangerous father. Pavel Cherchenko had taken over Zhoglo’s empire after he’d killed the old vor, and he was, if anything, more ruthless and cruel than Zhoglo had been. Tricky, with her calling in life, to have the son of a mafiya vor for a best friend. But who got to choose?

There were no messages from Sasha in the drafts folder. Just the ones she had sent to him, still unanswered. She opened a message document, and typed.



You still in Rome? Did you see my talk? Coming to Italy next week. Can’t wait to see you. Sveti.





She saved the message in the file without sending it, hoping that he was all right. Poor, hunted Sasha. She did not blame him for his addiction, knowing what he struggled with, but it drove her mad with anxiety. She’d lost so many people. She couldn’t bear to lose Sasha to that awful black hole, too.