Toni couldn’t contain her sob as her shoulders sagged and her chin dropped to her chest. Her fate would have been the same had she gone in the front door. It just took one little hiccup in her routine to save her, and she wasn’t wasting that second chance.
“Toni,” Jon whispered, pulling her close, letting his chin rest atop her head. “No more. No more tonight. This stresses your heart and I do not like it.”
She buried her face in his shoulder, fighting hot tears. “It’s okay. Really. Needless to say, I got the hell out of Dodge as fast as I could, because I knew they’d be looking for me. I’d told Andre when I asked to meet him that something was going on with Stas.”
Jon’s grip tightened on her arm, his voice low and menacing. “Why do I suspect this Stas found you?”
And then, she’d done the dumbest thing she’d ever done in her life. She told her hothead, overprotective brother. “Because he did. I stupidly confided in my brother, and to this day I can’t believe I did something so careless. But at that point, I still didn’t know anything about Stas’s involvement in the mafia or how widespread his reach was. I just thought he was a bad guy with a hot accent. But I had to tell someone what I saw. So I told my brother Cormac that Stas was cooking the books. I didn’t know what else to do. I knew I should have gone to the police, but I panicked.”
She’d wanted Cormac to go with her, and that had been the plan, until…
“Forgive my ineptitude. How does one cook a book? Surely there’s no culinary value in leather and parchment?”
Her shoulders slumped. “It means to fix them so they look like one thing but are absolutely another. Anyway, I told my brother. We planned to go to the police and tell them everything I’d seen.”
She’d never forget Cormac’s handsome face when he’d heard her story that night, after she’d left the dealership. His disbelief, his rage.
“I suspect your brother is a fierce knight?”
Toni nodded, her heart tight with sorrow. “He is. It’s just the two of us since my mother died six years ago, and we were…are very close. He took me to his house and told me to stay put. But Stas showed up and the next thing I know, I’m out cold and Cormac is gone.”
Jon lifted her chin, forcing her to look at him. “And this Stas? What did he do to you, Toni? Tell me.”
She shook her head as salty tears welled in her eyes. “He tied me up, held a gun to my head, threatened to kill me.”
And she’d stuck her face right back in his, dared him to pull the trigger, using the same technique he’d once told her he used when confronted with a heated argument.
Be the crazy, Antonia.
And then he’d laughed at the size of her balls, his deep-brown eyes glinting with maniacal pleasure. But Stas was far more into a good mind game, which he’d played like an expert by telling her all the things they were going to do, not just to her, but to Cormac.
“A gun? This is a weapon?”
“A bad weapon. Maybe even worse than a sword. It’s faster, stronger.”
“But you escaped his clutches.”
“Just by pure luck. Stas might be pretty badass, but he’s not exactly a rocket scientist.”
Jon’s stare was blank.
“It means he’s not very smart. I managed to get loose while he was on his cell phone in another room. I know Cormac’s house well, so I climbed out a window and slid down a trellis and made a break for it. Somehow I got back to my apartment, and that’s when I found…” She sucked in the cold air with a shiver.
Jon stiffened, the sympathetic anguish clear on his face. “Cormac?”
Toni shuddered, rubbing her arms. “No. My neighbor, Woody. I remember seeing him as Cormac and I left. My best guess is that he heard us talking about going to my brother’s place. Stas probably used his strong-arm tactics to get him to spill the beans about our location. Woody saw me that night when I got back from the dealership—he knew something was wrong because I was close to hysteria by that point. Stas must have sensed that Woody knew something, because he killed him and left him in the middle of my living room.”
Gripping her temple with her forefinger and thumb, she fought that image, the resurrection of the memory of Woody’s body, facedown on her hardwood floor, a hole in the back of his head.
“This Stas must die,” Jon growled with clear agitation, the muscles of his arms flexing in tension.
“If you ever get to Jersey, I’ll give you his address. Bring a sharp sword,” she joked.
“This is no laughing matter, Toni. He is vicious and should swing at dawn.”
“Don’t think for one second I don’t want that, but proving it is a whole other story.”
Just before she’d taken off, she’d made a phone call to the police. Told them everything she saw at the dealership, about Woody and her brother, and they’d claimed to have taken all that information down—and had done absolutely nothing.
Because Stas was part of a network of cold-blooded killers just like him who were pretty good about cleaning up their messes. No one matched the brief description she’d given to the police of the man at the dealership, and Woody’s death wasn’t a death with no body to show for it.