Chapter Eighteen
Yulyia Kolyadenko had a serious shopping habit. This hadn’t been referenced in Grif’s gathered data. Ditto the almost disturbing affection for something that looked like a cross between a gerbil and a rat, yet barked like a dog. She carried the shivering, useless thing for three long hours, never allowing its painted pink toes and sweater-clad underbelly to touch the ground. Grif knew this because he’d trailed her and two bodyguards as they wound their way through a cavernous place that reminded him of one of the lower levels of hell. The indoor monstrosity was serpentine, brightly lit, loud, and hosted a population of screeching young girls. It was called a mall.
Dodging cart vendors who inexplicably kept trying to put lotion on his hands, and others who wanted him to buy T-shirts stamped with the names of places he’d never been, he watched Mrs. Kolyadenko enter stores with a brisk, confident gait, yank clothing and belts and jewelry and shoes from the racks, purchase most without trying them on—thank God—then hand the packages over to the men flanking her, essentially turning them into beefy bellmen. Grif started to believe his hunch was wrong—how could a woman so obsessed with red-soled shoes run an entire network of foreign mobsters?—and he’d just decided to abandon her and her pampered fur ball when she slipped through a pair of discreetly placed side doors, and into a waiting stretch limo. Pausing halfway into the car, she turned slightly, then marched back through the porte cochere and directly up to Grif.
“You are following me.” Her voice was husky and low, her eyes cerulean and sharp.
Grif glanced down at the fur ball, spotting eyeballs and a pink tongue. It was definitely a dog. “Yes.”
“I don’t like it when strange men follow me.”
“I’m not that strange,” Grif replied.
Yulyia remained still and cold, like a Siberian ice sculpture.
“Besides,” he added, flicking his gaze at each of the flanking bodyguards, letting them know he saw them. “I’m a detective.”
She sneered. “First a cop. Now detective. I am starting to get paranoid, I think.”
“A cop?”
“Yes. This morning. He requested a meeting with my husband.” She lifted her chin. “He got me instead.”
Disquiet settled in Grif’s stomach like a stone, weighing him down at the center. “Detective Carlisle?”
“You know him?”
Grif inclined his head.
“Of course you do.” Yulyia flipped her hair, and her voice turned thin, honed. “All of you followers know each other.”
“I’d like to talk to you, Mrs. Kolyadenko. If you have a few minutes.”
Yulyia just turned and walked away. “If you’re trying to use me to get to my husband, Mr. . . . ?”
“Shaw,” Grif said, keeping stride. “Griffin Shaw.”
Yulyia paused as before, one heel perched inside the waiting limo, right arm thrown over the open door. “Mr. Shaw. My husband has not been well and he is getting tired of being harassed.” She drummed her long red nails on the window. “I’m getting tired of it.”
Tired? Grif mused. Because female or not, given the look in her cold blue eyes, he’d have said “furious.”
“You’re the boss,” he replied lightly, tucking his hands into his pockets, but Yulyia’s head whipped up, gem-like eyes narrowing. She held up a hand before her bodyguard could close her door, and Grif let a closed-mouthed smile grow on his face.
“Get in,” she told him, and the bodyguards headed his way.
Grif had never been in a limousine before, and took a moment to study the interior—the creamy leather, the thick carpeting, the bar, and the glossy woodwork—but ignored the bodyguard currently trying to drill holes through Grif’s head with his eyes alone. Instead, Grif shifted to face the Viper and the real danger.
“Now,” she said, as the limo pulled smoothly from the curb. “What could you possibly want from me?”
“I’d like to know why your bratva attacked a woman in a parking lot, and left her bloody and terrorized with a drug-filled syringe attached to her arm.”
Yulyia laughed and folded her hands over her knee. “Why would I do that? Who is this woman?”
“Why would you do that?” Grif asked.
“We,” she corrected so quickly the word emerged like buckshot.
“We?” Grif echoed, widening his smile.
Yulyia, though, was no longer amused. “I mean Sergei, of course.”
“Of course.”
Hands cradling her small dog, Yulyia began petting it in quick strokes. “You should not look at me in such a way, Mr. Shaw. Bare so many teeth, and someone might think you came here to bite.”
Placing his elbows on his knees, Grif leaned so close to Yulyia that she would need only to extend her index finger to touch him. Yet, her knuckles were white, bones showing as her hands fell still, and after a moment her little dog squealed. With a jerk, she relaxed her hold, and looked away.
Grif did not. “Why was the editor of the Las Vegas Tribune left lying in a parking lot with krokodil kissing her veins?”
Surprise widened Yulyia’s deep-set gaze, but she instantly blinked it away. Marin’s attack hadn’t hit the wires yet, so of course she wouldn’t know about it . . . unless she was a very good actress. By the time Grif had completed that thought, Yulyia was stroking her rat-dog again, fully recovered. “Mr. Shaw,” she said, slanting her legs to one side and nestling into the plush leather. “Do I really look like a woman who deals drugs?”
“I don’t care about the drugs, Kolyadenko,” he snapped back, using her surname, same as he would a man. “I care about the woman.”
For a moment Yulyia looked like the Viper that Ray had likened her to—body taut, head tilted, blood all but vibrating beneath her skin. Yet she didn’t strike. Even the oversize rat in her lap remained still. Grif wondered what he’d said that’d stunted her aggressiveness.
“The Rusanovka bratva,” he went on when she still said nothing, “which your husband is known to head, is infamous for its drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, and money laundering.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that, too.” A deep frown appeared on Yulyia’s forehead. It did nothing to detract from her beauty. “But, again, I ask you. Do I look like a woman who deals drugs?”
She looked sleek and sexy to his mortal eyes, and his celestial ones didn’t detect even a tinge of fatalistic plasma, and if she’d ever done drugs, even long ago, it would be there. Staring at the crystalline etheric outline, Grif had to wonder if she’d ever had a cold. She was a blank canvas . . . minus the canvas. There was simply nothing there. Grif finally answered, “No.”
“That’s right,” she said, tossing that thick, golden mane, and settling her dog next to her. Even with all the fur obscuring its features, the little animal looked relieved. “And has anyone been able to prove that the Kolyadenkos are anything but good American citizens?”
“Not that I know of.” Grif shrugged.
“Exactly. People are jealous. People are stupid. And people make up things that they can’t prove. Krokodil,” she scoffed, infusing the sole word with Slavic disdain. “I’d have to be stupid to bring that trash into this country.”
Grif didn’t point out that she’d never asked what krokodil was in the first place. “And who would like to make you look stupid?”
Eyes narrowed, she leaned so close her breath shocked him into a shiver. “What is your angle, Mr. Shaw?”
“No angle,” he answered shortly. “Just wondering about your enemies. It’s only a theory, but maybe other outfits have designs on your drug territory.”
“I told you. I don’t do—”
“Maybe,” Grif went on, “Marco Baptista.”
The hitch was slight, but Grif caught it, and Yulyia knew it. She lifted her chin and ran the tip of her tongue across her bottom lip. The move was both thoughtful and provocative. Grif thought he heard the bodyguard next to him swallow hard.
“That Cuban,” she finally spat. “That nothing of a man who likes to hit women.”
The description married with Grif’s gut instinct about the man. “He beats women?”
“How do you think his own grandmother lost all her teeth?” Yulyia scoffed, though Grif couldn’t tell if the disdain was for Baptista or his grandmother.
Grif trained his gaze on her placid face and not the long, bare legs in front of him. “He doesn’t seem to be a big fan of the fairer sex, does he?”
“Unlike you?” she retorted, scorn slithering through her words.
No, Grif decided, he wasn’t wrong about her. Although, locked in the back of a speeding vehicle with that look, along with an armed man next to him, Grif wasn’t feeling very self-congratulatory about it. “Unlike me.”
“Pull over,” Yulyia called to the driver, then addressed the man across from Grif. “Get out.”
His gaze flicked to Grif, but he left the car as soon as it came to a halt, without comment or question. Yulyia pressed a button, raising the privacy shield between her and the driver, saying only one word before he disappeared. “Drive.”
Grif thought better about waving to the meathead outside the car. The tinted glass would keep him from seeing it anyway, and the man already had his head down as he trudged along the gravel next to the asphalt, the rocky terrain a better choice than the still blazing street.
“What is your interest in Marco Baptista?” Yulyia asked, dropping her head against her soft leather headrest and observing him through a half-lidded gaze.
Grif held out his hands, palms up. “Two of the kids using krokodil died in his neighborhood.”
“Then maybe you should be questioning him.”
“I have.”
“Good. Because he’s known for dealing trash. In fact, he has a lot in common with the drug’s namesake. He lurks in the murkiest of places. He feeds on other living beings. He lives like an animal.”
Grif said, “And how would a woman like you know that?”
“And what kind of woman do you think I am, Mr. Shaw?” She uncrossed her legs at the ankle, lifting the right, draping it over her other knee.
“I think you’re calculated. And driven,” he answered immediately. “I think you once stood for so many hours in a breadline that you swore you’d never go hungry again,” he said, paraphrasing a line from the most famous movie of his childhood. “I think you’d do anything to keep from doing so again.”
Yulyia stared at him so long that the road ribboning beneath their tires took on a musical quality as they slid back onto the freeway, as if it could go on forever, and so could a breadline, and so could a stare.
“What did you mean earlier?” he was surprised to find himself asking. “When you called me a follower?”
“Just what I said. If you had any initiative at all, you wouldn’t be taking the orders, Mr. Shaw. You would be giving them. Then again, followers have their place in the world, too. We can’t all give orders.”
“Like you?” he asked.
“I like to be heard, if that’s what you mean. But that’s not what makes me different,” she added, preventing him from having to ask. “I have a gift for seeing a situation both as it is and as it could be. Most people merely long for the world to be as they wish it.”
“You’re not a dreamer?”
“Dreamers are easily deceived.”
“So you’re a realist?”
“I am . . . settled.”
Some guys spend their entire lives searching for a place to settle . . .
Grif frowned, Sarge’s words hitting him as hard as the paper had the morning the Pure angel appeared in a paperboy’s flesh. Was this what he’d meant? That Grif had more in common with someone who was Lost, like Jeap, than the coolly self-possessed woman who sat across from him now? He didn’t mind the contrast with Yulyia, of course, but he didn’t think that made him a follower.
Yulyia had been intensely quiet during Grif’s musings, but she tilted her head to the right now, interrupting his thoughts. “I like your hat. May I see it?”
Grif shrugged, then handed over the hat Kit had given him. Yulyia spotted the button to activate the navigation feature immediately, and Grif quickly explained what it was. He didn’t want her dropping her pretty pooch and reaching for the lady’s pistol she no doubt had stored back here. The bodyguard might be gone, but the danger was not. “It’s just a tool to find my way around the city. Like an electronic compass.”
Turning the hat in her hand, she still looked suspicious. “Why do you need electronic compass in hat?”
“I get lost easy.” Grif shrugged, his genuine embarrassment causing Yulyia to laugh, possibly her first genuine emotion during the day. Smiling, she placed the hat atop her head.
“Why do you do it?” Grif asked her as she adjusted the fedora into a fashionable tilt.
“Do what?”
“Hide behind a man.” Which would disappoint Kit. It put Yulyia firmly out of the running for Bella. “We both know your husband isn’t the one running the bratva. So why pretend it’s him?”
Yulyia propped an arm against the door, tucking the long red fingernails beneath her chin as she stared out the window. “I am Russian, Mr. Shaw. In my country, women are traditionally subservient to men. Like most men who came of age in Soviet society, my Sergei still lives in past. Such men are obsessed with honoring their fathers and family name, and doing something that will make those old, dead men proud. Yet I am woman.”
“I noticed,” Grif said.
“And as woman I am charged with looking forward. I must create my own future.”
“Only women do that?”
“Women know, as most men can’t, that we must choose fate before it is chosen for us.” Outside, the city passed by with frightful speed. Yulyia licked her bottom lip again, this time more slowly. “You are considering my words. That is also novel for a man.”
“Can you cut the insults, please?”
“Only if you do the same,” she said. “No more stupid questions. You and that cop. You know Baptista is dealing this shit. You know he introduced drug that originated in Russia to frame me.” She narrowed her eyes. “And you also know that telling me all this means I have incentive to stop these horrible deaths.”
“See,” Grif said, not denying it. “I can be forward-looking, too.”
Yulyia smiled at that, and if Grif wasn’t mistaken, this smile, too, was genuine. There was a long stretch of silence where they merely studied each other. This, he decided, had to be how she derived her nickname. Not because of a swift offensive strike, but due to the intensity of that unwavering stare. No man would ever fear her physical strength, but all could fear that forward-looking resolve.
“I really do like this hat,” she finally said, as the driver took an off-ramp. Uncrossing her legs, she slumped low in her seat. “I think I would like to wear this hat.”
“You are wearing it,” Grif pointed out, as they came to a stop at a red light.
Sliding lower, she propped one heel on each side of Grif’s body. “I think I would like to wear it and nothing else, with you on your knees before me.”
“I think I’d like my hat back now,” Grif said.
Yulyia just smiled. “I will tell driver to take freeway again. You will put those big hands inside my thighs. You will split me with your tongue. Then you will thank me for allowing it.”
You are a follower.
Grif fought to keep his eyes on hers. “I’ll just take the hat.”
“But you said all those lovely things about me.” She lifted her arms over her head, opening to him so that she was nearly reclined, and pressed the button on the hat’s brim. It began beeping in insistent, even beats. “Don’t you find me attractive?”
“You’re very beautiful.”
“Then what is problem?” There was a hint of anger in her tone, just a flash of that viper’s flare. “You can’t really be that attached to this hat.”
Gently, Grif put a palm on each of her ankles, the skin smooth and warm beneath his calloused hands. She shivered, and though he didn’t think she was feigning it, he still lifted one leg gently and crossed her legs for her. Yulyia immediately pushed into a sitting position. The dog squealed next to her. She ignored it.
Grif said, “Your beauty is not the problem. The problem is that touching you would be exactly like touching Marco Baptista. You both lurk in murky places. You both feed on other living beings. You both live like animals.”
“Look around, Shaw. Do I abide in filth like that man?”
No. If possessions were the barometer, she couldn’t be more different from Baptista.
He pointed at her chest, at where her heart was supposed to be. “I meant in there. You might be settled, sweetheart, you might be a survivor and a realist, and a leader of men who long for the good old commie days, but your heart is one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen.”
And the emptiness he sensed surrounding her suddenly made sense. There was a phosphorous gap around her etheric body not because she was clean, but because she was lifeless. Plasma didn’t gather around someone who was already dead, and that’s what Yulyia was inside.
Yulyia didn’t strike at him, not like a viper or even a woman just scorned. But she did immediately stop the car. Grif had expected that, but he still sighed as he was dumped back in the early evening heat. It was a residential neighborhood, and in this city they all looked the same. He’d been hoping to get kicked out closer to the center of town.
“Good-bye, Mr. Shaw,” Yulyia said coolly. He held out a hand, but Yulyia just gave him a closed-mouthed smile from beneath the brim of his beeping fedora. It was one of the most chilling looks he’d ever seen. “Don’t forget to keep looking forward.”
Then the window lifted, and she was gone.