Hard Bastard(43)

“He was raping her. I was told that it was up to me to handle her.”

“You were ordered to send her a message,” he said coolly. “You didn’t follow through. We had to take drastic measures.”

“By sending Kuzma?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Why does this girl matter so much?”

“Ah, now you’re asking the right question.”

“It’s been bothering me. Sure, she’s the ADA prosecuting Evgeni, but who the fuck cares about Evgeni? He’ll probably get off anyway.”

Vadik slowly took a box of cigarillos from his pocket. He slid out one and put it in his mouth, holding it there. Finally, he took a lighter from his pocket and lit the thing, puffing it gently. He didn’t seem to care that families and kids were nearby, and that the park was supposed to be a nonsmoking zone.

It was just a display of power, I knew, but it still annoyed me. I didn’t give a fuck about secondhand smoke, but I did care that he was subtly pushing back against me, showing me who was the boss in this situation.

“There’s pressure from above, as you well know,” he said. “The feds are sending out funding in order to start cracking down on organized crime. Our little town was on that list of places that will get a large chunk of that fed cash.”

“Which explains why the cops won’t take bribes, but not why she’s so important.”

“She found something,” he said. “My contacts in the DA’s office told me that she was doing research not just on Evgeni and his case, but on the entire family. As far as I can tell, she found some very interesting little connections while digging around.”

I clenched my jaw. The fucking stupid and brave girl. Of course, she went above and beyond what she needed to do. She hated the mafia more than anyone I’d ever met, so of course she was going to dig as deep as she could.

Naturally she found something. Ashertown was built on the back of scandal, corruption, and bribery. It was a fucking hotbed of mafia activity because every single cop, politician, and businessman was thoroughly fucking corrupt. It was a mafia man’s playground. All she needed to do was sniff around a little bit and she’d turn up loads of incriminating shit.

“How bad?” I asked him.

“Bad,” he said. “Very, very bad. The sort of things that we’ve buried in the past.”

“What do you want from me?” I asked him.

“I want you to remember where your loyalties lie,” he said, anger slipping into his voice. “But seeing as that isn’t happening, I want her files.”

“That’s it? Just her files and this all goes away?”

“After what you did, nothing goes away. But no, that isn’t it. The files are just the start.”

“What else do you want?”

“I will pay you half a million dollars for her.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Half a million dollars if you turn her over to me. And I will let you leave Ashertown a fairly wealthy man.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“She dug very deeply,” Vadik said.

“I have to think about it.”

He nodding, puffing his cigarillo. “Think fast,” he said. “Very fast. I’m running out of patience.”

I stood up, glancing around. Part of me expected a bunch of thugs to emerge from behind the trees to grab me, but nothing happened.

I turned and walked quickly away. “I’ll be in touch soon,” Vadik called after me. “Remember what I said.”

I didn’t look back. Vadik’s offer was rolling around in my mind, and I almost couldn’t believe how much he was willing to pay to get her back. Sadie must have found something important, something very important. Whatever it is might be enough to take down the whole mob, or at least Vadik seemed to think so.

That was a good thing. That meant we had leverage.

But it also meant that Vadik was never, ever going to stop. He was never going to back down, no matter what happened.

I could be a rich man after this. All I had to do was betray the woman I already sacrificed so much for.





Chapter 17





Sadie





I felt complete stifled sitting in that room alone. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to leave, but Gage had already promised me that the mafia didn’t know where we were.

Besides, for some reason I was still starving. The greasy pancakes he brought me from the diner didn’t do nearly enough to stop my hunger. Maybe it was because I was still in shock or something, but I was absolutely starving.

I tried to distract myself by leafing through files, but that didn’t last long. I’d gone through them hundreds of times and teased out whatever connections I could. There was a lot of stuff in there, some of it pretty surprising, but none of that mattered anymore. I was effectively done practicing law, even if I wanted to.