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“Are you choking on them?” Emmy asked.
“Huh?”
“Those words you were about to say. Are you choking on them?”
“Yes. Yes, I am, and I’m taking great pleasure in it.”
Because he was getting Kaylin out of NYC, and then he was going to make sure she got her life back.
* * *
“Dude, no. That’s not how it works.”
“You said you’d help.”
Now Emmy was drinking properly. They’d retired to her Upper East Side apartment, where she’d kicked off her shoes and poured herself a gin and tonic, but unfortunately, alcohol hadn’t mellowed her at all.
“Yeah, and by ‘help,’ I mean that you’ll fly back to Oregon while my team extracts Kaylin, her kid, and her dog from Rapunzel’s tower, and then you thank us by paying my extremely large invoice promptly.”
“I need to be there for her.”
“And you will be. Once she arrives on the West Coast.”
“I’m not a complete novice at this sort of thing.”
“You might have done your father’s dirty work in Russia, but there’s a world of difference between slotting some dipshit whose family won’t retaliate because of who your daddy is, and walking onto Mafia turf and stealing a capo’s fucking wife. You can’t do it by force.”
“So how will you do it?”
“I have a few ideas, and none of them involve a shoot-out in the streets of New York.”
“She’ll be scared.”
“Do you have any idea how many hostages we’ve rescued?”
“How many?”
“Okay, so I don’t know either, but only because I’ve lost count. Definitely over a thousand.”
“And how many have you lost?”
“Four.”
If Nico were in Vegas, he’d play those odds, but he wasn’t, and this was Kaylin’s life they were talking about. But what kind of life would it be if they didn’t act? If Cesare Cavallaro was anything like Lev Belinsky, then Kaylin’s life expectancy would be considerably shorter than average.
He’d have to play the hand, and like it or not, he’d have to play by Emmy’s rules. Once, he’d had the weight of the Belinsky name behind him, but it didn’t mean much outside of Russia. And even inside Russia, he’d mostly left the game. True, he hadn’t entirely divested from his father’s business interests, and he still had some favours owing, but he had no desire to start a war.
“One condition. I’ll stay out of the way, but I want to fly with her.”
“You’ll wait on the plane.”
She was telling him, not asking him, but Nico nodded anyway.
“Yes.”
“I’ll leave a man with you, and if you so much as breathe funny, he’ll shoot you up with enough ketamine to knock out a horse.”
“Agreed.”
