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Cavallaro might have been American, but he shared the same mentality as his Russian brothers. Control. It was all about control. He hadn’t tried to clear his wife’s name because he could use the outstanding warrant to keep her in line, and what kind of life was that?
Kaylin, Kaylin, Kaylin… Why didn’t you learn from the past?
She’d probably been too young to understand how badly Nico’s father treated her mother. All she remembered was the trappings of wealth, the illusion.
Nico? He remembered the screams that came from his father’s bedroom as he roughed up Renée La Rocca. He remembered watching movies with eight-year-old Kaylin and turning up the volume so she wouldn’t have to listen. Back then, he’d been a weedy sixteen-year-old, still developing, and he remembered the helplessness, the frustration of being unable to stop his father from treating women as throwaway items. His mother, in her way, had been complicit. She came from a good family, and she was happy for him to use her name and connections as long as she got money out of it. Hadn’t cared about the mistresses as long as he left her alone. While Nico had lived in Moscow with a succession of nannies, she’d lunched in Paris and shopped in Milan before being found dead in a Sardinian hotel suite a week before his twelfth birthday. She’d tripped and fallen, the autopsy report said. Any mention of blood alcohol content had been erased from the official record.
And now the cycle continued. Kaylin followed in her mother’s footsteps while the boy, Matty, walked in Nico’s.
Would he spend sleepless nights plotting his father’s demise? Would he get as far as loading a gun, only to back away at the last moment? Nico had chickened out a dozen times before the angel of death visited. Viktoria, she’d called herself, although he doubted that was her real name. As his father lay dying, he’d watched her flit across the lawn and into the trees, carefully avoiding the security patrols. A ghost. At twenty, he’d have stood a better chance of identifying her ass than her face, so he’d been no help to the police in that respect, not that he’d tried hard to describe her.
Some things were better left alone.
But Kaylin’s fate wasn’t one of them.
This time, Nico had been blessed with the good fortune to cross paths with Emmy Black, and if she was the person he suspected she was, then perhaps he wouldn’t have to spend another decade waiting for the nightmare to unfold.
He picked up the phone and dialled.
18
EMMY
I tamped down a smile as Nico Belinsky walked across the rooftop pool deck at the Black Diamond Hotel in NYC. I’d told him to wear Speedos—partly to check he wasn’t wearing a wire and partly for my own amusement—and he’d complied. Yeah, yeah, I was married, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate a fine specimen of a man when he was right in front of me.
“Drink?” I asked.
“Belvedere, straight up.”
Must be serious if he was diving right into the liquor. I waved over a waiter and relayed the order, plus requested another orange juice for myself. I needed to stay sober for the discussion I suspected we were about to have.
“We can take a swim while the bartender pours.”
It was a little chilly to hang out poolside, which made the location perfect for my purposes. There were only two other couples present, and I’d made sure they were assigned cabanas far away from ours.
Nico gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I’m not wearing a wire.”
“I didn’t think for a minute that you would be, but it’s so much fun to check.”
He looked me up and down slowly, and my bikini didn’t cover much more than his teeny-weeny trunks. Finally, he grinned, but there was tension in it.
“Okay, I’ll play the game.”
A member of my team would be checking his luggage while we talked, including the contents of his phone and laptop. I’d told Nico to leave any electronics in his suite. Even if he’d locked his shit in the safe, that wouldn’t cause us a problem. Hotel safes were a joke. There was always an override because so many guests forgot their code. And my tech team was the best in the business, so bypassing passwords wouldn’t be a problem either, although I’d be disappointed if Nico used his birthday or the name of his cat, both of which I knew.
I dove cleanly into the pool and ended up at the far end in four strokes. It wasn’t a big pool, more of a gimmick than anything else, but the bar was top notch. Nico followed suit and quickly caught up with me.
“Blyat, that’s freezing.”
“Oh, poor diddums. Have your nuts shrivelled?”
“Not as much as your nipples.”
“Touché. I thought you’d be used to the cold.”
“I lived in Moscow, not Siberia, and when it snowed, we flew somewhere warmer.”
“Sometimes, I wish I could do that.”
