“How long have you been assassinating low-life criminals, beautiful?”
I blink rapidly, not sure if I’d heard him correctly. There’s no way he could have just asked me what I think he did.
“Uh, what?”
“Daria, I know.” The look on his face is curious yet determined. Surprisingly, I don’t see any judgment. Or approval for that matter.
“How long have you known?”
“A while. I’ve been following you at night. Since you took out the guy on forty-third street.”
“That long?”
He nods.
Bile rises in my throat. How is it possible that he’s known for that long and not said anything to me? And more importantly that he’s known for that long and I haven’t caught on. That he’s been following me and neither myself nor my girls have seen him. We are too good for that. We don’t miss things like tails.
“What are you going to do?” I hate that my voice shakes.
“Why don’t we start with you telling me why.”
So, I do.
“My great-grandmother is Lidya Limonov.”
The ways he nods tells me he’s not getting it.
“The original femme fatale,” I add.
“The sniper?” The shocked tone in his voice a sign that he’s starting to understand.
I take a deep breath and ready myself to tell him my story. “In my family, there is at least one person in every generation with the gift of sight, as Lidya would call it. Sight being the eye for shooting, an innate talent. Before me it was my mother. Her mother before her, and Lidya before that. So far it’s always been a woman, even though the boys are tested for the gift at a youthful age as well.
“The men in my family make a lot of money, but in ways that are not so, how you would say, above board. And it is often necessary to take out the competition. Or the customer. As retribution, payment, etcetera. Another way to make money for our family is as hired assassinations. Training begins at an early age—at age eight for me. It is not limited to just guns, but also hand-to-hand combat, explosives, poisons, self-defense, code deciphering, much of what you would consider spy espionage.
“We are readied for anything. I have a cousin who works exclusively for Putin as a Jane-of-all-trades. She is not as good as I am. Putin would have paid double for me. But my mother promised us all one wish on her deathbed, for me it was to visit America with my sister. Before we came here, a while before actually, she started with the cocaine. We drink very heavily as it is, and when she would mix it with the cocaine, it would not go well. As you can imagine. She liked to party. And my father, he likes the party girls.”
I pick up my cocktail and drain it, then motion to the server for another. My salad is still untouched after that first bite.
“I don’t think anything untoward ever happened, that is not my point. My point is that he was lenient with her. Let Katya have whatever she wanted, and she was very spoiled as a result. Within days of coming to America, she met a man who introduced her to heroin. And she fell in love. With the man and the drug. It was all I could do not to kill him. I don’t even know how it happened so quickly, her addiction. It was as if one minute she was my sister and the next, someone else entirely.
“At first it was fine, Katya seemed to be managing it, but I knew the guy was bad news. I could see it in the way his eyes traveled down my body whenever he saw me. As though he wanted to devour every inch, and not in an enjoyable way. Or at least not in a way that I appreciated or wanted to have happen. He was smart, I’ll give him that. Because he knew to stay away from me.
“But with my sister . . . Katya was never as strong as me. It’s like he could tell that she was low-hanging apple.”
“Fruit,” he interrupts. “It’s low-hanging fruit.”
I nod, not sure if I’m annoyed that he interrupted me, or appreciate that he corrected me.
“Anyway, he wasn’t wrong. We’d been here less than a week when she disappeared for the same amount of time. I was frantic trying to find her. I almost had my father’s men come to help me. But she eventually came back, acting like it was no big deal. That she’d been at a party that ran long, and she lost track of time. But, I mean, come on, a party that lasts for seven days?”
He nods as though he agrees with me. His attention has been riveted since I began talking.
“The second time Katya went missing, she failed to return at all. A few weeks later I received a DVD.”
I must brace myself for this part of the story, taking a large gulp of my second cocktail to help. “I watched what was on it and it was obvious Katya was being used as a sex slave.”
He reaches for my hand to comfort me, but I pull away. I can’t be touched when I talk about this, it would make me feel vulnerable when I don’t want to feel anything less than removed and untouchable.
“It was shortly after that I went to the party where I met you. I was there that night looking for clues. Either men I’d seen in the video, or something that might help me get Katya back.”
“Did you?” he asks.
“You know I didn’t. I met you and all sense just flew out the door.” I wave my hand in the air to illustrate my point. “It didn’t matter, none of the men showed their face in the video anyway. Unless I could examine their cocks, I wouldn’t know it was them.”
Mack stiffens as I say that. I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes because what a stupid thing to be upset or jealous about.
The server sets our main courses on the table and asks if everything is okay when she sees our unfinished salads. Mack gives her a look that has her backing away from the table quickly.
“It was a few weeks after that when I saw her again.” My lashes dampen and I feel a tear start to trickle down my cheek. Mack reaches out to wipe it gently from my face.
“She was walking down the street, looking all normal like to someone who didn’t know her. Only I could tell that she was missing. You know? Her eyes were vacant and blank. She looked like she hadn’t bathed in weeks. And the man she was with was pulling her forcibly down the block. She didn’t even recognize me when she saw me. And of course, the man didn’t know who I was.”
I take a deep breath again, because what I will tell him next is a decision I made, a bad one, that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
“But I made a mistake. A big one. Instead of doing anything right then, instead of rescuing my sister from the man, I waited and followed them. Back to a home in a regular neighborhood. And for two days, I watched the place not taking a break to sleep or eat.”
“My god, Daria.”
I wave my hand at him dismissively, not pausing to tell him how easy that was.
“Then I left to get weapons and ammunition, returning within a few hours. Ready to kill all the men and free my sister. But I was too late. Not with the men, I killed them all. Every last one of those assholes. But by the time I reached the room where my sister was being held, she was dead.”
I start to cry now openly. Not caring that we are in public, or that anyone can see me, or even that Mack is witnessing my emotions. Katya deserves so much more than just my embarrassment over showing weakness. She deserves to be alive. And she never will be again because I was stupid.
I blow my nose in the cloth napkin provided by the restaurant, feeling only mildly ashamed for whoever will have to touch it next. Then pat at my face to dry my tears.
Squaring my shoulders, I continue, “She’d overdosed. The needle still stuck in her arm as though she was mid-shot. Her body was still warm, but I was too late to save her.”
Mack sighs and sits back in his seat, knowing not to touch me, but also not knowing what else to do. I finish the rest of my cocktail before resuming my tale.
“I set the rest of the women free—seven aside from my sister. Not knowing what else to do for them. Not having a plan. It was a small operation, only four men. Easy enough for me to do on my own. Now, most times I have one of my girls with me. And we have set up multiple safe houses where we help the women either to be well enough to return to family or to rehabilitate or both. Whatever they need. Because I won’t let what happened to Katya happen to anyone else.”
“You did this all by yourself? How did I not know?” Mack asks.
“You were gone,” I tell him. “A longer trip, a few weeks I think.”
“What about your family, why didn’t they come?”
I laugh at that. “Remember how I said that my family is not exactly ‘above board’ with what they do?”
Mack nods.
“Well, had I told my father at any time before that, he would have sent an army to come and rain fire down on the city. Which would have resulted in a war—most likely against Ronan Sinclair—from which I do not believe my father would emerge a victor. So I waited until I took my vengeance and somehow convinced my father that it was too late for him to do anything.
“However, I don’t believe the men I killed that day were responsible for Katya, I think they were just, how do you say, caught in the cross fires?”
Mack nods.
“So, my father and I agreed that I would stay here and continue to hunt the men responsible. But to get to them, I must continue to take out the little guys. I’m waiting for the one who will lead me to the man in charge. Until then, I continue to kill.”
Mack looks shell shocked. Not that I blame him. But the look on his face is nothing compared to what I feel after his next sentence.
“Beautiful, I hate to tell you this, but I’m an agent with the criminal investigative sector of the FBI.”