AllFreeNovel Stories worth discovering

Married to the BRATVA Guard

Page 25

by Ella Thorne

There’ll be no five-hundred-guest wedding. No ballroom at the Drake, no ice sculpture, no ten Bratva families sizing each other up across the dance floor. That’s what everyone expected from a Maximov daughter.

Galana wanted a chapel with forty seats and her sisters in the front row. So that’s what she gets.

At seven in the morning, I’m standing in my apartment in a dark suit, fastening my cufflinks, when Arkady calls.

“I have your seller,” he says, without any greeting.

My hands stop moving.

“I traced the payment. The house package. One hundred and twenty thousand, in crypto, through three wallets. Then out again into a shell company in Delaware. Then into a bank account in the Caymans.” Paper rustles on his end. “The Delaware company is called Northwind Integrated Solutions. It has one director, a dentist in Ohio who doesn’t exist.”

“And the Cayman account?”

“Belongs to Daniel Riddings.”

I close my eyes.

I knew it. I’ve known it since the first time I sat in that control room and watched his cameras record nothing at all for eleven minutes. Brenner was the hands. Riddings was the man who sold Maximov information, piece by piece, to anyone who’d pay.

“Who paid him?” I ask.

“That I’m still working on. The money came in through a casino in Gary. Indiana. It’s laundered very well.” A pause. “But that casino has a silent partner, Caleb. You know who it is.”

“Rusakov.”

“Close enough. Oleg Rusakov’s brother-in-law.”

Close enough to be sure. Not close enough to prove.

“Send me everything,” I say.

“Already in your inbox.”

I hang up. I stand very still in front of the mirror, in my wedding suit, with one cufflink still in my hand. My reflection looks back at me, perfectly calm.

Inside, I want to burn something down.

Yaroslav trusted that man. He let him walk through his house, past his daughters’ bedrooms, with a tool belt and a smile. And Riddings took the old man’s money with one hand and sold his information with the other. For a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Less than the price of the dining table in my Winnetka house.

Somewhere out there tonight, a man has floor plans with Galana’s bedroom on them.

I put the cufflink on.

I could go now. I could find Riddings before lunch, and Brenner by dinner, and I could make sure neither of them ever touched anything of hers again. Leo would come. Ivor would come, if I asked, and he’d enjoy it.

I think about Galana.

I think about her standing in the chapel in front of Father Iestyn, looking at the doors, waiting for me. Wondering if something more important came up. The way things always came up, for every person in her life. Her father, with his business. Her sisters, with their emergencies. All of them, all her life, putting something else first.

No.

I call Leo and tell him to double the men on Riddings’s office and his house. I tell him to watch, not to move. I forward everything Arkady sent to Arina and Garick, with one line at the top. Not today. Tomorrow.

Then I pick up the ring box and go to get married.

The chapel smells of beeswax and old incense.

Galana’s sisters fill the front row on the left. Arina’s in navy, with Garick beside her and his hand on her knee, which she’s pretending not to notice. Zhenya’s in black, as if she’s at another funeral. Milana’s in sequins at ten in the morning. Evaria’s crying already, and Theo’s handing her tissues one at a time from a packet he’s clearly brought for this exact purpose.