Page 44 of Drowning in the Deep
I couldn’t help but thrash wildly against my bindings, trying to put even a small amount of space between us. It didn’t do me any good. He was relentless as he kept the spraying fluid in my face until the fizz died down and it was no longer shooting up my nose.
When he stepped away, the burning didn’t stop. I kept my eyes closed and tried to calm myself, but the sensation lingered for so long, I didn’t know if I was going to survive.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” he asked in a mocking voice.
I opened my slitted eyes and glared at him, noticing the bottle wasn’t empty. When he began to shake it up again, I knew what was coming.
I wouldn’t break. I couldn’t.
He stepped closer. “Want to tell me about Daemon Petrov?”
“Go fuck yourself.” My voice was weak, but he heard me.
Alexander La Rosa chuckled as he grabbed my chin, and we began round two.
CHAPTER30
DAEMON
The wedding was nice, as mafia weddings went. Viktor Yushenko’s daughter, Anastasia, was a large gal who, unfortunately for her, resembled her father much more than she did her delicate mother. One wouldn’t have even guessed the two were related if they didn’t know better. I’d sat on Ana’s side for the ceremony, between Dezzy and Vin, and watched some member of another of our crime families, Jakob Gorch, promise to love her for the rest of her life.
Well, that wasn’t going to be much longer.
I did feel a little bad that so many people were going to die who had nothing to do with what was happening between Viktor and me. After all, Ana was innocent in all of this. But there wasn’t anything that I could do about it. I realized in that moment that I was growing soft. Elisa was starting to get to me a bit, with her sensitive ways. I’d tried to call her again a few hours ago to see if she wanted to come along, but her phone went right to voicemail again, and she hadn’t called me back after the last time I’d tried to call her.
Now, I needed to focus on the task at hand. Inside my jacket pocket, the spray bottle Igor had given me was practically burning a hole through my shirt. Not because the poison was leaking through but because I was so hyperaware of its existence.
“Well, it looks like everyone is having fun at the reception,” Vin noted, standing on the other side of me where we hung out in the back of the garden area set up for a party. All four of us were sipping on glasses of water, wanting to keep our wits about us. Vin had tried to convince me he was sharper when he was drunk, but I didn’t buy it. I needed him to focus.
“It’s a nice party,” Mikel agreed, rocking back and forth slightly to the sounds of the string quartet playing near the front of the dining area. A thousand tiny fairy lights lit the night from the canopy of trees above us. Around us, waiters moved through the large crowd with trays of booze, canapes, and drugs. This was a mafia wedding, after all. I watched one of Viktor’s capos snort a line of coke off the charger at his place setting and shook my head. Only at a mob wedding.
“There’s enough alcohol here to drown a herd of fucking elephants,” Dezzy noted.
“Speaking of alcohol,” I said, hitting Vin lightly in the chest with the back of my hand. “I think it’s time. We need to get in there before the bride and groom make their appearance.”
“Where the fuck is Viktor?” he asked as we moved toward the mansion. Dezzy and Mikel moved as well. All four of us had important jobs, and none of us could fuck this up if we were going to pull this off.
“Maybe he’s upstairs with the bride and groom making sure they consummate the wedding so he can have a grandkid,” I joked as we made our way inside. People had been pouring in and out of the mansion all evening, going in to use the restroom or have a look around. That would make our job harder, but I was confident we’d pull it off. My brothers were the best men for the job, and all of them were with me.
The Yushenko mansion was nice. Almost as large as our own home, there were winding hallways, dozens of bedrooms, and enough bathrooms for an entire football team to take a dump at the same time. We wound our way back toward the kitchen and into a side room where we found the champagne flutes for the official toast all set up and ready to go.
I hadn’t come by this information by accident. I’d befriended a maid earlier in the day who’d let me know where to find them. In exchange, I’d given her a chunk of Leo’s money, a free pass to get the fuck out of there, and the assurance that she wouldn’t be amongst the bodies tonight.
Not that she knew what we were up to. No one did except for me and my three brothers. Igor hadn’t asked any questions, smart man. So once these bodies hit the ground, it would all be supposition.
Thankfully, there was only one door in or out of the room we were infiltrating. I positioned Vin in front of it and started to work, hoping we could get this done without anyone walking in because killing someone any other way might be noisy, and I didn’t need to draw any attention to what we were up to.
Pulling out a pair of gloves, I put those on to protect myself and got the bottle out of my pocket. Igor said I should be fine without wearing a mask over my nose, but I was careful as I shook it up and began to spray the clear liquid into the champagne glasses. I had to hurry, but I also had to make sure to coat the glasses so that enough of the concoction would be consumed by everyone.
“Yes, Emily. I’ll be right there.” The voice of a man growing dangerously close to the door hit our ears. I looked at Vin, and he looked at me just as the door swung open and a waiter shot into the room, muttering, “Fucking bitch. Get off my ass.”
Clearly, he was too busy complaining about his colleague to immediately notice what he’d stumbled into, but when he looked up to see me standing next to the glasses with a spray bottle poised precariously over a glass, his eyes bugged out of his head.
“Hey, what the fu—”
That was all he got out before Vin had his arms wrapped around his head, one around his mouth and the other on the top of his skull. It only took Vin a matter of seconds to twist hard enough for us to hear a snap and the body to go limp.
“Shit,” I muttered as Vin dragged the guy away from the door. “Now we’ve got a fucking body to get rid of.”
