Cheese.
So much cheese. Cheese from everywhere in the world, made from original recipes without the fillers and artificial flavors and preservatives that could irritate his stomach. Cheese that he couldn’t get anywhere else. Underground, black-market cheese that tortured his dreams as darkly as the memory of what Elena said to him before bursting into tears. I’m sorry. I can’t give you what you want.
Only one person could give him what he wanted anymore. A tall, dangerous man who now smirked darkly at him from across the shiny room. “Knew you’d be back.”
So did Vlad. Deep down, he always knew he’d be back because this was all he had left. Hockey and this dirty, secret cheese shop.
He should have known better than to tempt Fate.
* * *
* * *
Of all the mistakes Elena Konnikova had made in her life, and there had been so, so many, this would probably count among the top five.
Because this—meeting a source in the middle of the night without telling anyone where she would be—was exactly how her father had disappeared.
But what choice did she have? She was running out of time. She would graduate from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in less than a month, and after that, she would return to Russia. This might be her last chance. So if a creepy, abandoned building was the only place her source felt safe meeting her, then that is where Elena would meet her.
Go where they’re comfortable. It was one of the many lessons Elena had learned from her father. Indirectly, of course. He never taught her anything on purpose, because he never wanted her to follow in his journalism footsteps. But if that’s what he’d wanted, he shouldn’t have been so good at his job.
There was a time when Elena would have been happy to oblige him. A time when she made some hasty decisions that created a ripple effect until it eventually caused a tsunami of damage to people she cared about most. But time had clarified things. Opened her eyes to something that pain and selfishness had blinded her to.
Her father was a hero.
And all that pain and selfishness that had once driven her to flee both the country and the profession that had stolen her father from her had been replaced by a determination to make things right. Though Elena could never change the mistake she’d made the night he disappeared or any of the mistakes she’d made since then, she owed it to everyone to attempt to try to undo whatever damage she’d inflicted. And she was going to start by finishing the story that had most likely gotten her father killed. It wouldn’t bring him back, but it would at least give his disappearance, and everything that happened afterward, some kind of meaning.
Now, finally, after years of frustration and of working in secret, Elena had the one thing her father apparently never did.
An inside source.
The decaying Chicago warehouse where they were supposed to meet was four blocks away from where Elena had the Uber driver stop. Make it hard for people to follow you. Another lesson she’d learned from her father. Maybe he was paranoid, but he had to be as a journalist in Russia, where reporters who refused to trot out state propaganda sometimes mysteriously fell out of windows. Or vanished from train stations in the middle of the night, like him.
Elena kept her head down as she walked along the cracked sidewalk. Half the streetlamps were broken, casting her steps in alternating dark and light shadows. Gravel scattered across shards of glass and pockmarked concrete in the alley behind the warehouse where honest blue-collar workers once earned a decent living making car parts before greedy corporations shuttered the plant and sent the jobs overseas. Nearly every window in the four-story brick structure was now shattered as surely as the promise of a better life. Americans liked to tell themselves that in their land of the free, nothing but hard work was needed to succeed, but places like this proved otherwise. There were oligarchs here, too, just like in Russia. No matter what flag they flew on their front porch, men with money would always care more about their own fortunes than the lives of the people who actually did the work.
Shivering in the late-night chill, Elena pulled her phone from her pocket to check the time. It was five minutes after eleven. Marta was late. Concern inched its way up Elena’s spine. Marta’s boss kept all of his employees on a tight leash. If Marta didn’t show up by midnight for her job as a waitress at the strip club, he wouldn’t hesitate to fire her or worse. And Elena had learned enough to know how bad or worse could be. Marta’s boss was a monster, just like all the others. But Marta had had enough. She didn’t just want out. She wanted to make him pay. Elena was going to make sure he did, and not just for Marta and all the other women he’d victimized, but for her father too.
It had taken years for Elena to figure out what he’d been investigating when he disappeared—a sex-trafficking ring run by a notorious but mysterious Russian mob boss who was known only as Strazh. In English, it translated to guardian, but there was nothing noble or protective about him. Among his many criminal enterprises, he was rumored to be involved in a chain of strip clubs in America that were nothing but fronts for luring desperate young women from Russia and Ukraine with promises of big money and lavish lifestyles. But when they arrived, the women found themselves trapped in a nightmare.
It was clear from the notes her father left behind that he’d gotten close to unmasking Strazh’s real identity. And they’d killed him for it.
A skittering noise made Elena whip around. Marta had appeared out of nowhere. She wore a dark green hoodie high over her hair and a threadbare pair of jeans.
“I was worried,” Elena breathed, speaking quietly in Russian. “I thought you’d changed your mind or—”
Marta rushed forward. “I don’t have much time.”
“I know. You’re sure they didn’t follow you?”
Marta nodded quickly and shoved her hand into her coat pocket. Her every motion was a frantic display of anxiety and fear, but the look in her eyes was resolute and determined. She handed Elena a tiny scrap of paper that looked like the torn edge of a pastry bag, the kind you’d get at a coffee shop with a bagel or muffin. A four-digit number and a name were scribbled hastily in pencil.
Nikolei 1122. Elena looked up. “What is this?”
“I don’t know.” Marta’s eyes darted around as if looking for them. “I overheard him say it on the phone last night. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but he—” Marta swallowed deeply.
“He what?” Elena prodded.
“He got very mad when he realized I had heard him. He grabbed my arm and shoved me and told me to get back to work.”
Bile stung the back of her throat. This was what Elena feared most—that someone else would get hurt. “You’re not safe, Marta. You have to let me help you get out of here.”