HER RUSSIAN SURRENDER by Theodora Taylor Page B

inside his arm.
    “You may run now,” he told the smaller male.
    The man, perhaps believing his fate had unexpectedly changed, that Sergei Rustanov had only meant to scare him and hadn’t truly intended to kill him in front of his child, ran.
    He ran as fast as he could, given that his hands were taped together in front of him. More proof that this man was either stupid or did not truly know Sergei Rustanov.
    Sergei watched him run for a bit before calmly pulling a Glock 19 from his jacket holster and shooting a hole in the back of the man’s head. The maintenance man dropped dead less than twenty feet from where Sergei and Nikolai stood.
    “You see,” he told Nikolai with a grin as the sound of the gunshot reverberated though the night sky. “In this case, it is okay to be sloppy.”
     
     
    Thirty Years Later
     
    “IT IS ONE IN THE MORNING,” Alexei said in lieu of a greeting when he answered his phone.
    “I would not call,” Nikolai answered in Russian. “But I threw a party tonight. Do you still have the maid service in Miami?”
    “Lexie, is everything all right?” a tired voice asked in the background.
    “It is nothing, Eva,” Alexei answered. “An associate, calling about an important business matter.”
    Not a direct lie, Nikolai noted. For men who had been raised like he and his cousins, calls like these were a matter of business. But not the exact truth either.
    Nikolai listened to the sounds of rustling on the other side of the phone. He imagined Alexei getting out of the bed he shared with his wife, and going to another part of the house to finish the call out of earshot.
    “I do still work with that service,” Alexei answered. “But it’s based in Chicago now.”
    So Alexei’s hit man had moved to Chicago, it seemed.
    “It is fine. Chicago is closer to my party,” Nikolai answered.
    “Also, the service no longer caters. Family obligations.”
    That gave Nikolai some pause. He’d only met Tetsuro Nakamura once, when he’d handed him the audio recording of Sergei’s death. But the emotionless Asian man hadn’t struck him as the type of guy who would ever had “family obligations.”
    But then, Nikolai had never planned to have children himself and look at him now. Making arrangements to clean up this mess before he went home to his nephew… and his nephew’s current guardian, the girlfriend of a police officer.
    In this case, though, whether Nakamura was still willing to kill was neither here nor there.
    “That is not problem. The party was already thrown,” Nikolai answered. “But it was very messy. I need your maid service.”
    “How long did this party last?”
    Nikolai surveyed the basement room, a less than classy affair, with carpet on both the floors and the walls. Not like his own home, which he had designed as one big fuck you to Sergei, who’d been from one of the richest crime families in Russia but had forced his girlfriend and child to live in a small, grey two-bedroom apartment.
    That small apartment was luxury accommodations compared to this room, located below a strip club called Jiggles. Every piece of furniture looked to have been either hauled from a sidewalk or bought at a discount store’s clearance sale. So cheap, it was no wonder it had only taken Nikolai fifteen minutes of “questioning” the guy who’d been sent to take out Pavel before he’d sung like a bird and gave him an address.
    The drug outfit that had killed his brother was fairly new with a boss who’d come to Indiana with just a few East Coast connections and a family of thick-necked brothers and cousins. According to the hit man Nikolai had interrogated, they only had the one strip club and apparently not enough money or taste to redecorate.
    Either way, it wasn’t something they’d have to worry about now. The man who’d attempted to kill a defenseless woman and child earlier that evening was dead on the carpeted floor, along with his boss and other family members, after having been