The Marriage (Darkest Lies Trilogy Book 3), Bethany-Kris [books for 8th graders txt] 📗

The two maids had been running away from the front entrance to the home, while the men thundering down the stairs were heading for the outside.

Roman joined the men.

*

It was Marky.

Roman recognized him right away even though he was lying face down in the driveway with his limbs twisted in crooked angles. He knew it by the leather jacket his friend wore every day—proud of the years and stories the piece of clothing could tell about a decade or more of his life.

There was a lot of blood, just not on the driveway. His friend’s jeans were soaked in a deep red, and the matted, wet hair tinged the bit of slushy snow on the ground with a pink hue.

Roman came to a halt outside the front door, just at the top of the stairs, his breath having been knocked out of him. Time slowed, then, like the old reel of a film skipping toward the end as the strip started to run out.

He felt the cold air surrounding him, but he couldn’t move.

Blood rushed in his ears.

Around him, the men who had been inside the house blew past his still form, running to where Marky laid unmoving. Someone running up the driveway shouted about how a truck had burst through the mansion’s front gates, driving full speed.

Another guy said the body had been kicked out of one of the doors before the truck burned rubber strips onto the asphalt driveway as they left at the same manic speed. Someone had even taken a few shots at the truck, but it didn’t do any damage.

The only thing Roman fixated on was how they had now started referring to Marky as the body. He was vaguely aware of the neighbors who had come to stand at the end of their gated driveway, surveying the damage and the scene in front of them. One was on their phone.

Calling the emergency services, he bet.

Fuck.

They wouldn’t be able to hide this.

And it was already too late for Marky by the looks of it.

He took a few steps closer, wiping his palm across his mouth to hide the way his breaths shook in clouds around his face. The circle of Avdonin men—the half a dozen tasked with watching the house and property—stood around his broken friend. Nobody had the balls to turn him over.

Not a single one stepped forward to touch him. Marky hadn’t once moved. Roman suspected he’d probably been dead before he even hit the driveway. In the peripherals of his vision, he could see the way their faces turned towards him in unison.

Roman stood over his friend for a moment, the whoosh of blood still loud in his ears, and his heart aching with racing beats while he took in the scene again. The gawking neighbors and the woman shouting she had called for help; his father’s men waiting for him to say something; and his friend, broken and bloody, at his feet.

Bending down, he grabbed the ripped, blood-soaked arm of his friend’s jacket and turned him over. The wind picked up as he laid eyes on his dead friend, and the stab wounds that peppered his body telling a horrifying story of a violent end.

He wasn’t surprised the wounds were focused in the front—the cuts on Marky’s hands, wrists and arms where his sleeves had been shredded said he fought. He wouldn’t have turned his back or tried to run. In the final moments of his life, he’d been fighting.

Roman should have been out there with his friend, asking questions and making his presence known. It would have afforded Marky more protection because he shouldn’t have had to hold the fort down by himself.

Everything about the scene in front of Roman was coldly calculated, and it had Dima’s bloody fingerprints all over it. It screamed his kind of work.

Dima didn’t appreciate being rejected by Demyan repeatedly. He wanted to be treated as the new Chicago boss as he believed he rightfully was. He wanted to exact revenge on the Avdonins for the insult. Marky was out there looking for Masha. Digging. Asking questions because he knew the right people to get answers, but it was dangerous work all the same.

He’d been alone with no backup, and close enough to the Avdonin family for his brutal killing to make an actual impact on the people who mattered the most.

A loud shrill shriek snapped Roman out of his daze. He turned to find his mother standing at the open door of her home. She stared straight down at Marky covering her mouth with trembling hands, collapsing into a puddle of tears.

The man who had accompanied her to the door was close enough to her grab her before she fell to the ground.

“Who would do that to him?” he heard her cry.

He knew who.

Wanted so badly to make them pay for it, too.

He just had other things to handle first.

“Take her inside. Someone call the boss,” Roman barked, turning away from his friend’s body.

The faint siren in the distance might not have been a cruiser coming for them, but it reminded him instantly that the police presence would be thick on their property soon.

This was going to be bad. Really bad.

*

By the time Demyan returned to the Avdonin home, the cops were already littering the property, their cruisers, and forensic vans filling the driveway. His father wasn’t pleased, and had his wife not been home, likely wouldn’t have returned to the property but sent lawyers in his absence.

No crime boss wanted this mess.

Not that Demyan had to worry. The moment a pig walked across their threshold, nobody had anything to say. That was the law of the land for people like them. As much as it killed Roman, his statement was the same as everyone else’s when the police and detectives cornered him earlier.

He didn’t know Marky.

Didn’t see what happened.

Didn’t have anything to say.

They’d have to prove differently.

“Where is she?” Demyan growled at one of his men who stood at the front of the