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

observe him from afar because she wasn’t a part of his circle.

Now she was in the center of it.

In fact, she might have always been.

“And we’ll be staying right here until they arrive,” she continued.

The men had nothing to say, barely able to keep their heads up or their eyes open. How many lines had it taken before they realized it wasn’t just coke Cherie snuck them—or did they just not care because high was high?

What did it matter?

Karine had to make a phone call.

TWENTY

“Are you going to tell her?”

Across from where his father sat on the private jet, Roman’s gaze drifted away from the porthole window and the flickering lights of a city he’d hoped to never see again.

“Tell her what?” Roman asked.

Demyan shrugged as he murmured, “That it was me who killed him.”

Frankly, Roman’s mind had been running a million miles a minute from the moment he’d gotten word from the bull driving his car that Maxim Yazov was at his parents’ home.

Blatantly.

Once upon a time, Roman might have believed he was a bold motherfucker, but compared to Karine’s father, that just wasn’t the case.

The last thing he’d had time to think about over the past handful of days was whether or not he would tell his wife, a woman he was only partly certain might still want him at all, that his father killed hers. He was still trying to piece together how a supposedly dead man had managed to make so many moves behind the scenes that he’d orchestrated an entire game no one but him really knew they were playing.

He had a lot to think about.

Demyan’s bloody hands were only one of them.

“I don’t know,” he settled on telling his father.

And this certainly wasn’t a conversation he wanted to be having on a chartered jet to Chicago because a call had come through—Karine had essentially taken over the small estate property where Dima had, for all intents and purposes, declared his headquarters to the Chicago bratva.

Demyan let out a hard grunt before reaching for the glass of vodka in the gold cup holder. He slammed the remaining alcohol back, waving the cup high for the flight attendant to see, before saying to his son, “Yeah, I don’t know very much, either. I guess you don’t always get to be the hero, though. Sometimes you’re the villain no matter what you do—you’re just a catalyst in someone else’s story. You don’t get to write it.”

“Philosophical.”

Demyan shot him a look.

Roman only shook his head, and smirked. With his gaze back on the porthole, he muttered low, “It’s not always so bad being a villain. I hear they get the best women.”

That earned him a laugh from his father, but Roman didn’t bother to say more. The attendant refused to refill Demyan’s glass if only because they were putting the bottles away to begin the descent. Here he was, a couple of hours from reuniting with Karine, and he still hadn’t figured out how it all happened.

Oh, he knew the details.

He’d been sleeping off a drunk on his father’s office couch when she made the phone call, because, after days of scrubbing away the evidence of her father’s murder, they still couldn’t find her.

And he didn’t trust the last words of a dead man to be true.

So when he heard that trembling voice of hers on loudspeaker—her quaking I killed him, Demyan; Chicago is yours—Roman learned what it meant to go on autopilot.

“He wanted his body to be found publicly. He’s going to be discovered on a park bench tomorrow,” Demyan said suddenly. “It’ll look like a very suspicious suicide.”

Roman’s brows furrowed at that. He’d only known that the body had been quickly removed from the house along with Claire’s sixty-thousand-dollar rug under the table.

“He could have just done that,” Roman replied. “Why’d we have to do the business.”

“You know why—we’re sitting here, Roman, that’s why. And I think he hoped to give Karine a chance to say goodbye in the end, even if he didn’t want to die alone.”

“I don’t think he ever gave a shit about Karine, let’s be real.”

“He did. Because he loved her. He loved her more than he could show or tell. I know what that’s like, Roman, to love someone so much and have it taken away. I felt like I couldn’t be loved—but for other people, for him, it felt like love was poison. He wanted her to know he loved her, still.”

Roman emptied the remaining dregs of his own vodka down his throat, but as he’d opted for a plastic cup instead of glass, the attendant had left him with his drink. Crunching the cup into broken pieces, he tossed it into the cup holder, and told his father, “I don’t give a fuck anymore. I just want to see Karine.”

*

This time, unlike their meeting with Dima at the battered farmhouse—the Avdonins were prepared. They arrived at the Chicago estate ready for a battle if they had to face one. Or start it.

Dima’s men had been scattered and very few in number, to begin with after the old Yazov mansion burned down. He had tried to portray strength when the truth was he had already been deserted by most of the old Yazov crew who had clearly started noticing his ineptitude. He couldn’t even stay in his own city for any length of time to handle mafia business because he’d been too busy raising hell in New York for a woman.

“What are we going to find inside?” Roman murmured as their car drove in through a broken gate that had needed to be pushed open by a heavily-tattooed man. The upturned spider on his hand told Roman the guy was probably with the Yazov crew.

What other calls did Karine make?

Had word traveled that fast that she’d taken over the estate to the men of her father’s organization who would find that information beneficial?

“I have no idea,” Demyan murmured, “other than there are bodies that need burned, and a