Read In For the Kill for Free Online Page B

that private conviction back to her. Who gave him the right to know something so intimate about her when she’d barely articulated it for herself? She couldn’t let someone so deep inside her head. She’d watched that dynamic play out between her parents. It had not been pleasant watching, even before Zhoglo’s revenge, her abduction, her father’s murder.
    Even finding her daughter alive had not saved Sveti’s mother. She’d become unbalanced and paranoid. Had begun making bizarre claims about mass graves. People being murdered in illicit experiments.
    No proof of her claims was ever found, and eventually, they had locked her in a mental hospital. Sveti had been fortunate to have a safe place to be with her friends in America for that awful interval.
    But even after she was released a few years later, Sveti had not gotten her mother back. Sonia had promptly run off to Italy and taken a new lover. Some rich, pampered, hateful Italian guy. Ick.
    And then, without warning or a good-bye, she’d killed herself.
    Sveti had been finishing high school in Cray’s Cove at the time, living at Tam and Val’s. Mama’s last letter had been to tell Sveti to cancel her plans to come to Italy to spend Christmas together.
    Visit another time, she’d said. Right before she threw herself off a bridge.
    Stupid, to think about this stuff at all. Old pain, dredged up to no good purpose. Her mother had seemed so strong, but it was all show. Like her own show, with the kids in the traffickers’ dungeon. Bombast and theater, and behind it, the ugly truth. Weakness, despair. Loss of hope.
    And a long fall through the dark.
    Love did that to a person. Grief drowned you. Or it ripped out your guts, as Zhoglo had done to her father. Or ripped out your heart, as Zhoglo had almost done to her. Call them life lessons or call them dysfunctional hang-ups, it hardly mattered. They were part of her now, like her bones or her blood. And speaking of dysfunctional hang-ups.
    She pulled her phone out and logged in to the account she used to communicate with her best friend, Sasha, who had shared her ordeal. Sasha was the son of one of Zhoglo’s henchmen, Pavel Cherchenko. The man had fallen out of the vor’s favor, and Zhoglo had punished him by selling the man’s young son to the organ traffickers.
    She and Sasha had been together from the very beginning. They had bonded in their captivity, although Sasha had stopped speaking, even to her, after a few months. The other children had been too small to talk. Several had been developmentally disabled as well. It had been so lonely. Sveti had almost forgotten how to talk herself, by the end.
    Sasha had his own struggles these days. Depression, heroin addiction, and his extremely dangerous father. Pavel Cherchenko had taken over Zhoglo’s empire after he’d killed the old vor, and he was, if anything, more ruthless and cruel than Zhoglo had been. Tricky, with her calling in life, to have the son of a mafiya vor for a best friend. But who got to choose?
    There were no messages from Sasha in the drafts folder. Just the ones she had sent to him, still unanswered. She opened a message document, and typed.

    You still in Rome? Did you see my talk? Coming to Italy next week. Can’t wait to see you. Sveti.

    She saved the message in the file without sending it, hoping that he was all right. Poor, hunted Sasha. She did not blame him for his addiction, knowing what he struggled with, but it drove her mad with anxiety. She’d lost so many people. She couldn’t bear to lose Sasha to that awful black hole, too.
    She hadn’t had the courage to tell her friends about the Illuxit job yet. She cringed from the thought of telling Rachel, but there would be visits, and Skype. Her friends had saved her and sheltered her, and she loved them for it, but they continued to see her as a vulnerable child. They’d never understand that she was an adult