gazed at Val, breathing out a long stream of smoke.
Val stared back, expressionless. What did the man expect? Gratitude for not killing him? He’d spat blood for PSS for years.
Hegel’s lips pursed around his cigarette. “I’m starting to regret that decision.”
“I am devastated,” Val murmured.
“Don’t mouth off to me. What happened in Moidu was damn lucky.” He grunted. “For you, anyway.”
Val was not sure that his life over the past eleven years was that much more desirable than a bloody but mercifully quick death.
Hegel made an impatient sound. “Get your ass back to work, Janos. You made me look like shit, going incommunicado for three days. Luksch is riding my ass. He wants that woman now.”
“Sorry,” Val said, unrepentant.
“This is your last chance to redeem yourself for that Fuentes disaster,” Hegel went on. “Do not fuck this up.”
“That op went by the book,” Val argued wearily. “Every member of the Fuentes cartel was dead at the end of the day. What’s to criticize?”
“Emilia Fuentes,” Hegel snarled. “Don’t play dumb with me.”
Val saw the girl in his mind’s eye. Puppy fat, school uniform, eyes huge behind thick glasses. In shock. Spattered with her parents’ blood.
“She was eleven,” he said tightly.
“Yes, and she was the daughter of Francisco Fuentes, and she saw everything. You knew she had to die. You fucking knew it.”
“I don’t…do…children.” The words dropped out of him, heavy and clanking and cold. And so fucking futile.
“You can’t afford a code of conduct,” Hegel hissed. “We own your ass, Janos. We tell you what to do with it. Who to kill, who to kiss, who to fuck. And I don’t appreciate being forced to clean up your shit.”
“Is that what you call that car accident?” Val retorted. “The one that killed her grandmother and her two cousins and her pregnant aunt, too? That is what you call ‘cleaning up my shit?’ You hack.”
Hegel’s eyes narrowed to puffy slits. “That was damage control. And you can chalk the grandmother, the aunt, and the other kids up to your own incompetence, since you didn’t have the stomach to do your job. God knows who she talked to in that forty-eight hours—”
“She couldn’t talk,” Val said, his voice hard. “She was catatonic.”
“Shut up. Your sulking has been remarked upon, Janos. Your usefulness has been put seriously into question. Understand?”
Val poured some palinka into the glass and took a reckless swallow. “I’m bored with the threats. What puzzles me is why you haven’t killed me yet. Do it, if you can. Since retirement doesn’t appear to be an option, death is starting to look very restful.”
Their eyes locked. Seconds ticked by. Val saw death in the other man’s eyes. He smiled at it with all his teeth. Unintimidated.
“You owe us,” Hegel grated. “You owe us your fucking life.”
Val shrugged. “I’ve paid and paid. Enough.”
Hegel rose to his feet. “All right, then. Time for the big guns, old friend. You might be hard to kill, but your shriveled old grandpa is not.”
Something froze inside him. Hegel sensed it and smiled. Fuck.
Hegel peeled bills out of his pocket, and tucked them under his plate, grinning. “Never knew you had a sentimental side. Dangerous to your health. Like principles. Ditch them if you want to survive.”
“Fuck off.” Val’s voice was strangled.
Hegel chuckled, genial now that he had won. “Aw, don’t take it so hard. Consider this. If you’d followed instructions and stayed away from Budapest, you wouldn’t be in this position right now. There’s a flight for London that leaves in three hours, with a tight connection back to Seattle. Be on it. I want that uppity bitch fucking Georg’s perverted little brains out within forty-eight hours. If you have to stick pins under the baby’s fingernails to make her do it, that’s your problem.”
Val stared after Hegel’s broad, blocky back as he stumped out of the restaurant. He was unable to move for several minutes.
Finally, he lurched to his feet and left the place. He turned his face up to the sky. Snow brushed his face, caught in his hair. The car was gone, of course. There were no taxis to be seen anywhere. Snow was piling up. Cars were crawling, skidding in the slush.
He tried to think it through on the long, cold walk back to Józsefváros. He and Imre were leaving the country tonight, if he had to club the old man over the head and carry him over his shoulder.
And when they were safe, he just might discreetly contact Tamara Steele and warn her about whoever Hegel might send next. Why not?
It was strange. He had never even physically met the woman, but he had begun to feel almost responsible for her. And her child.
Then his neck began to crawl, as he approached his rented car. His stomach sank. He looked around himself, wishing he’d called a cab.
A mistake. His last mistake. A culmination of an infinite series of mistakes, false moves, errors in judgment that stretched back over generations. To his stupid mother, who should have stayed with the boring pig farmer from the country she’d married after she got pregnant with Val. Who should have been grateful to live a life of hardworking respectability in Romania rather than coming to the big city with nothing but her beauty and her young son, to meet men, drugs, ruin. And her son’s ruin.
That and other irrelevant details flashed through his mind as the flickering shadows converged upon him in the deserted street. He pulled his knife. He should have brought a gun. Another mistake, he thought.
Time to stop thinking. He spun to meet them, staying in constant twirling motion as they came at him. Four men. Five. More.
Lunge, spin, duck, kick. The heel of his boot crunched through the bridge of someone’s nose. Blood spattered the dirty snow. A high parry blocked a blade that slashed through the thick wool of his sleeve. He lunged low, a stabbing blow, blade punching through cloth, piercing flesh, grating on bone. He saw blue eyes widen, stringy blond hair swirl and flap as the man spiraled back, shrieking. Val lost his center of balance as he followed through on the blow, lunging too far forward to jerk back and evade the blackjack that whipped down—
An explosion, all white, all black, and pain blotted out everything.
Chapter
4
Val had been drawing reluctantly nearer to consciousness for a pain-blurred eternity. The bucket of ice water clinched the job.
He gasped, choked. The realization was a hammer blow. He tried a slit-eyed peek, gasped at the searing pain in his head.
There was no need
