“I’m not putting my mouth on a corpse,” I tell her. She looks up at me, confusion creasing her forehead.
“He’s not—he’s not dead. He can’t be dead. There’s still a chance. He’s going to be fine.” She shakes her head, her chest compressions becoming harsher. “He can’t be.”
As she adjusts her legs, I notice a tiny metal can. Pepper spray. He could have been allergic, he could have had asthma, or he could have had some kind of cardiac issue.
They weren’t accomplices. For some reason—I could imagine a few—he attacked her and she defended herself.
She’s still doing chest compressions, but they’re getting slower and slower. It’s gradually dawning on her that she’s trying to perform a miracle.
And just like that, the answer to all of my problems slides neatly into place.
“You killed someone in my nightclub,” I state, the gravity of the situation hitting me quickly. The police will swarm the nightclub. They only need the flimsiest reason to investigate me, and a death in my nightclub while I’m here might as well be a nail in my coffin.
But there’s a way to avoid all of that.
“No,” she mutters. She stops doing chest compressions. She wipes the sweat away from her face, slicking her hair back. “No. No. This can’t be happening.”
She’s wide-eyed, shaking her head like she’s a mental case. There’s certainly guilt written all over her, but there’s something more, too. Her bag is right next to her. She could have called 911, but if she had called them before I showed up, I’d hear the sirens by now.
I walk over to her bag. I pick it up. It’s pathetic. When I pull the zipper, some of the material rips. I find her phone in the bag and hold it out to her.
“Do you need to call someone?” I ask. She slowly turns her head. She looks at her phone. She must see her reflection in it. She shakes her head again before putting her forehead in her hands. I watch her for a few seconds. “You killed a man.”
“I didn’t mean it,” she mumbles. “God, I’m sorry. God.”
“Why did you come back here with him?”
“H-he was a bad person. I just wanted to make sure—he didn’t do … I just wanted to keep an eye on him.”
My mind jumps to rape. I imagine his hands on her. My grip on her bag tightens involuntarily.
“He touched you,” I say. A statement, not a question. She looks up at me, staring up at me with her nose scrunched up.
“How did you … ?” She stops. “Oh. No. That wasn’t the problem. I mean, it was, but it wasn’t. He killed a girl after getting drunk. DUI.”
She still hasn’t called 911. Or her father.
I crouch down next to her. It smells like piss down here, but I can’t be certain if it’s coming from the asphalt or the body.
“Do you want me to call one of your parents?” I ask. She rests her head against the heel of her palm. She closes her eyes.
“No. They can’t know about this.”
Reputation is something I understand better than most. A lot of doors were closed to me when I was building Mariya’s Revenge; my father’s notoriety turned me into a pariah for a lot of people.
But Allison’s father is alive, and whether or not he keeps his job is dependent on his reputation. She’s worried about contacting anybody because of her father’s job—being connected to a murder would give any police chief a bad image and the mayor would likely force him to resign in order to appoint a chief who wasn’t closely connected to a felony.
Her body begins to shake.
“Tell me you’re not crying,” I say. She shakes her head.
“You don’t understand,” she mumbles. “Everything is over. My father is going to lose his job. Even if I don’t go to prison, I’ll never be able to get a job. I should have just let him do what he wanted.”
“That’s pathetic,” I tell her.
“You don’t understand.”
I watch her. The crying is an annoying habit, but even with the tears, she’s beautiful. As she chokes down a sob, I’m brought back to a memory.
My mother is crying. My father keeps telling her that she can’t tell anyone. When I was older, after I found out that conversation was about the Bratva, I asked him how he could be certain she would keep the secret and stay married to him. He told me that she knew if she turned against him, a jury would inevitably question if she had known he was in the Bratva the whole time and she’d therefore be guilty by association. Commitments are fueled by fear. My mother was fearful of my father’s power and violence. My father was fearful that she’d expose him and make him look weak.
I could blackmail Allison. Use her fear to my advantage. I could blackmail the chief, too, but I know the chief is significantly more capable of luring me into a trap. Allison is weak, young, and malleable. Her father is significantly more valuable to me, but there’s a way for me to secure the chief’s loyalty through her. The tail wagging the dog, so to speak.
“I can deal with the body,” I say.
Her head shoots up. “What? Why?”
“Because you’re afraid of what a murder investigation will do to you and your family.”
“Why would you do that for me?”
“Because I want you to marry me.”
* * *
Silence permeates the space between us.
I stare at her as she stares at me. If I was her husband, it would make me immune to police investigations. Nobody is going to go after the son-in-law of the police chief unless there was enough evidence to convince the whole city I was the Bratva boss—which would never happen.
A laugh bursts out of her. She covers her mouth with her hand. “Are you insane? Are you on something? Were they selling molly in there?”
“Allison Harrington,” I say. Her smile vanishes at the sound of
