The Killer’s Vow by Aria R. Blue
Vera
“Okay, we need a plan,” I say, clapping my hands together.
“No.” Ivy opens the car’s built-in fridge and pulls out a glass bottle. “What we need is some bubbly.”
“Champagne?” Luna asks. “Seriously, right now?”
“Why not? We have a lot to celebrate. And this is sparkling cider, not champagne.”
She grins as she unscrews the bottle’s lid and pours each of us a glass.
Dumbstruck, I accept it.
The streets of Moscow pass by us.
Ancient culture and modern architecture exist side by side. We’re moving into the heart of the city.
If anything, this is where we should cower and hide.
But Ivy insists on celebrating the day so far.
“To winning,” she says, bouncing in her seat.
“To winning? We haven’t won anything. We barely made it out alive,” Luna says, echoing my gloomy thoughts.
“To winning,” Ivy cheers, louder this time.
We echo her toast.
By the time I sip my fizzy apple juice, a smile is tugging at the corners of my lips.
People like Simon and Ivy make it look so easy.
I wonder if it’s their default state to be so carefree or if they deliberately choose to focus on the good stuff.
Stuff like gratitude and celebrating small wins.
“I know it wasn’t the most optimal day, but we made it out alive, and the men we shot won’t wake up until tomorrow afternoon?” She ends her statement in a question, turning to me.
I nod. “Yeah, the effects usually last for twenty-four hours.”
“You’re such a badass,” Ivy says, tossing me a grin.
“You two were the ones who did all the work,” I say, smiling back at her before looking over at Luna.
Her head is buried in her phone.
Nico had been calling her relentlessly.
“Luna, are you going to ignore your husband forever?” I ask.
“You know Nico,” she says, her gaze flickering to Ivy. “He’ll send an army here if he finds out what I’m really up to.”
She told her husband that she was going on a girl’s trip.
It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. He only let her go without bodyguards because he knew that Ivy would be with her.
Ivy knows her weapons like the back of her hand.
“I have to say, I’m surprised he didn’t follow us here,” Ivy says, sipping from her glass and looking out at the streets.
She nearly spills her drink when she sees the iconic St. Basil’s Cathedral for the first time.
Their onion-shaped domes are swirls of colors.
Blue and white.
Green and gold.
“It looks like a gingerbread house,” she exclaims, plastering her face to the window like a little kid.
Her breath fogs up the glass, and she impatiently wipes it with her hand.
Gingerbread houses.
“Look. They even have the snow on top,” she squeals.
I exchange a smile with Luna.
Unlike me, Ivy managed to preserve her childhood curiosity and innocence.
Or maybe she just found it again.
Ivy oohs and aahs at every new thing she sees.
And when she’s had her fill of the Red Square and the frozen Moskva River and the cathedrals, she peels her face off the window.
“I can’t believe you grew up here,” she says, turning back to me with sparkling eyes. “I would’ve loved this place as a kid.”
Simon didn’t.
The streets weren’t kind to him. They gave him no other option but to turn into a thief or a killer.
With my next breath of air, a question clouds my mind.
A big one.
I hold Ivy’s gaze as I speak. “When I called you that night in Mexico, I got the feeling that you knew something about Simon that I didn’t.”
Ivy immediately buries her head in the fridge. “I don’t know what gave you that impression.”
Ivy is an American mafia queen.
She’s always one step ahead. She knows what her enemies’ next move is going to be before they do.
And she has been distrustful of Simon since she met him.
I’m determined to get an answer. “You asked me about Simon. I told you that we broke up, and you replied by saying that the breakup changed things. I remember it now. You were about to tell me something, but you didn’t.”
Luna is watching Ivy as well.
When Ivy finally lifts her head from the fridge, she has a dozen ice cubes in her glass. She pours apple cider over the ice.
She’s trying to stall.
“I say a lot of things,” she says casually. “And I don’t remember why I say half of them.”
“Ivy.”
“Okay, fine. Fine. God,” she says. “But I have to warn you, nothing good comes out of knowing certain things.”
“I would have agreed with you a few days ago,” I say. “But I’m starting to feel differently about some things now.”
The truth about what happened in that barn.
About what really happened to my family fifteen years ago.
Why my sister left.
“What do you know about Simon that I don’t?” I ask her.
Ivy plucks an ice cube from her drink and sucks the juice from it. “It’s not that important right now. Why don’t we talk about what you learned in that barn?”
“I’ll tell you,” I say. “But tell me about Simon first.”
She chooses to aim an arrow at my heart instead. “What made you want to leave him, Vera?”
“Ivy,” Luna scolds.
“No, this is important. I want to hear this,” Ivy says. “There must be a reason you left him, right?”
I shake my head. “It’s not for the reason you might think. I still love him. I adore everything about him. He and I, we just click. Like we’re two magnets that fit perfectly together. He’s everything I never thought I needed in my life. He’s…everything.”
Ivy swallows.
Luna squeezes my hand in hers. “But you had something else to take care of first?”
It’s not even that.
“It feels silly to say this out loud, but I just had to prove something to myself, you know? That I could be more than who I thought I was. That I could fight instead of just deflecting.”
The girls nod like it makes perfect sense.
Their warm companionship prods me to share more.
“That was the main reason,” I say. “But there’s also the fact that I was scared of the depth of my feelings.”
The burn of my lips every time he kissed me.
The fire in my heart every time I looked into his eyes.
It was all too much.
Because I am my father’s daughter, after all, I find it hard to trust people. And a part of me believes that love is a weakness.
“Your turn,” I say, looking back at Ivy.
She places her glass down.
Her inhale is sharp. “You know that I always investigate new people, right?”
I nod.
She swallows. “Well, there was something about Simon that set off alarm bells in my head. And the feeling only magnified after you told us that he was a killer. While you were away looking for your sister, I did some research of my own.”
“What did you find?” I ask.
“My husband knows some Russian agents. I asked him to inquire about Simon for me.”
Ivy’s eyes look pained, the complete opposite of the way they were just moments ago.
She twirls a long lock of hair around her index finger. “Russia has five intelligence agencies, out of which only four are known to the public. And…there is no record of a Simon Kalashnik on any one of them.”
“You’re saying he lied about his name?” I ask, blinking.
“I’m saying that he lied about who he works for,” Ivy says, sitting up straight even as she delivers my death blow. “I triple-checked this information, Vera. And I’m positive that Simon doesn’t work for any Bureau.”
I suck in a sharp breath.
I hear his voice as if he’s speaking the words against my ear.
I never lied to you before, tigritsa moya. And I have no reason to start now.
I shake my head.“Simon is a lot of things, but he’s not a liar.”
“I’m sorry,” Ivy says. “It’s just what I found.”
Luna is furiously chewing on her bottom lip. “What does your gut tell you, Vera?”
There’s a layer of disbelief covering my emotions.
But there’s also a whole lot of belief.
I know Simon.
“I want to hear it from his lips,” I say as tears burn the back of my eyes. “But I still trust him.”
I don’t know what I’m doing.
A whole lot of things are going on at once, and I want to be led by my heart, not by the voice of fear.
“Okay,” Ivy says softly.
“There’s something I wanted to show you,” I say, pushing thoughts of Simon to the back of my head again.
I open my purse and pull out the family photograph I got from the dacha.
“This is my family,” I say, putting the photograph between us.
My grandparents are sitting in the middle. Mama and Papa stand behind them. Papa’s older brother, Arseni Reznikov, stands next to my parents.
It was supposed to be a formal photograph, but I insisted that I wanted to sit on the floor in front of Babushka.
And Inessa was only a toddler then. She wanted to sit in my lap, so I let her.
I point at my grandmother.
“This is my babushka,” I say, pointing at the woman with the heart-shaped face and big brown curls.
“You’re the spitting image of your grandmother,” Luna says, her eyes glimmering.
Ivy is watching me with a soft smile on her face.
I point at my uncle to the side. “And this is the man who shot her.”
Shot, not murdered.
The bullet was not a fatal one.