Revenge (David Shelley #1) - James Patterson Page 0,59

He had been driving the Peugeot, and so he’d seen at first hand what had been done to her.

But for the time being she just wanted to hear his voice, wanted to say the words “Emma Drake” and hear his reaction.

“What is it, sweetheart?” he’d growled on the phone. It struck her that she missed him. Being among the Chechens was good, treated like a queen the way she was, schmoozed like a foreign ambassador, but there was no substitute for genuine affection.

“It’s Emma Drake,” she told him.

From the other end of the line came a sharp intake of breath. “Wait a second there,” he said, and she heard him light a cigarette, exhaling loudly. She thought of him with his Benson & Hedges and his gold Zippo and knew that he’d be regarding the world through a cloud of blue-tinged smoke, thinking of Emma Drake, casting his mind back to the whole sorry episode.

“Not one of our finest hours, was it, sweetheart?” he said at last.

You can fucking say that again, she thought sarcastically, but didn’t say. She was in poor-little-girl mode for this call. “I think about her all the time, Dad,” she said, pouring all that pent-up hurt into her voice.

“I don’t doubt it, sweetheart, after what they did to you.”

It wasn’t just the nerves in her arm. Emma Drake’s bite marks were another permanent reminder. A large patch of scarred and mushed-up skin on her hand. Little cow had bitten her hard.

“She’s working for us, Dad. She’s got a new name and she’s a junkie, but it’s her.”

There was another sharp intake of breath at the other end. “And have you told Dmitry? Or Sergei?”

“You know what would happen if I did.”

“Yes, of course.”

There was a pause. He’d be thinking of her, she knew, taking her hurt feelings into account, but there was also the relationship with the Chechens to consider. He had worked hard to broker the union. Merging had created a single, untouchable consortium. Nobody wanted to do anything that might undermine all they had worked toward.

After a while he said, “You know, don’t you, that you could have got to her any time over the last—how many years has it been?”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen years you’ve had, Kaz. We could have taken her out if we really wanted to, but we didn’t.”

She sniffed, hoping she wasn’t overplaying the poor-little-princess bit. “It was your wishes, Dad. You wanted to leave it. You said the whole thing was a stain on the family name.”

“Which it was.”

“I did what you wanted.” She was being merciless, she knew, preying on his guilt for what happened. On the other hand, what was the bloody point of having feminine wiles if you never got to use them?

“I never realized you felt that strongly about it, sweetheart,” he said with an almost crestfallen tone in his voice.

“The thing is, Dad, neither did I. Not until I saw her again. Having her right under my nose has brought it all back. I don’t want to make a big fuss about it. I don’t want to dig up bad memories of our failure that day. I just want . . . I just want . . .”

There was another pause. When her dad next spoke it was in the comforting fatherly tones she knew so well: “What do you want, sweetheart?”

“I just want to kill the fucking bitch who crippled me, Dad. I just want to fucking kill her and watch her bleed.”

“And God has brought her to you,” said her dad. He wasn’t especially religious but would occasionally invoke a higher power in order to justify a certain course of action. That was a good sign, she knew.

“That’s right—that’s right, Dad, it feels like that. God has brought her to us.”

“All right,” he said, and she let out a silent sigh of relief. “The Chechens can’t find out. It wouldn’t be good for business. It would be bad news for the union if they discover that we passed up the chance to earn so much easy dosh. Wait—you don’t think you could ransom her and then kill her?”

“I thought of that. I don’t think so, because of Dmitry. Besides, it’s not what I want, Dad. I want this just between me and her. I want it so that right at the end she knows that her money couldn’t save her. She can’t hire a bodyguard and buy her way out of this one.”

“I gotcha, babe,” he said. “I’ve got your back, I understand. Just as long as you know that anything

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