Prologue
When Eva Walkers stared into the barrel of the gun, she knew her fate had been sealed. On this fine summer night at twenty-nine years, seven months, thirteen days, eleven hours and thirty-eight minutes old, she was going to die.
Plain and simple.
No amount of pleading was going to change these men’s mind. They were professional killers, sent by the Russian mafia vory v zakone as retribution for her testimony against their boss in a murder case three months ago in New York.
She thought ruefully about the district attorney, Glenn Adams, who had promised her safety in the Federal Witness Protection Program. With a new identity, a new job, and a new home, Adams had reassured her that she would be protected from the bratva retaliation. Adams needed her testimony to put Anton Kovalenko, the vor boss, behind bars for the rest of his life. Eva had gullibly believed Adams’s words. She had done the right thing. Anton Kovalenko had destroyed many lives and he needed to be locked away forever. Justice had to be served so his victims would receive closure.
Now she could see how foolish she had been.
She should have seen this coming.
She was a librarian for Christ’s sake! And with her taste of literature in true crime, noir, and thriller, she should have known that nothing good ever came from being a squealer. The person who ratted out the mob always ended up in a tragic accident.
Still, she had gone through with it.
She was romantic at heart and innocently believed that in the battle between good and evil, good always prevailed. Now she knew the reality wasn’t nicely wrapped and sugar-coated like on TV. Reality was harsh, bitter, and vengeful.
Conditioned in the Gulag with the credo that the home for angels was heaven and the home for a vor was prison, vory v zakone made the Italian mafia look like a troupe of dancing nuns. These tall men stood before her like towering black columns of reapers who had come to collect her soul. The hard-lined faces told her that these men had gone to hell and back. Their expressions were cold. Their prison tattoos peeked underneath their suit sleeves and collars, decorating their bodies like badges of accomplishments. Eva wondered if they were really human beings who were capable of showing emotion and feelings. She doubted it. Their hearts must have been carved out of petrified stone.
They had ambushed her in the parking lot when she got out of work. She was a librarian in her old life and now she was working as a manuscript restorer for a private literary foundation. She had settled in nicely and was enjoying her new life in Chicago, putting the past behind her. But now that the past caught up with her.
They had shoved her in a van and had taken her to a clearing near a river. They spoke to her but Eva didn’t understand Russian. Either way, she didn’t need a translation. Even a village idiot could see they wanted her to suffer before she died. Their faces remained icy as one of them broke her fingers as if he was snapping annoying twigs. The pain jarred her to the bone. She had screamed, cried, and pleaded for mercy. But deep inside, she knew her life had been forfeited.
Now as she stared at the barrel of the gun, she prayed her death would be quick and painless.
The man squeezed the trigger.
Her head whipped backward. Her body collapsed.
She blinked. She was still conscious.
Damn it, they lied, she thought. People getting shot on TV. The victims on those shows always died instantly. And why she was still able to think? Even worse, why was she conscious? She wanted to speak, trying to move her limbs, but her body and her brain were no longer cooperating. Pain scorched her. It felt as if she had shoved her head into a coal furnace: blistering hot agony throbbed in cadence of her beating heart. She couldn’t do anything but endure it.
She couldn’t breathe. The air around her thinned.
The vor shot her a couple more times.
Two fiery leads burrowed into her flesh like worms from hell that sought new fertile ground to subsist and breed.
She tried to speak again, but her mouth frothed with blood and saliva, making her speech garbled.
As she sprawled on the wet June grass, she prayed the pain would go away. Minutes passed by and she still hadn’t died.
Every nerve-tip in her body screamed pain.
Darkness crept into her field of vision.
Eva shut her eyes. A tear leaked down her cheek.
Die already, she thought with exasperation. I’m ready…
The man who shot her kicked her in the stomach and pushed her into the river. In the depth of the watery abyss, Eva felt the shroud of the angel of death slowly envelop her weak and broken body.
She surrendered.
Chapter One
Liam Caderyn wondered what was wrong with his dog. Hades, the rescued golden retriever he had adopted from a no-kill shelter a year ago had been restless since dinner time. He whined and scratched the back door repeatedly. Liam didn’t let him out because of the rain. When the downpour finally subsided, he opened the door to take him for his evening walk. Hades bounded to the backyard toward the wooded area like a loose arrow, not heeding his master’s calls.
Rain had been pouring since morning, leaving the grass on his vast property soggy and squishy under his boots. Liam didn’t mind the wet. He liked the smell of the earth after rain: dense, musky, a cornucopia of steeped leaves and dirt tea, a scent of mystery and a new beginning. He just didn’t like the mud that Hades would track back into the house. The old pup would need a bath before bed time, and honestly, grooming a long-haired retriever was more time-consuming than caring for his sister’s toddler. Liam babysat Caitlyn’s son Brandon once in a while. To tell the truth, the two-year old was less of a handful than his spoiled dog.
“Hades!” Liam called. “Come here, boy.”
The dog whined somewhere far ahead. Liam silently wished that Hades wouldn’t go near the pond. Retrievers liked to swim, but now wasn’t a good time. Cutting through his property was an offshoot stream from Calumet River that ended in the pond. Even though it was small, the stream was quite deep. A couple years back, Liam had it dredged to encourage the growth of the wildlife.
And from the sound of it, it seemed the dog had gone in that direction.
Liam owned a forty-acre piece of land near the Whistler Preserve where he had built his sanctuary, the quiet place where he spent most of his days painting and photographing nature. He was thirty-five when he had finally got fed up with politics and the ruthlessness of the cutthroat business world, and the scandal his ex-wife had caused. He sold his six-billion-dollar telecommunication company that he had started right after he graduated from Stanford, gave half of his fortune to charities, and retired in modesty.