Beauty & the Beast by Nancy Holder Read Free Book Online

warehouse years ago. He didn’t even remember what was in the cardboard boxes any more.
    “So then we threw him over the side,” Ilya informed him.
    Anatoly nodded calmly, but inside, he was furious. Had they not even considered that Suresh could have gotten them another copy of the chip? It had taken Anatoly nearly a year to recruit Suresh to betray his employer. Suresh had been his only contact there. Mischa Stepanoff, the “mutual acquaintance” who had served as Anatoly’s go-between with Suresh, had died ages ago. Anatoly had made it look like a drug overdose, but it had simply been a case of ensuring there were no loose ends where the chip was involved.
    But now Anatoly suspected that Mischa had been the one to introduce Ravi to Mr. Q. He would never know. And these two idiots had ensured that the chip was lost to him—unless he managed to get the tiny plastic box away from a police detective on her honeymoon.
    “None of the neighbors saw her leave,” he said to them.
    “I propped her up between us in the car. No one could tell there was anything wrong. She looked completely fine,” Svetlana assured him. Svetlana was upset. Good. At least she understood what a debacle this was. Ilya, on the other hand…
    Oh, Ilya. What should he do with his sister’s idiot son?
    “Suresh was so stupid,” Anatoly grunted in Russian as Ilya and Svetlana dragged the weeping girl over to a chair and began to attach her to it. Anatoly liked zip-ties. No knots.
    “Please, please, let me go,” the girl sobbed. Her makeup was smeared all over her face. She looked like Heath Ledger as the Joker. Anatoly couldn’t help a smile. Good movie. But truly, had she looked like this on the drive over? He wouldn’t call that fine.
    “I haven’t done anything. There’s nothing I can do to help you,” the girl blubbered.
    And you’re just as stupid as Suresh, if you think that , he thought.
    Ilya bound her wrists together with a plastic zip-tie and anchored them in her lap, forcing her to hunch her shoulders. Soon she would be begging them to unbind her. At that point, she would find ways to be helpful. Many ways. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself cutting a Joker smile into her face with a serrated hunting knife. A burst of rage coursed through his veins, but he quickly suppressed it. His fury lurked beneath the surface like a shark, always, but he was its master. He remembered what he had once said to a different American prisoner: “We Russians are like you. We laugh, we cry. But then we grow up.”
    That man had died weeping.
    This girl would too.
    “I didn’t know he put anything in the jacket,” she sobbed. “I barely knew him!”
    She was smart enough to talk directly to him, although she couldn’t see him, of course. The iPad was programmed for one view only: He could see all of them, but the reverse was not true. She also couldn’t see the rat that skittered across the dirty concrete floor behind her, six inches from her feet.
    In Russian, Anatoly said to Ilya, “She was there when you killed Suresh?”
    “Saw the whole thing,” Ilya confirmed, also in Russian. “Shouldn’t we just kill her now?”
    “Show me the cruise itinerary again.”
    Ilya held the paper up to the iPad’s camera. It was spattered with Suresh’s blood, but still legible. Dr. and Mrs. Keller were spending the night in Los Angeles before boarding the Sea Majesty for a fifteen-day cruise. There would be five straight days at sea. Day six would see them in Hilo, Hawaii.
    He put the iPad on mute, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed in a number. It was answered on the first ring.
    “Da,” a voice answered.
    “An American couple is staying at this hotel,” Anatoly said, reading the address off the page. “Their names are Catherine and Vincent Keller. Madame owns a black silk jacket, and in that jacket is a small plastic box that belongs to me. Get it. If you need to kill them to retrieve my possession, do it.”
    The voice on the other