Page 147 of Monstrous Urges
“I think it might be the other way around.”
After Polina disappears upstairs, Zoran walks over.
“What do you want to do with her, boss?”
“Set her up for life,” I grunt. “I still haven’t heard back from Milos. But get in touch with him and ask him to arrange for the purchase of an apartment in New York. Big, but not gaudy. On the park, maybe. Near the ballet at Lincoln Center.”
He nods. “On it.”
“And have him open an account in her name and transfer ten…” I frown. “Twenty million dollars into it.”
Zoran nods, unfazed. He pulls out his phone and walks out the back door. My other men set up a perimeter around the house and move the cars from the road to behind the barn.
I check on Vadik’s corpse. I always make sure those who I think are dead are actually dead. After all, that was this asshole’s second mistake after deciding to slaughter my family.
He thought I was dead, too.
But Vadik is indeed very, very dead. The insane amount of blood around him and the broken bones from his tumble down the stairs protruding out in places, not to mention the vacant look in his staring eyes, make it pretty obvious he’s not going to be seeking revenge.
I stalk through the rest of the ground floor of the farmhouse, looking for anything I might be able to use. There’s a laptop and tablet I have my guys scoop up for Dimitri to crack into later. There are a few business papers in a laptop bag in the home office, but nothing remarkable. I find cash, a few guns, and an amusing amount of Viagra stashed in a kitchen cupboard above the fridge.
But when I walk into the downstairs bathroom, I see a phone with bloody fingerprints all over it.
Interesting.
The phone is obviously Vadik’s. And from the pattern of the fingerprints, I’m guessing he was trying to unlock it to call for help as he was dying ingloriously from a spatula wound to the neck. He must have failed, and the phone locked after multiple failed attempts. But those fingerprints…
I peer closely to see what numbers he hit, then bring the phone out to the kitchen. There’s a pen in one of the drawers, and I take everything over to the kitchen table, writing zero-one-two-eight on the surface and then staring at it.
That’s his four digits, but I don’t know the order. And not even Dimitri can hack an iPhone.
I’m staring at the numbers as I hear Polina come downstairs from her shower. She walks into the kitchen dressed in jeans and a hoodie, a towel wrapped around her hair.
“I don’t suppose you know that asshole’s phone password, do you?” I grunt hopefully.
Polina shakes her head. “Sorry.”
Fuck.
I stare at the numbers, considering what I know about Vadik. He’s…sorry-not-sorry, was…a prick. Loud. Obnoxious. Not to mention rude and lazy…
I freeze.
Lazy.
I’ve already tried zero-one-two-eight. I’m guessing Vadik’s laziness would stop him from adding more than the four numbers required to set a password.
Jesus, he can’t have been THAT stupid…
“Polina, what was Vadik’s birthday?”
She scowls. “August sometime. I remember that.”
Maybe he was that stupid.
“Would it have been the twelfth?”
She shakes her head. “No, I have a cousin with that birthday. I would have remembered if they were the same.”