“Why?”
“I want to pull a hit and make it look like Eagle Eyes did it,” I replied patiently, using the dumbass name the only other sniper worth his shit went by. Where the fuck people came up with this crap was beyond me.
Declan wasn’t slow, but his tone was musing as he asked, “Vasov?”
“Yeah. He hurt Inessa again.”
“Fuck’s sake. Why? When?”
“She went out without her guard. I need you to arrange something—maybe get the apartment beneath us? So the guard is always on hand?”
“I can do that. Especially if you go ahead with this. You sure it’s wise to take him out?”
“Oh, I’m not taking him out. I’m sending him a warning he can’t ignore.”
Silence hummed down the line. “But you still want it to look like the Italians did it—”
“Yeah. War’s been brewing among us for a while. If this is the trigger, then they look like the aggressors.”
Everyone knew Eagle Eyes had ties to the Italians. People said he worked on a marker theFamigliaheld over him, but I’d long since stopped believing that.
Maybe it had started that way, but our business was lucrative.
“We should talk to Aidan at least.”
“He’d sanction it. He already saw the state of her the other day. If he saw her neck, he’d want to ram Vasov’s balls through his throat.”
“That bad?” Declan grunted. “Fuck, Eoghan. I don’t know. This is a decision with repercussions.”
“Yeah, but the war won’t be between us, will it? It’s the Italians and Russians that’ll be at war.”
“Bullshit. You want the Bratva to think that, but you’ll rub this shit in Vasov’s face. I know you—you forget that.”
I pursed my lips, appreciating that he did, in truth, know me well.
“Vasov will be glad to have a scapegoat.”
Dec clicked his tongue, but he didn’t try to dissuade me. “Come to the compound. I’ll hook you up with the gun.”
“Thanks, bro.”
We both knew I could have gone alone, but my presence at the warehouse that housed our armory would raise questions without Declan or Brennan there too.
That wasn’t my side of the business.
An hour later, I was heading away from the compound where our shipments of weapons were stored, and onto the address Inessa had given me.
I wasn’t sure what I was walking into, and Declan had offered to come with, but he knew I worked best alone, and there was little threat to me when I slipped into the shadows.
The only danger I was truly in was boredom when I had finished my setup, waiting for the perfect hit.
When I approached the streets near the compound where the Russians hid in plain sight, I found a neighborhood of red-brick McMansions that were along an avenue that led to the ocean.
The street behind had a few high rises, wide rather than super tall, and when I drove by the end of the road where Inessa had lived, I let my gaze scan the periphery without slowing down that much.
While the street was much like the other I’d passed, instead of low fences, or even none in some cases, there were brick walls. High ones that separated the houses from the street, revealing roofs and the upper parts of the building, nothing more. At least, not from the road.
Inessa hadn’t said there were several houses on the compound, but it was myopic of me to think theirs would be like ours.