Ultimate Vengeance (Wanted Men Book 4) (10 page)

He stood in front of the window and felt ashamed as he watched the light flurries. He and Sergei had been living in their misery for the same amount of time, but when one compared the two…

“I’m sorry. I can’t help it. Want to come over for a drink?”

“No, thanks, man. I am getting shit done.”

His lip quirked at the expression Sergei had laughed at when he’d first heard it upon settling in the States five years ago. Alek was convinced it had been Sergei’s mother who’d pushed her son to relocate. Vasily had gone to see his much older sister before she died and she’d told him to expect Sergei and his family in America within the year. They’d shown six months later, so a promise must have been made. The regrets and what-ifs must drive the guy insane. Had he stayed in Russia, he’d still have his wife and child.

“If you finish up early, swing by the Flatiron apartment. I’ll be here all night.”

There was a tense moment of silence. “It is true then? I heard the boys say something about Anton being assigned to you because you were bringing your female back into the fold. I was on the phone and thought I had to be mistaken. What has happened?”

Almost feeling cruel, Alek kept it short. “We were at the restaurant and she walked in.” Sergei hadn’t come to the engagement party for obvious reasons. Watching a couple begin their new life together could only add insult to injury.

A thump sounded. “Just like that? You are kidding me. Are you with them now?”

“Who? The boys? Did you drop something?”

“Yes. My gun. I almost shot Reynard.” He chuckled tightly and Alek heard Sergei’s regular partner curse in the background. “Uh, yes, are the boys with you? Or her? Did you speak with her? What did she tell you?”

Knowing Sergei’s English suffered when he was agitated, Alek made sure to cover all the bases because he wasn’t sure what exactly he was being asked. “The boys are home, as far as I know, and Vasily just left. As for speaking to Sacha…” He hesitated when he felt something he hadn’t felt in well over a year. The stirrings of desire. Not a simple hard-on, but a rush of heat centered in his groin that grew in strength and hardened him to stone. Sacha. Sacha. By releasing her back into his consciousness, the woman was doing what she’d always effortlessly done; light him up.

He cleared the roughness he knew would be in his voice and went on. “We talked, and will do so again tomorrow. She was with someone.”

“Who? Did you see her? Meet her?”

“It wasn’t a woman friend; it was a man.”

“What! A man. What
man
? Are you certain they were together? That isn’t right!”

Sergei’s explosion came out in Russian and Alek was touched by the outrage he could hear in his cousin’s voice on his behalf. “My thoughts exactly. I plan on taking care of it tomorrow.”

“Alek, are you sure this is wise? You should think about this before you go any further. What if something happens? What if they are left unattended—?”

“I won’t allow anything to happen,” Alek cut in, then questioned, “Who’s ‘they’?”

“The family you must want with her!”

Fuck. Why had opened this can of worms? “Oh, right. I don’t have to think about this. I know now that I’ll do anything I have to do to protect them.” A family with her. Fuck, that sounded beautiful.

“Oh. Yes, I think I see now. You will not allow harm to come to them. You will do what you must to protect them.” Sarcasm dripped from his cousin’s words. “I see. So I
allowed
my wife and child to be chopped up by our uncle’s enemies. Having them live an hour outside the city and not returning home for sometimes days at a time when the family was on high alert was not protection enough.”

Alek’s spine shot straight. “No! Jesus Christ, Sergei. You know that’s not what I meant.”

“I heard you!” he shouted away from the receiver. “I have to go.”

“Hey. I never meant to imply you failed to do all you could for your family. I swear to God.”

A rough sigh came after a long moment. “I know you didn’t. Forgive me. My fuse is not what it used to be. I should not taint your reunion with the misery of my experience. I truly wish you well, cousin. And much luck to you. I think you will all need it.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Sergei Pivchenko slammed his phone so hard onto the bathroom counter the face cracked. He sucked in a few breaths, and when that did nothing to calm his racing heart, he grabbed the broken cell and banged his hand on the switch to kill the lights as he left the room.

The moment he reached the main floor of the house, he heard her screaming that name. Pounding down the stairs into the basement, he blew into her room, sending his guest stumbling back from where she’d been shouting and crying at the door.

Just as she did every time, she attempted to get around him and dart out. He easily clamped an arm around her waist to prevent her escape. She struggled like a little animal as he got her on her cot. Holding her there with a knee on her chest and a hand around her throat, he uncapped the syringe he’d snagged from the bookshelf just outside.

“No! Don’t! Please…stop…this…” she rasped, trying to breathe over the pressure he was exerting that must be crushing her lungs. He jerked her arm straight with more force than he normally used and jabbed the needle into her vein. “Let me…go…please…”

He tipped his head, giving her a patronizing look that she didn’t see because her wet eyes rolled back in her head as she lost consciousness.

“Your pointless dramatics have become more than a nuisance.” He jerked away from her, still taking deep, slow breaths, hoping to get a grip on himself before he did something stupid like kill this one because she was in front of him.

He paced in a circle and felt his pulse begin to slow as his and Alek’s conversation played over in his head.

When Alek had first ended his relationship with Sacha, Sergei had been tasked with babysitting the girl, and he had, but only for a short time. Once she changed locations to an address he hadn’t shared, he’d considered his job done and had pretended to lose her. But by then, he’d been busy. His resolve had cemented. Within weeks of being left alone in his misery, and with nothing but his thoughts for company—aside from the ghosts of his loved ones, of course—he’d gotten serious in his attempts to destroy the organization that had done such irreparable damage to his life.

It wasn’t until last spring that he’d returned to visit Alek’s ex. And he’d only done so because he’d heard Alek had a P.I. searching for her. He’d stationed himself across the street from her building to make sure she was still in residence and had been stunned to see she was about to have a baby. He’d questioned an old, chatty resident and learned what a nice young girl “Sarah” was. Again, satisfied she and the child she would soon have were safely hidden, he’d let them be. Not once had he suspected she might become involved with another man. While she was pregnant? How could she?

He pushed the thought away. Who cared? His mistake had been in not scaring her away. He should have made her leave the New York area altogether. He would do that now. There must be something he could come up with that would hurt enough to make her once more walk away from the man she loved. The man she
really
loved. How could she be with someone else? How could she be so disloyal? That was infuriating.

He shook his head to dislodge the thought again and got back to what mattered. If she wouldn’t go voluntarily, he would resort to desperate measures. He’d done it before and was willing to do it again.

“Her reappearance is going to fuck with my timeline,” he muttered aloud as he recapped the empty syringe before tossing it into the trash. He ran his hand over his guest’s unwashed hair. She’d need to bathe soon. He hated that day of the week but could do nothing to change it. He couldn’t leave her in her own filth. Well, anymore more than he already was.

After leaving the small room, he stood outside the door that couldn’t be opened from the inside and cocked his head. Silence. They’d never used the basement much, but it wasn’t the absence of noise he heard, it was the absence of life.

As would be found in other homes, there was no music playing, no TV blaring, no dishes being done or snack being prepared. No one was arguing, or playing, or laughing.

Because this wasn’t a home anymore. It was a house. A silent house.

But that was preferable to his guest’s nonsense, he thought as he got moving. It wasn’t the banging and shouting that bothered him. It was the crying. He hated hearing it because it reminded him of tears he’d ignored by slamming out of the house, impatient to get away from them when at one time he would have done anything to stem them. That was what made him sedate his guest.

It was always worse when she screamed for her child, as she’d be doing a few minutes ago. That sometimes caused him to lose his temper. He’d never done her permanent damage, but he’d hurt her. But not even that stopped her from shouting that name over and over, and continuously attempting to gain her freedom. But as he told her time and again, her tenacity was admirable but futile. She was going nowhere. She would remain in that room no larger than a bathroom until the day she died. Whether that be of natural causes or he killed her, he still hadn’t decided.

Rubbing at his forehead, he could almost hear her begging.

“Please, just let me go. I won’t tell a soul what you look like or that you kept me here. I just want to go home. Please! Let me out of here!”

Sometimes she changed it up and asked why he’d done this, claiming she wasn’t a part of their world. And she wasn’t. Not directly. But indirectly, the tie was there. Love was love, and family was family. Pain was pain.

Dead was dead.

In his case, anyway.

As he walked through the beautifully decorated living room toward the stairs, he felt nothing. Not guilty. Not even bad. He was a yawning pit of emptiness. And he would remain in that state when someone’s mother once more cried, begged, and made her promises. And, in the coming days, when someone’s brother did the same; if he allowed himself the satisfaction of getting close enough to hear those pleas, they would be ignored. He would not relent. Until they all felt his pain, he would continue on this path. That was his vow, and it was one he intended to keep.

He thought again about the baby girl about to be discovered. An innocent infant was going to bring joy to two men who didn’t deserve it.

Unless Sergei could stop it. His thoughts grew darker the higher up the stairs he went. If Sacha didn’t heed the warning he would try to get to her—if he could get to her at all because knowing Alek, the girl was likely cloaked with security by now—Sergei might be forced to kill her and the baby. He would make their deaths quick and painless because they didn’t deserve anything worse. Well, the baby didn’t. Sacha, on the other hand, had been unfaithful. If she was with another man, her death would hurt.

When he opened the door to the main floor and took that last step up, his image appeared in the long mirror on the wall opposite him. He stared into his pale-green eyes and considered something. Alek’s pain. How brutal would it be to find your love, learn you have a daughter together, then lose them both only days later?

“You ready?”

He looked at the man standing by the front door at the end of the hallway and nodded. Yes, he was ready. Ready to end this. But for now, he would content himself with getting to Rapture before Maksim showed and asked why they were late.

It was almost noon by the time Maks showed at the apartment. He came sauntering into Alek’s office just off the foyer, looking all casual, as if it were any other day.

Alek got up and came around his desk. He’d gone to TarMor at five a.m. and brought home some work to occupy his mind. It had been working. Sporadically. He caught a bag that was lobbed over as he smoothed down his silver and navy striped tie. He placed the bag—smelled like Hvorost—on the corner of his desk. Did up his jacket. Ran his tongue across the front of his teeth.

“You seriously going to wait for me to ask, you asshat?”

Maks grinned and tipped his head, making the diamond studs in his ears twinkle. “Those Edward Greens? Split toes are my favorite. Good choice for today because I have a feeling you’ll be doing a lot of pacing. Got any coffee? The Hvorost at my bakery is kickass; the coffee is swill.”

It was only because Maks’s playful mood indicated good news was coming that Alek was able to pass by on his way out and not deliver a hard punch. He owed him one, after all. When they made it to the kitchen, he nodded a good morning to Micha, who now had half of Anton’s Moscow Times in his face where they sat at the dining table.

“So when were you going to tell us you lost your touch?” he said conversationally. He opened the cupboard, and ignoring the pods for the Keurig, grabbed the unopened bag of beans and the grinder.

“I haven’t. Syd needing a soak in the hot tub after I was through with her this morning will attest to that.”

Alek poured the beans and the whir of them grinding filled the apartment. He glared at his friend. What a dick.

“You shouldn’t talk that way about your future wife,” he said when he shut the machine down and transferred the grounds to a filter.

“Why? You should hear the shit I’ve caught our three ladies talking about during random security checks. You’d never catch me giving you pointers and demonstrating on garden vegetables. Mind you; I did find an empty bottle of wine in the kitchen when I got home that night. But Gabriel’s smutty little woman is pregnant, which means she was sober, so she has no excuse for the tips she was offering her friends.”