by Nic Saint
“Please,” she spoke softly, reaching out a hand to Vitaly. “Don’t do this. You can still let us go. You don’t have to do this.”
Vitaly, panting, shook his head. It was clear he didn’t believe in asking for mercy. They’d gambled and lost, and now they were going to pay for it.
In a last ditch attempt to escape their fate, she reached for Vitaly’s gun, and when her fingers curled around it, she saw the look of panic in his eyes. The moment she raised the gun, she knew, they would kill her—kill them both. Since that was exactly what she wanted, she did it anyway. Swinging up the gun, she aimed it at the rat-faced one, certain he would respond to her challenge with eagerness and keen swiftness.
His little eyes widened with glee, and in the split second their eyes met, she saw the murderous intent reflected in them, and the yearning. Then he was raising his own weapon to match hers. He was a quick draw, and would have shot her in a heartbeat, had not another shot echoed through the air. No, not an echo. Two shots. One blew out the camera, the other hit the vicious killer in the chest. The man’s eyes widened in shock, his jaw dropped, and the next moment, he was falling to the ground, the look of astonishment etched on his features in death as it had in life.
Two men lowered their guns. One was built like a freight train, his bald pate one intricate tattoo. The other was a young man with curly blond hair.
“That’ll teach the bastard to shoot people in the back,” grunted the big man.
“Thanks, Boris,” Vitaly called out, then winced. “And you, Ruslan.”
“Any time, boss,” spoke the young man.
As if on cue, the others now reached down and helped Vitaly to his feet.
“What do you want us to do, my friend?” one of them asked solicitously.
Vitaly winced, blood oozing from his wound.
“If you could help us up and over, that would be fantastic,” he responded.
“Anything for you, boss,” one of the other men said, and then strong hands gripped Joanna, and she was pushed up the fence once more, and then she was anxiously watching as Vitaly’s large frame was granted the same treatment.
“Thanks, guys,” he was saying. “I’ll never forget this.” Then he turned his attention to the curly-haired one. “Care to come with us, Ruslan?”
The man shook his head. “Can’t leave Tatyana, Vitaly.”
“He’ll never let you come near her, and if you do, he’ll kill you like he did Spartak. You know that, right?”
“I know. I’m hoping she’ll want to do a Vitaly with me, and escape like you’re doing now.” The young man grimaced. “Though I’m afraid she doesn’t really care for me all that much.”
“All Tatyana cares about is Tatyana,” Vitaly grunted.
Ruslan shrugged, and his eyes darted to Joanna. “We can’t all be as lucky as you, boss.”
Vitaly eyed Joanna, and she was struck by the tenderness in his gaze. “That’s true,” he spoke softly.
A sudden worry struck her. “What are you going to tell Yury?” she asked the men. “If he finds out you let us go…”
“He won’t,” Ruslan assured her. “We’ll simply tell him that by the time we arrived all we found was Viktor’s body. He smiled. “No great loss there.”
“Be well, boss,” the others called out. “And don’t be a stranger.”
“See you, guys. Thanks again.”
And with those words, the bond between the men intact, Vitaly let himself fall down the other side with a grunt, then helped Joanna down as well. Ram leaped up at her, relieved to see his mistress unharmed. They were in another world, she now saw, this garden less regal and wilder than Yury’s. No large patch of smooth turf here, but vegetation allowed to flourish unhindered wherever she looked.
And yet there was a system to the madness, for their feet found a small garden path, and as they followed it, soon a large mansion came into view, and then a large moon-faced man with a full beard, who’d been cleaning a gun on a table outside, rose to his feet the moment they came stumbling from the brush, and his eyes widened at the sight of a bloodied Vitaly, a red-haired woman and a small white Maltese emerging from the garden like some woodland creatures popping up out of nowhere.
“Vitaly!” the man cried out, and was upon them in moments, lending a wounded Vitaly a helping hand.
Vitaly winced, his back now really starting to hurt, and she saw the beads of sweat pearling on his brow, a clear sign he was in urgent need of some medical assistance.
“Got into a little tiff with Yury,” Vitaly briefly explained. He then gestured to Joanna. “This is Mayor Royale’s daughter. Joanna Royale. Joanna? This is Bogdan Travnikov, boozehound and dear friend.”
Bogdan laughed a booming laugh, and Joanna took an instant liking to the bearded giant. “Can you help us?” she asked.
“You don’t even need to ask, Miss Royale,” Bogdan said, helping Vitaly to a chair. “In my house, you’re absolutely safe. Yury would never dream of barging in here.”
The strange rules these people abided by totally escaped Joanna, but she was grateful they’d finally found sanctuary. She knelt down next to Vitaly, a worried frown on her brow at the sight of his pained grimace. “He needs a doctor. He’s been shot,” she explained.
“Lucky shot,” grumbled Vitaly. “Viktor normally couldn’t hit a bear when it bit him.”
“Well, you’re a bit bigger than a bear, aren’t you?” commented Bogdan. “Hard to miss. So why, if Viktor shot you, did you still manage to get away?”
“We had help,” Joanna told him, and they briefly explained what happened.
Bogdan turned to Vitaly. “Let me get you a doctor. You look like shit.” And with these words he disappeared through sliding glass doors.
“I’m sorry for getting you into this, Joanna,” Vitaly spoke in a rasping voice. “If I’d known what Yury needed you for, I’d have put you on that plane myself and told him I’d just missed you.”
“It would have been to no avail, honey,” she spoke softly. “He would simply have sent someone else after me.”
As she spoke the words, she realized they were sharing the same predicament now. Even though Vitaly’s men had been loyal and had allowed them to escape, Yury would still put out a contract on the both of them now, which would only expire with their untimely demise.
For some reason, Bogdan’s house was a safe haven, but they could hardly stay holed up here forever. One day, Bogdan’s hospitality would run out, and they would be fair game for Yury’s killers.
Never would they be safe again. Not anywhere in the world.
CHAPTER 21
The days lingered, one melting into the next as easily and naturally as day morphing into night. Vitaly’s wounds had been tended to. Luckily no vital organs had been hit, and now all he needed was rest.
Bogdan had made a few phone calls, and Yury had indeed gone to great lengths to make sure they never left the premises.
They were, to all intents and purposes, prisoners on Bogdan’s domain now.
The man kept repeating he didn’t mind, and that they were welcome to stay as long as they liked, but both Joanna and Vitaly started to feel edgy soon after their arrival. They were taking advantage of Bogdan’s generosity. Not to mention putting him at risk—even though there was a mysterious truce between the two men, with Yury you simply never knew.
One evening, shortly after they’d arrived, Bogdan had left the house, and had sent the staff home so Vitaly and Joanna would have the place to themselves.
Joanna had wandered the house in his absence, exploring all its nooks and crannies. It was a big place. Four stories and easily twenty rooms in all, and inside easily as rambling and seemingly disorganized as the garden outside. Appearances could be deceiving, though, for she discovered there was a system to the madness, and even though furniture and baubles and knick-knacks and other ornaments seemed haphazardly strewn about, there was a harmony to it all that led her to believe Bogdan was some mad genius interior decorator in
his heart of hearts.
“What does he do, your friend?” she’d asked the first day, but Vitaly had merely given her the vague response that Bogdan was into imports and exports. That still didn’t explain why he would be involved with the likes of Yury, though, but since Vitaly had been in a lot of pain those first days, she’d refrained from pressing the point.
“I like to think of Bogdan as a mad genius,” she now said as she lounged on Vitaly’s bed, the patient having just awakened from a slumber that had taken him out for the best part of the day. She gestured around the room, where she’d only just now returned after roaming about the house and grounds for the past hour. “I mean, just look around. There’s clearly a system that defies the laws of design. I haven’t yet figured out what it is, but I intend to, even if I have to wheedle it out of your friend.”
He looked up amused. “I think Bogdan just does whatever Bogdan likes. No rhyme or reason. If today he likes pink cherubs, he will plunk them down everywhere, from the garden to the guest bedrooms. And if tomorrow he gets it into his nut that the Madonna and Child are what he loves most in this universe, he will gladly place them right next to the cherubs. Over the years, this place has grown fuller and fuller until it’s so loaded with junk that only a madman like him can stand it.”
“Why, you don’t like all this… stuff?” she said, gesturing at a bust of Beethoven placed on the dresser next to a Swiss cuckoo clock, a globe and a dolphin that lit up in the dark.
“I hate it,” he returned laconically. “Which isn’t to say I don’t appreciate all the man has done for us. He took a great risk when he decided to harbor two known fugitives from Yury.”
He pulled her down onto the bed next to him, then swept in for a kiss. She easily evaded him, seeing her chance to find out more. “Why is it, exactly, that Bogdan is the only one who seems safe from Yury’s clutches?”
Vitaly lay back against the pillow with a sigh. “Long story, honey. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“I can’t wait.” She folded herself against him, snuggling against his chest, reveling in the warmth of his embrace. “Shoot.” He winced, and she amended, “I mean, please commence.”
“Once upon a long ago, Yury and Bogdan were business partners. In fact, I think it was Bogdan who gave him his first introduction into the local business community. Yes,” he added when she looked thoughtful, “Yury used to be an ordinary captain of industry at one point. But then he grew weary of the lack of profit he could wring from selling real estate or setting up restaurants, and he figured he’d be better off catering to the dark underbelly of Lincoln by muscling in on the drug trade, gambling places, and prostitution racket. It didn’t take long for him to alienate every respectable member of the chamber of commerce and set himself up as the reigning king of the underworld.”
“Didn’t those other businessmen ever try to have him arrested?”
“That’s the thing. He’d been their pal for a while, and he knew where all the bodies were buried. In smoking rooms and club meetings, he’d amassed a wealth of personal details so he could blackmail each and every one of those businessmen. They simply chose self-preservation over doing the right thing.”
“So did my father, probably,” she mused. She didn’t know what hold Yury held over the man, but she was certain it helped explain why Paul had never tried to root out crime in Lincoln, in spite of all his election promises. Though apparently he’d still held out on Yury, otherwise the gangster would never have needed to have her abducted. Perhaps her father wasn’t all bad?
She trailed her fingers along Vitaly’s chest. “So what about Bogdan? Where does he fit in?”
“Bogdan… has his fingers in many pies, many of them as unsavory as Yury’s. In that respect, he’s Yury’s direct competitor. And then there’s the twins.”
“Yury’s girls.”
“Who are, in fact, Bogdan’s.”
Joanna looked up in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“Yana and Tatyana are Bogdan’s daughters. Bogdan and Alyona Abraskamov had a torrid affair, and soon after, the twins were born.”
CHAPTER 22
“So what happened to Yury’s wife?”
Vitaly thought back to the beautiful woman that Alyona had been, and a shoot of pain momentarily had him wincing at the memory. “She died. Yury had her killed.”
Joanna jerked away from him at the dry statement. “But that’s terrible!” Then she eyed him wearily for a moment. “Did you…”
“No, I didn’t. When he gave the order, I wasn’t even here. He’d sent me out to Vegas, for a conference of other crime bosses. He knew how much I cared about Alyona. I would never have condoned it.”
“Then why did you stay? Why didn’t you simply up and leave after that?”
He stared into her accusing eyes and couldn’t blame her. “Bogdan asked me to. He wanted me to keep an eye on the girls for him. Afraid Yury would take his vengeance out on Yana and Tatyana as well.”
She shook her head, still not comprehending. “But why would Yury raise them as his own? Why not simply disown them?”
“At first, he did not know. Alyona, for obvious reasons, never told him she’d had an affair. Then when he did find out—a stupid blood test revealed the truth—he’d already tied the girls to his criminal empire.”
“They’re tied into his business? How?”
“As you can imagine, in Yury’s line of work, the mortality rate is very high. Everything he owns, every business he’s started, it is all set up in Yana and Tatyana’s names. They don’t know that, of course, but it is his way to ensure his heritage. Make sure that if anything happens to him, the girls are provided for. To disown them at this point, he would have to restructure everything, and he’s not prepared to go to all that trouble. At least not until now.”
She frowned, understanding dawning. “But if Bogdan is the girls’ father, that means—“
“—he holds the keys to Yury’s kingdom. If anything happens to Yury and the girls, Bogdan only has to prove parentage, and everything will be signed over to him.”
“All the more reason for Yury to have him killed.”
“He would never do that. As I said, Bogdan knows a great deal about Yury’s business dealings that no one else does. He was his partner and mentor until Yury struck out on his own. I think it’s safe to say that Bogdan could destroy Yury if he chose to do so.”
“But he doesn’t because of the girls…” she said slowly.
“Exactly. Yury and Bogdan are at a stalemate. They can’t eliminate the other, but neither can they stand each other.”
“Talk about bad neighbors.”
He laughed and bunched his fingers in her hair, pulling her close, then claiming her lips with his own. He was feeling a lot better, the pain killers the doc had given him removing much of the discomfort. He was still sore, of course. Being shot in the back will do that to a man, but he was starting to feel more or less human again, and his appetite had returned, and not just his appetite for food, either.
“Come here, you,” he grunted when she struggled against him.
“We can’t, Vitaly,” she countered huskily. “Your wounds—you will hurt yourself.”
“Sure I will,” he murmured lazily against her cheek, then darted kisses along her neck until she shivered in delight.
They hadn’t been intimate since that morning in the garden, and the memory had done much to speed up his recovery. They’d slept in the same bed, and being close to her had been sheer agony, his cock rock-hard each time his eye caught the sway of her hips or the curve of her bosom. But then his body had protested vehemently each time he’d reached out.
Now he didn’t care whether the pain shot through him with the same violence and vehemence as the bullet that had torn through his tissues. He had to have her, or he would die trying. And that she felt exactly the same about him was obvious, for the moment he touched her, she was pliant and moving against him with an urgent desire that mirrored his own.
Joanna knew this moment would come, and she’d feared it as much as she had yearned for it. A part of her had hoped they would go their separate ways after the episode that had done so much to change her life. She loved him, and perhaps he loved her, but that still didn’t make it right that he’d done those horrible things in his past.
He’d been a Mafia don’s main enforcer, and she couldn’t even begin to contemplate the kind of violence he’d inflicted. She had only to think of the night he’d shown up at her house, sledgehammer in hand, to know he was a bad man, and she should heed the still, small voice inside that said never to associate with him again.
Yes, they slept in the same bed, and she had nursed him back to health, but that didn’t mean he could simply have his way with her whenever he pleased. She’d postponed the dreaded moment, but now she could no longer put it off.
Pushing his hands away, she quietly stated, “We have to talk, Vitaly.”
“I know something else we have to do,” he muttered, sliding his hand along her back and pressing her against him. Oh, God, how much she wanted him—and how strongly she felt she needed to get away from him lest her body brought her deeper and deeper into this unholy association with a known killer.
Finally, she found the strength to resist him and pushed back against his chest. “No, Vitaly. I—I can’t.”
This time, he did stop, and glanced up with a look of surprise. And pain.
She quickly averted her gaze, not able to bear the hurt in his eyes. She had to be strong now, lest her future was destroyed as surely as Viktor’s bullet would have.
“I—I don’t think we should be together any longer. It—it’s just not right.”
There. She’d said it. Now if only she could keep away from him, she would be fine. Just fine.
CHAPTER 23
“You can’t be serious.”
His blood had turned to ice. He simply couldn’t believe she would do this to him. Not now, when he’d given up everything for her—risked his life to be with her.
