It only took a moment for his mind to conjure what this room had been—or rather, what it would have ultimately become in the future.
Was that his own heartbeat he heard in his ears?
Echoes of the past?
Was his hand shaking?
He started forward, drawing in a noisy breath as he twisted the knob and let himself inside. Though soot scorched the floor, the room itself was left mostly untouched by the damage done outside it.
The light gray walls were nearly flawless, the floors that dark shade of brown that was missing from the rest of the house, and sitting right in the middle of the floor was a stuffed white rabbit.
In any other room here, he might have thought it was merely a token, that she had left it to ensure that he knew she was responsible for the wreckage. In any other room, it would have meant nothing.
But here, it told him everything.
And even as he thought it couldn’t be possible, he heard her voice whispering in his ear.
“What do you think of this room?” she’d asked as she walked in ahead of him, a brilliant smile on her face as she spun a quick circle, her arms outstretched.
Uilleam had been on his phone at the time, lost in whatever deal he had been making. “It’s as nice as any other room.”
“Nice enough for a nursery, do you think?”
That one word had managed to grant her his undivided attention. And even as he knew she was joking from her light laughter, the seed had been planted. He was imagining what their life would be like, and even with a little one that would be theirs.
A family.
“If we did,” she’d said with a mischievous wink, “I’d have the crib right here in the very center of the room. D’you want to know why?”
He’d smiled, walking to her before pulling her into his embrace, lost in the fantasy with her. “Tell me,” he said.
“Because they would be the center of our universe. And you know what my first gift would be?” she asked, her voice gone softer now, and maybe ... maybe the idea wasn’t just a wistful thought but rather something she desperately wanted. “A little white rabbit.”
He refused to believe his own memories. It was merely his mind trying to attach meaning where there was none, but whether half of him refused to believe what was right in front of him, it was still there.
Within his reach.
Uilleam counted every step he took until he reached the center of the room where the animal was sitting. He counted the breaths he took as he bent to pick up the stuffed toy and held it in his hands.
It just wasn’t possible.
If the blood hadn’t been swimming in his ears, he might have heard the front door open, or the soft footsteps that brought someone to the very room he was in.
Had his time finally come?
Was this where he was meant to die?
“Guess she kept her promise.”
Uilleam turned to face the man in the doorway, taking in his bruised face, the evidence of a recent shave, and the slight gauntness to the man’s features. He might have looked older, but the years had been kind to him during his captivity.
“She said you were dead,” Uilleam said, too exhausted and too dead inside to say much more.
He was dangerously close to thinking he was balancing on the precipice of his own sanity, and if what he held was what he thought it meant, he would topple over face first and no one would be able to save him.
Grimm shrugged, stepping farther into the room before he placed a cigarette between his lips.
“Yeah, well … she probably wishes I was.”
Clutching the rabbit in his hands until his knuckles blanched, Uilleam stared at the mercenary he hadn’t seen for nearly half a decade. After everything she had done, and everything she had taken from him, he still didn’t understand her end goal.
Had it been him, Grimm would have never walked out of wherever he’d been held. He would have died for the cause.
And considering she had taken Grimm from the very beginning and left him alive for so long … it didn’t make sense.
What was the reason?
“Why?” Uilleam asked, unable to voice the jumbled mess of his thoughts. “Why did she take you?”
Grimm pulled out a lighter, his expression unreadable, but there was something lingering in the man’s eyes—the way he too stared at the white rabbit in Uilleam’s hand as if it held all the answers. “I tried to kill her.”
Such beautifully poisonous words. Even as he was eager to hear anything she thought to tell him, he wasn’t sure he was capable of having her taunt him any further. He was already standing on the precipice. He wasn’t ready to tip over.
Uilleam flinched, the only thing he was capable of doing at hearing those words, even as rage followed on its heels. But he knew, though Grimm had yet to say, that it didn’t end there. And by the time the man finished, he was sure he wasn’t going to like what he heard.
“The Omerti job,” Grimm went on, his tone flat. Resigned.
He remembered the job well. It was his first after the “Kingmaker” had made its mark in the underground, and he was becoming known as the man who could fix any problem. But on the same token, he’d had to prove even more that he was formidable.
That no one would be able to walk all over him.
Respect could be earned later, he’d reasoned back in those days. It was people’s fear he wanted.
Yes, Uilleam remembered Douglas Omerti very well.
“What about him?” Uilleam asked, trying to remember the details of that day. Of what he’d been doing.
Grimm might have been able to provide some clues as to what happened, but it was doubtful that Karina had shared with him everything. No, she wanted Uilleam to remember. She’d demanded it constantly.
What? What did she want him to remember?
“He was at the restaurant, like you said,” Grimm went on before dragging in a lungful of smoke as only a nicotine-addict could. “But he wasn’t alone.”
I called you, and you didn’t answer … you said you were busy.
He could hear her voice in his head, loud enough that she might as well have been standing across the room from him, watching as he discovered the truth that had eluded him.
“I was a different man then,” Uilleam muttered to himself, shaking his head.
Rejecting the truth that was fast approaching.
Grimm continued, as if the words being uttered had weighed heavily on him. “The rule back then was no survivors. No witnesses. But she wasn’t like the others …”
Uilleam’s stomach twisted, his thoughts racing, blood coursing through his veins.
August fifteenth was the day she said she called.
The day he hadn’t been bothered to hear what was so important for her to say.
Eight months, nearly, from the last time he’d seen her.
He held that rabbit tighter in his hand.
And the truth … the truth was so much fucking worse.
“She was sitting when I pulled the trigger, her back to me—that’s why I didn’t realize it was her until she fell.”
“Don’t,” Uilleam said before he could continue. “She wasn’t … she couldn’t have been preg—” The word was lost somewhere in the back of his throat, trapped behind a knot of emotion swelling so big he could hardly take a breath.
He couldn’t even bring himself to look in Grimm’s direction, knowing what he would see in the man’s gaze.
Pity, most likely. And a pain that Uilleam wasn’t quite ready to face.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Two words that meant nothing.
Two words that only brought a pain so acute to Uilleam’s chest, he leaned against the wall, afraid his legs would give out from beneath him.
Grimm didn’t have to go on for him to know what came next.
He’d lived it.
He was now suffering the consequences of his actions.
And as he looked down at his hands whe
re he held the little white rabbit and understood the gravity of what it meant, Uilleam broke.
“You do not allow something as trite as love stand in the way of your goal. We are Ashworths, Karina. We take what is owed. We don’t bargain.”
When Karina was just a girl, Mother always said weakness was for those who didn’t know any better. In her mind, it was merely a construct of one’s own imagination.
She grew up believing there was no greater failure than someone who allowed themselves to be weakened by something as simple as matters of the heart. Of the flesh.
But she hadn’t known—she couldn’t have known—just how quickly and deeply she could feel for another person.
Then she hadn’t understood what grief really meant.
For a while, Karina had believed that. She believed that only those who weren’t capable of greatness succumbed to feeling helpless.
That was before she understood what grief really meant. How it could claw its way into her insides and ensure she never felt anything other than pain.
She stared at the grainy 3D image in her hands, her name and birthday in the top left-hand corner, as well as the date in which the rendering was captured. It was one of her few prized possessions she took with her everywhere.
After all, the little face depicted in it was the reason she wore white and would until the day she died.
Sitting back with a sigh, Karina watched the seat belt light flicker off a moment before she heard the soft click of heels on the carpeted floor of the jet.
A moment later, the woman they belonged to sat in the seat opposite her. Before the woman could get a look at what she held, Karina tucked the image away, folding her hands back in her lap, her gaze going to the window.
“Yes, Mother,” the woman said, her gaze trained on Karina even as she carried on her conversation with her mobile still to her ear. “I’m bringing her home now.”
Karina barely withheld a grimace at the thought.
Home.
Sure, she had once considered the country estate they flew toward as home, but now, it was merely a piece of impeccable architecture. Four walls that carried beauty and secrets.
There had only ever been one place that she had, in her twenty-seven years, considered home.
A place she had left a puddle of her own blood in.
A place she hadn’t been back to in so long, she doubted it was still standing. Uilleam always had a habit of destroying the things that hurt him most. It would make sense that the brownstone where they had once lived together would suffer the same fate.
“I’ll have her call you when she wakes up … of course, Mother. Yes, see you soon.” Moments later, the woman pulled her mobile from her ear and ended the call, tossing the slender device onto the seat beside her.
Now that the conversation was over, she turned to better face Karina, the blank expression she had slipping away as only it did when they were alone together. She had always, even when they were little girls playing in their mother’s garden, been able to read her without trying.
“I warned you not to fall in love with him,” she said with a sad shake of her head. “It only ever ends one way.”
“Isla, not right now.”
Karina had known the rules when Mother had first brought her the terms—when she had first seen Uilleam’s picture in a file. She’d known that if she wanted to do what Mother instructed, she couldn’t get attached to the subject.
It was the most basic rule of espionage, and though she and her sister weren’t spies by any means, they had been raised to believe in the same concepts.
In the end, she had broken every rule that had ever been put into place for her.
With relish.
For him.
In the beginning, instead of destroying him, she had fallen in love and walked away from everything she knew because in her mind, nothing was greater than what she had felt for him.
Nothing else mattered but him and her and … what could have been.
“Mother will have questions,” Isla said, gesturing for the flight attendant to pour her, her usual. A fruity cocktail that contrasted with the type of woman she was.
Mother had always told them to order something simple and feminine, a martini or something just as dull. This was Isla’s small act of rebellion.
“If you can’t handle mine, surely you don’t expect you’ll be able to suffer through hers.”
She was right, though Karina didn’t want her to be. It might have felt like a chapter in her life had just closed, but this was another beginning for her.
Because now that she didn’t have Uilleam’s befoulment to keep her going, Mother would be ready to send her on another mission.
Another chance for her to understand her role in the family and do what was expected of her.
She wasn’t looking forward to it.
“Fine,” she said, though her real agitation wasn’t with her sister. It was with herself.
Nearly a decade later, she was still hopelessly in love with a man she needed to get over. They would never again have what they once did.
Before he was the Kingmaker and she Belladonna.
That was as much of a fantasy as her having once believed that their future would be bright and beautiful and everything she’d ever dreamed of before such desires had been forced out of her.
“Ask me whatever you want,” Karina said, plucking Isla’s drink from the attendant’s hand before she ever got the chance to set it down.
Within seconds, she downed the contents, relishing the burn left behind by the vodka.
A drink that was well overdue after the past couple of weeks.
Isla merely smiled. “She’s going to ask why you didn’t kill him. That was the original plan, no?”
Karina sighed, realizing the one drink wouldn’t be enough. “I took what mattered to him most. Trust me, that’s more than enough.”
Death was easy and finite.
But living, knowing that he had allowed someone to get under his skin deep enough to destroy him, was a worse existence.
Karina knew that all too well.
And despite how close she was to her sister, she would never be able to admit that she couldn’t bring herself to kill him, or to callously give someone else the order to do it.
Even the thought was horrifying.
His mercenaries were gone, his business in shambles, and even his home life was broken after she’d revealed to Kit that his mother was still alive by Uilleam’s interference. He had nothing left. She’d seen to it.
“And Poppy?” Isla asked, knowing how one little name made her feel as if she were dying a thousand deaths.
Just the thought of it made her feel as if the picture tucked away in her pocket was burning away the fabric. “What about her?”
“I know you, little sister, and had you told him the truth—all of it—you wouldn’t be sitting with me now.”
Karina was shaking her head before she even meant to, trying to call up an argument that would explain her reasoning, but instead, the truth spilled out of her before she could contain it. “That would have destroyed him.”
As the truth had once destroyed her.
“Then I can’t imagine how the two of you are done with each other,” Isla said as she sat back, staring back at her with Mother’s eyes. “I also told you the truth would set you free, yet you still withheld it.”
Karina wanted to say he didn’t deserve the truth, that he didn’t deserve her, but deep down, she knew that if she told him, it would break him in a way that she or anyone else ever could.
And even as angry as she was with him—after all these years and this last and final battle between them—she still didn’t want to hurt him that way.
She didn’t want to see him utterly broken.
He was her weakness.
“His organization is dismantled,” Karina said, thinking of his mercenaries and the truths she’d used to get them to walk away. If she hadn’t, Mother would have had
them all slaughtered, just as she’d have Uilleam if given the chance. “His name is practically useless without them. I didn’t need our truth for that. The job is done.”
Nearly a decade in the making, she had finally finished what Mother had requested her to do.
Take down the heir to the Runehart fortune.
She just hadn’t expected all she’d suffered in her quest to do so.
Isla laughed, the sound light and airy and far too amused. “Do you honestly believe this is the last we’ll see of that man?”
“If he knows what’s good for him.”
But some part of her—the part that had fallen in love with a man with the drive and ambition to take over the world and rule it without anyone truly comprehending the power he had—wasn’t quite so sure Uilleam was beaten.
She knew, even though she wouldn’t admit it aloud, that Uilleam wasn’t finished with her yet.
At that thought, Karina smiled.
But she didn’t look convinced. “If the two of you have shown me anything over the past—how many years has it been?—you’re not going to quit each other.”
And that was the problem.
Her life would be far less complicated if she could.
Afterword
A word from the author …
It all started with an idea.
I was working on the second book in my Volkov Bratva series and when Niklaus Volkov popped into my head, I hadn’t intended on going on this epic 7-book journey with him and the other mercenaries. But the more I started thinking about “Red,” the more I started thinking about the Kingmaker.
And without him, this series wouldn’t be what it is.
It’s so baffling to think that I’ve been writing about this crazy team of mercenaries for almost two years—it’ll be two years in April, actually—and now the end is finally here.
But as one journey comes to an end, another one is about to begin.
Karina and Uilleam’s relationship is complicated, so much more than any other I’ve ever written. I can’t wait for you to read their series because it’s going to be epic.
Iris. (Den of Mercenaries Book 7) Page 30
