The Vigilantes Collection

by Lake, Keri

  But not yet.

  “I had Nicoleta delete them.” The easy way Dmitry said it forced me to hold back a chuckle. Only someone as intimidating as Dmitry could get away with speaking so casually to a man like Tesarik—one psychopath to another. “It’s gone. Poof. No more.”

  “You fool. You fucking fool!” Tesarik tugged a gun from beneath his suit coat, tightening my chest, as Dmitry stood with his back to the bastard. Before he could take the shot, he fell to his knees and cried out.

  A stray shot whizzed past me, the burn streaking across my cheek, and the sound of broken glass chimed its exit. I swung around to see the hole in the window, with its branching cracks, and slapped a hand to my face, damned near pissing myself as I palpated the wound that extended up my cheek, angled in the same trajectory as the bullet. Holy hell, that was close! An inch closer, and I’d have had a hole through my face.

  Tesarik’s gun clanged against the wooden floor, and he smacked a hand to his shoulder where Dmitry’s guard had nailed him. “Do piče!”

  “Heartbreaking isn’t it? How your entire world can collapse in a matter of seconds? One minute, you’re a king, sitting on top of the world, and in one blink, you’ve lost everything that mattered.” With his gloved hands clasped behind him, Dmitry paced alongside his suffering brother.

  Tesarik groaned and fell back onto the floor, beside the scatter of blood drops.

  “Your failure was your greed. Your love for money. There’s no passion in that, Jozef. No purpose.” Dmitry shrugged, head tipped as he stared down at his brother. “Now look at you.”

  “You won’t kill me. You’re weak. You’ve always been weak.” Tesarik spat at Dmitry’s feet, still holding his wound to staunch the oozing blood.

  “You mistook compassion for weakness. But you’ve stripped me of that, now. So unlike you, who left me to live with the memory of that night, I am going to kill you.” He reached back his hand, and another guard emerged from the shadows, carrying a medium-sized plastic bottle that he handed off to Dmitry. “But first, I’m going to watch you suffer.”

  The second guard, dressed in black like Dmitry, moved like a phantom, taking position behind Tesarik.

  Tesarik fell forward, his good arm stretched out toward his fallen gun, and the guard slammed his boot down on his elbow with a sickening crack.

  I flinched, as Tesarik’s scream reverberated off the walls of the hollow room.

  Dmitry poured what I surmised as acid, given the curls of smoke that rose up on impact with Tesarik’s skin, and those screams turned blood-curdling. A sound like nothing I’d ever heard before. The sizzle of his skin coiled my stomach, and I had to look away as the gore of his wounds dripped onto the floor in a pool of blood and burned flesh that left a dark brown stain on the wood.

  With his cheek pressed into his arm, Tesarik’s body seized on the floor while his hand liquefied before his eyes.

  “It’s unbearable, the pain. And I wish I could say it subsides at some point, but it doesn’t.” Dmitry set the bottle down and crouched in front of his brother, removing his black gloves. “Even now, just watching you, I can feel the burning across my skin.”

  “I … kill you.”

  “You did, the night you took my family.” Gray thunderstorm eyes met mine, and he pushed to his feet. “And then you hurt the only thing I’ve come to care about since then.”

  “The whore?” Tesarik chuckled, and I would’ve stabbed him with my blade, had I not just watched his hand burn away into a pile of liquid on the floor. “Did she tell you of our games? How she loved them?” The moon’s light glinting off his eyes gave them a soulless shine, like staring into black onyx.

  I ground my teeth at the memory of those depraved games in his bedroom, the pain in my cheek flaring with my repulsion.

  “You called my wife a whore, as well.” Jaw clenched, Dmitry kicked him in the face, while the guard still held Tesarik’s arm steady beneath his boot.

  A flicker of distant headlights snapped my attention toward the window, and the rumble of an old engine outside twisted my stomach.

  Dax. Early, as I’d expected. Probably wanted to case the place before meeting up.

  I pushed off the edge of the stage and strode across the room, taking a stand beside Dmitry. “He’s here. I can’t stay.”

  “You’ve done well, Nicoleta.” He dragged a scarred finger down my cheek and pressed his lips to my forehead. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Dmitry … promise me …. Promise me you won’t kill him.”

  “This man is the one who came for you?”

  “He is.”

  “And you’ve developed feelings for him.” It wasn’t a question, and I bowed my head to keep from having to look him in the eyes.

  Dmitry had always considered love a weakness. A liability. And perhaps he was right, as I felt more vulnerable in that moment than I’d ever felt before.

  “Please, Dmitry.” I spoke the words and mustered the courage to look at him. “Promise me you won’t hurt him.”

  “You have my word.”

  With a nod, I shuffled quickly out of the room and into the dark corridor of the boat house. The hard thunk of the front door shuddered through my muscles, and I padded toward the staircase beside me, ascending the stairs up to total darkness with careful steps.

  Below me, Dax appeared, the barrel of his gun leading the way as he slinked along the wall toward the ballroom. His eyes scanned the place, but failed to lift high enough to see me.

  My pulse quickened at the sight of him, and I took in what little I could see in the light that reached the threshold of the room, where he stood looking within. I hoped he wouldn’t shoot first and make the mistake of attacking Dmitry, whose guards would shoot him without the slightest hesitation.

  For his sake, I knew he’d want to see Tesarik. He’d want to look him in the eye as he lay dying, to know that it was over. I knew he needed that closure, because I had once needed it, too. I’d left Dax with so little, so few answers, and I owed it to him. For all he’d done. All he’d risked. I owed him the satisfaction of knowing it was over.

  He disappeared into the room, and I snuck back down the staircase, taking light steps toward the ballroom entrance. From the shadows, I watched him approach Tesarik with slow and easy steps, his back to me all the while.

  Dmitry and his guards were nowhere in sight.

  Tesarik had taken a sitting position, cradling his arm, and his laughter bounced around the room. When he lifted that disfigured chunk of meat up into the air, I had to slap a hand over my mouth to keep the nausea that slammed against the back of my throat from spilling onto the floor. Nothing but a mutilated stump of bone stuck out from his elbow, the skin hanging like draped fabric. “Perhaps now, we both regret … touching her.” More laughter echoed in the room.

  Darkness stretched from the corner where I sat hidden, as Dmitry stalked toward Dax and held a gun to the back of his head.

  Branches of horror coiled around my spine, watching Dax’s shoulders roll back, his weaponless hand balled into a tight fist at his side, as though ready to fight.

  Anger ripped through me, tearing into my muscles.

  “Do you?” Dmitry asked, his hand steady on the gun.

  Tears welled in my eyes as I waited for Dax’s response, and when he answered, “No,” I blinked and they skated down my cheeks. My whole body trembled, anticipating Dmitry’s next move, knowing if I rushed in to stop him, there’d be no going back.

  Dax would never let me go again. That much I knew for certain.

  Dmitry lowered the gun, and I blew out a shaky breath, a wave of dizziness sweeping over me, and I clutched the doorjamb for balance.

  “Dmitry?” Dax asked, kicking his head to the side as Dmitry circled around him.

  “You’re welcome to finish him off.” Reaching into his pocket, Dmitry pulled out a cigar and lit it up.

  “Where is she?” Dax ignored his offer and glanced over his shoulder, but not far enough to see me. “I
s she here?”

  “I want you to forget about her. From this day forward. she’s no longer your concern.”

  “See, I can’t do that. Because all I do is think about her. From the time I wake up, to the second before I fall asleep. I can’t just fucking forget about her.”

  Tipping my head back to the ruined ceiling above me, I blinked hard to hold back the tears, the urge to break down. I understood every bit of what he meant, because I’d felt it, too. The unrelenting ache. The sleepless nights. The phantom strokes of his hands always reminding me of what I’d left behind.

  “I’m not asking you, Mister Wolfe. Believe me when I say, if Nicoleta wants to be found, she’ll find you first.”

  “Eden. Her name isn’t Nicoleta. It’s Eden.”

  I listened to the way my real name rolled of his tongue, how sweetly it sounded in his voice.

  “Eden. Of course. It’s been so long since she went by that name. Now, if you’d like to finish him off, I’m gifting you the opportunity. She wanted you to have some closure. Otherwise, I’ll ask you to leave, so I can pick up where I left off.”

  Dax’s gaze scanned the room, and I crawled back to keep him from noticing where I sat crouched. “Thanks. But no thanks.” He shoved his gun into his pocket and backed himself away from Tesarik. “I didn’t come here for closure. I came here for her.”

  I twisted around with my back against the adjacent wall and slid to the right, taking cover in the corner across from the staircase.

  As Dax strode through the doorway, I held both hands over my mouth to trap the sob begging me to call out to him. To run back into his arms where I felt most safe. Instead, I let him go.

  Love was a weakness, after all. A liability. One I couldn’t afford. I didn’t trust that Dmitry would feel the same and cut Dax out of my life for me.

  It was better my way.

  The moment Dax exited the building, I felt the weight crash down on top of me, pushing me under the surface again.

  38

  Nicoleta

  One week later …

  Throughout my life, my mother had prattled off a number of verses from the Bible, most of which I’d ignored out of anger. The one that’d stuck with me, though, was the one she’d spoken as she lay dying of a heart attack on the bathroom floor.

  Water becomes hard like stone, and the surface of the deep is imprisoned.

  My mother had always taken Bible versus in a literal sense, a result of her own ignorance, I supposed. And the words she’d spoken that day had only exacerbated my rage, as I’d imagined she was trying to tell me that only through God’s love could the water be thawed or some shit. After all, she’d accused me of lying about what’d happened to me, had told me it was an unbelievable story, because what young girl could find the strength to cut herself free from being tied to an anchor, and then crawl back onto that dock?

  When she’d fallen to the floor that night, I hadn’t called an ambulance. I hadn’t screamed for help, or attempted to save her, at all. I’d sat beside her, contemplating life without her, and the kind of strength I’d need to survive on my own.

  I’d watched her take her last breath, her eyes pleading for my help, and had never once shed a tear.

  It wasn’t until years later that the meaning of those words she’d spoken to me through choppy breaths had come to light.

  In her own way, she’d been asking for forgiveness. Confessing that her heart had grown so hardened by life, all the words she’d wanted to say lay trapped and imprisoned within her.

  I’d have to live with the fact that’d I’d denied her forgiveness, and instead watched her suffering. My first kill, a merciless act that’d landed me another admission into the psych ward, and the only one I’d regretted.

  Perhaps she’d have changed over time. Maybe she’d also had a hard time communicating with others throughout her life, and the verses she’d spoken had deeper meaning than the credit I’d given them.

  My mother and I weren’t entirely different in that respect.

  I’d always allowed the icy surface to act as a barrier to the truth inside of me. Dax had been proof of that. So many times I’d wanted to show him the turbulent nature of my heart that lay hidden beneath the glassy surface of my smile. Instead, I’d fed him lies, my own verses, never fully expressing what he’d come to mean to me.

  Cloaked in the darkness, I lay in the obscurity of my room, where I’d spent most of the week. Could’ve gone anywhere in the world with the money I’d stolen from Tesarik, but like a fool, I’d chosen to stay with Dmitry. He’d insisted, after I’d successfully delivered Tesarik to him, as promised. A deal I’d made with him, in exchange for the names of the men who’d hurt me, and where to find them.

  A frigid cold crawled over my skin, the faint breath of despair winding down my spine. I was sinking again. Spiraling into the depths of something that promised no return. A darkness filled with skeletons, through whose bones I’d soon have to pick.

  My cellphone lay on the nightstand beside me.

  Help me, Dax.

  Couldn’t reach it, even if I’d wanted to call him. Not with my hands cuffed to the bed. I’d toyed with fate one too many times for Dmitry’s taste, testing my limits. Holding my breath underwater far longer than I should’ve. Every cut to my arm closer to severing my ties to the world. Funny thing was, I hadn’t actually planned to kill myself. Kind of like those pills Dax kept on the shelf—a reminder of how much power we actually had over our demons.

  Unfortunately, Dmitry had taken matters into his own hands, and once again, I found myself imprisoned.

  The door clicked, and the light slicing through the bedroom shone on a lavish painting on the wall, which captured the dark innocence of a young girl picking flowers in a field, while the eyes of a wolf glowed through the forest trees in the distance.

  How fitting.

  I stared down at the dark silhouette taking up the doorway and swore I could see his gray eyes glow as they studied me.

  He wordlessly entered my room, and the bed dipped as he took a seat beside me. The scent of his cigar smacked the back of my throat with a rich, woodsy aroma. The same scent I imagined death must’ve tasted like for his enemies. “You should’ve left when you had the chance.”

  “I knew you weren’t finished with me. That you’d come for me, if I ran.”

  His hand slid up the side of my silk nightgown, teasing the hem just above my panties. “I imagined his hands on you as I poured the acid.”

  “It meant nothing, Dmitry. You know that.”

  “I wasn’t referring to my brother’s.”

  His words brought to mind the afternoon in the bathroom, when I’d watched in the mirror’s reflection as Dax’s hands erased the memory of my captors. What I wouldn’t have given to have them pulling me in, settling my mind, the way his gentle strokes had always distracted me.

  “They meant nothing, as well.” Saying anything else would put Dax on his kill list.

  Warm breath trailed over my shoulder where he dragged his nose across my skin, inhaling me. “You smell like lies, Nicoleta.”

  “My name is Eden.”

  “No. Eden was the child who stole from me. Nicoleta is the woman I intend to take in exchange.”

  “I fulfilled my part of the deal, Dmitry. I gave you Tesarik, as you asked.”

  “And I’ve kept my hands off you. I’ve waited for you. I dare say I fell in love with a child the day you stole from me, but that would make me worse than my bastard brother. You fascinate me, Nicoleta. Here, I’ve helped you at every turn, never once turned you away.” A sharp sting hit the back of my skull, as he yanked my head back and set his mouth to my ear. “All for a promise. The promise that you belonged to me in the end.”

  My throat bobbed with a swallow, as he held my neck taut enough for a blade to slice across it. “I’m grateful for what you’ve done.”

  “Your gratitude isn’t good enough. I want all of you.”

  There’d always been something t
errifying about Dmitry’s eyes. Something hidden within those gray irises that set my teeth on edge, and as I stared into them right then, I finally understood what I’d found so disturbing. They were empty—as empty and cold as his brother’s had been.

  “You have me now, Dmitry. I’m yours.” Because I no longer cared what he did to me. Everything I wanted, everything I cared about, had been stripped away.

  “No, I can see it when you look at me.” He relented his grip and pushed off the bed, his footsteps counting off his paces. “There’s betrayal in your eyes.”

  “I did what I had to do.”

  “As did I.”

  I snapped my head back, taking in a sharp breath at the second silhouette standing in the doorway. “No. No, please.” Kicking against the mattress sent my back flying into the headboard behind me. “Please, Dmitry. I’m yours. Whatever you want, I’ll do it.”

  “I’ve been assured that you’ll be well taken care of. We can’t have anymore of these … little accidents you keep having in the bathtub. With the blade. I can’t take the risk that you’ll do harm to yourself.”

  Doctor Emberle stepped into the room and adjusted his glasses. “I’ve taken the liberty of making sure your room is comfortable. Secure. You have nothing to worry about, Eden. You’ll be watched carefully.”

  “Please! Dmitry, don’t do this!” Panic thumped inside my chest at the thought of my small, white room, with the barred windows and tiny cot. The mind-suppressing drugs and nightly visits from Doctor Emberle.

  Dmitry stood over me and stroked a hand down my face. “You know how I feel about betrayal, Nicoleta. Besides, chtoby ctati privedeniem, nyjno izbavitsa ot teh kto verit v tvoe cyshestvovanie.” He leaned forward to plant a kiss to my cheek, and whispered, “To remain a ghost, you must eliminate those who believe you exist.”

  I shook my head frantically, kicking and wriggling on the bed.

  Dmitry stepped back, waving his hand toward Doctor Emberle, who approached carrying a syringe.

  “Once she’s out, I’ll have the orderly help carry her down to the vehicle.”