Sweeter Than Hate: A Darker Than Love Prequel

by Anna Zaires

  “No, and I wouldn’t expect to hear from him anytime soon. We’re still”—Peter pauses, as if to check the time—“about an hour from the start of the deadline. I’m guessing we’ll have to make good on our threat with at least a few bodies before he realizes we’re serious.”

  “All right,” Esguerra says as I skim the message. “I’ve already given our men the instructions on which hostages are to be killed first. Any word from your hackers?”

  I look up from my phone. “Actually, yes. They’ve just tracked down the sniper for us—the one who shot the agent during Peter’s arrest.”

  Peter visibly tenses. “Who is he?”

  “He is apparently a she,” I say, reading more of the email. “Goes by the name of Mink and is from the Czech Republic. Hold on—the picture is loading now.”

  “What about our doppelgängers?” Anton asks. “Any word on those fuckers?”

  His words reach me as if through a wall of water, the roar of my heartbeat thunderously loud in my ears as shock and fury twist my guts. I’ve always prided myself on maintaining a cool head, the tight leash I keep on my emotions often fooling people into believing I don’t have any. But there’s no reining in the volcanic rage building inside me.

  On my phone is a face I never thought I’d see again—a pale, pretty face framed by short, spiky white-blond hair. The photographer caught it in partial profile, and if there were any doubts in my mind about the woman’s identity, the tattoo of the hummingbird on the side of her neck and the piercings studding her delicate ear would’ve dispelled them.

  The sniper who shot a SWAT agent during Peter’s arrest, setting off the firefight that resulted in the deaths of his in-laws, is none other than Mina, my pretty waitress from Budapest.

  The girl for whom I’d obsessively searched for days after she ran off.

  “What is it?” Ilya demands, and I tear my gaze from the screen to find my twin frowning at me.

  If I try to speak, I’ll explode. So I just hand the phone to him, letting him see.

  His harsh face freezes. “Her?” He looks up, jaw flexing. “She is Mink?”

  Peter grabs the phone from Ilya and examines the picture with a confused frown. Of course, he doesn’t see what Ilya and I see.

  He’s never met the deceitful little bitch, nor come dozens of times to the memory of fucking her.

  “Who is she?” he asks, looking up at me and my brother. “How do you know her?”

  I force the words past the knot of rage in my throat. “It doesn’t matter.” I snatch the phone back from Peter, fighting the urge to break his fingers in the process. “I’m sending men to capture her. She may know where Henderson is.”

  “It does matter,” Esguerra says as I furiously type an email to those of our men who are in Europe, scouring it for traces of Henderson, the former US general who’s Peter’s—and now our—greatest enemy. I send them the hacker’s file on Mink/Mina and direct them to capture her alive.

  We not only need to question her about Henderson, who’s apparently her employer, but I have an interrogation of my own to conduct.

  “Who the fuck is she?” Esguerra demands when no one replies to Peter.

  “We met her in Budapest,” my brother explains grimly as I send off the email and look up. “She works as a waitress in a bar.”

  Anton, the fucker, is staring at me with dawning recognition. “Did you sleep with her a while back?” he blurts out. “Is she the one Ilya was pouting about when we were in Poland?”

  I almost plant my fist into his bearded face. Only a lifetime of self-discipline keeps me still, my fingers squeezing the phone so hard it’s bound to leave bruises on my palm.

  My brother can’t control himself nearly as well. “I wasn’t pouting,” he growls back, murder in his eyes. “But yes, he”—he jerks his thumb at me—“fucked her.”

  My vision speckles with red, the rage inside me boiling out of control. Pivoting to face Ilya, I slam the phone on the table. “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  Face reddening with fury, he jumps to his feet, sending his chair crashing to the floor, and I follow his example, ready to pound his thick skull into the table. Fuck self-control. Bloodlust sings in my veins, dark and toxic, spurred by anger and the harsh sting of betrayal.

  Mina is Mink.

  She lied to me, played me for a fool.

  And my brother, ublyudok that he is, is still mad I didn’t fucking share.

  My fist is already balling up, about to fly toward his face, when Lucas Kent bursts in, his square-jawed face tense and his T-shirt drenched with sweat.

  “It’s Sara,” he says, panting like he’s sprinted all the way across the compound. “Peter, you need to come with me right away.”

  Sokolov is already moving, the mere mention of his wife enough to make him forget everything under the sun. A moment later, he and Kent are gone, and with them, some of the fury that had blinded me.

  Taking a breath to calm myself, I sit back down, and Ilya does the same, even as Anton and Esguerra eye us like we’re a pipe bomb ready to explode. But they don’t have to worry. I’m back to being in control.

  My brother is not the enemy here.

  She is.

  And when I get my hands on her pretty little neck, she’ll pay for every bit of her deception.

  7

  Mina

  I wake up to a splitting pain in my skull and a dull ache in my ribs. My mouth tastes like stale copper, and my arms are numb, my wrists painfully restrained above my head as I lie stretched out on some hard surface. It’s hot and humid, and I can smell my own sweat mixed with old wood and mustiness. For a moment, I can’t make sense of any of it, but then my memory returns, flooding my body with adrenaline. It takes all my training to remain still, with my eyes closed and my breathing unchanged, as images of what happened invade my mind.

  Attacked.

  Captured.

  I was heading to a bartending gig in Budapest when four men surrounded me in a dark alley, their eyes as cold as the weapons in their hands. I managed to disarm one and injure another, but there were too many of them.

  Even strong and healthy, I was no match for all of them.

  My memories after that are a blur. They either drugged me or knocked me out. I vaguely recall a sense of motion—a car, most likely—followed by a loud roar that reminded me of a plane’s engines. Did they fly me somewhere?

  If so, why?

  Fear presses in, the metallic tang of it bitter in my mouth, but I push it aside, forcing myself to concentrate. Think, Mina. Focus and think. I rake through the blurry recollections, looking for anything that might explain this situation.

  Who would want to capture me and why?

  A conversation comes to me, dim and hazy, as if from a dream. Amid the roar of the engines, men were talking—a mixture of English, Russian, and Spanish, if I’m not mistaken. What was it they said? There was some mention of someone named Esguerra, and also something about a captain or a general…

  Oh, fuck.

  My stomach tightens as it comes to me, the realization of what this is about. I should’ve known the clusterfuck in Chicago would blow back on me.

  It’s the one time in my life I didn’t listen to my instincts.

  The one time I took a job that didn’t sit right with me.

  The sound of footsteps yanks me out of my thoughts.

  Someone’s coming toward me.

  My heartbeat jacks up, but I don’t let it show, doing my best to appear passed out. The newcomer is not fooled. He stops next to me—somehow, I know it’s a he—and sinks to his haunches, watching me with malevolent amusement. I feel the weight of that stare, sense the darkness in it, and an uncanny sense of familiarity washes over me as the subtle, masculine scent of sandalwood and pepper teases my nostrils. He laughs then, the sound low and cruel, and as his fingers tenderly graze my lips, a chill roughens my skin at the impossible realization.

  “If it isn’t my little Mina,” Yan says in Hungarian, his
smooth, deep voice straight out of my darkest dreams. “Or should I call you Mink?”

  8

  Mina

  Lungs seizing with a mixture of shock and perverse excitement, I stare at the man I’ve tried—and failed—to forget over the past fifteen months. He’s as dangerously attractive as I remember, his hard features as symmetric as if they’d been carved by a sculptor and his blue button-up shirt perfectly tailored to his muscled frame. His mouth—the same talented mouth that had lapped at my sex with startling hunger—is curved in a cold smile, and his green eyes are filled with the promise of hell.

  Fuck. He is connected to all this.

  The possibility had occurred to me when Walton Henderson III, a former US general, reached out to me with the assignment. He wanted me to interfere during the arrest of a Russian assassin in the Chicago suburbs, a man who went by the name of Peter Garin.

  The goal was to make sure Garin didn’t get taken alive.

  The assignment sounded simple and straightforward, but the Russian assassin bit gave me pause. I wondered if the men who’d kidnapped me that night were somehow involved—if it could have anything to do with Yan and Ilya. But the picture of the target looked nothing like the twins, and after some deliberation, I took the job.

  Henderson made my skin crawl, but he paid well and Hanna’s bills were due.

  There was no way Garin was connected to Yan and Ilya, I told myself as I flew to Chicago with the US passport Henderson gave me. Russia is a huge country, one where criminals of all sorts abound. That my target shared a nationality and a dark calling with the man I’d slept with was a coincidence, nothing more.

  Later on, when the clusterfuck happened and my target’s face and name—his real name of Peter Sokolov—were all over the news, I remembered Ilya mentioning someone named Sokolov at the bar. But it was too late by then, and besides, it could’ve still been a coincidence.

  Sokolov is a fairly common Russian surname.

  But clearly, it wasn’t a coincidence, and now I’m Yan’s captive again, in some wooden shed someplace warm.

  “Where am I?” I ask in Hungarian, my voice cool and steady as I quickly survey my surroundings. He now knows what I am, so there’s no need for the fainting damsel act. As I speak, I become aware of a stinging pain in my lower lip and a dull throbbing in my jaw—likely from when I fought during my capture.

  “Colombia.” Yan’s smile turns darker as I shift slightly, trying to relieve the pressure on my bound wrists. “Julian Esguerra’s compound in the Amazon.” He says it in Russian, mocking the lie I told on the night he’d taken me.

  I stare at him unblinkingly. The name “Esguerra” means nothing to me, though the fact that I was brought halfway across the world is more than a little worrisome. I switch over to Russian. “Why am I here? What do you want from me?”

  “Right now, answers. After that, we’ll see.”

  Despite the pain in my battered body, my insides contract, a dark heat sizzling over my skin. Ignoring the sensation, I ask as calmly as I can manage, “And what do I get if I give you these answers?”

  “Your life,” someone answers in Russian. It’s a different, rougher voice speaking, and I tear my gaze away from Yan to see his brother approaching, the dim light in the shed making his skull tattoos look like a patchy buzz cut.

  “Hi, Ilya.” I give him my brightest smile—something I immediately regret, as the movement reopens my split lip. Still, it’s worth it. Ilya looks taken aback at my enthusiastic greeting, and some of the dark amusement on Yan’s face fades.

  He doesn’t like it that I’m happy to see his brother.

  It’s probably unwise to piss off Yan, but I don’t believe I’m going to get out of this alive. Not this time. With the Henderson job, I messed up in more ways than one. Not only did I accept a job that I had doubts about, but the SWAT agents didn’t kill Sokolov when I took a shot at one of them from a nearby roof. Somehow, the bastard managed to survive a firestorm of epic proportions and go on the run with his wife.

  And if he’s the twins’ friend or boss or whatever, the best I can hope for is a quick death.

  “Mina.” Ilya crouches next to his brother, his expression tight as he gazes down at me. “I guess you were never a waitress, were you?”

  “I was—I am. I waitress and bartend part-time.” I need a source of legitimate income for things like renting an apartment and keeping my grandmother in the dark.

  “Right.” Yan’s tone is mocking. “And the rest of the time, you do what? Kill SWAT agents for fun?”

  “Not for fun,” I say evenly. “For money. Same as you two. I was trained as a sniper in the Hungarian Special Forces, but things didn’t work out for me there. So when an opportunity to make some extra cash came up, I figured I’d put my skills to use.”

  There. I’ve said it. It feels strangely liberating to admit the truth, to drop the mask that I’ve been wearing for the past few years. No one except my trainer knows about this side of me, and if they did, they’d be shocked and horrified.

  The two men in front of me don’t look shocked or horrified. They look like they’re contemplating killing me, which is still somehow better than moralizing disapproval.

  Yan reaches out and strokes my lip again, his touch deceptively tender on my wound. “Where’s your employer?”

  I lick my lips, tasting blood as he takes his hand away, his fingers smeared with red. “I don’t have an employer. I freelance.”

  “He’s talking about Henderson,” Ilya says harshly, and when I look up at him, he’s glaring at his brother for some reason. Focusing back on me, he growls, “Where is he?”

  “I have no idea. I only met him in person once, when he gave me the assignment. The rest of the time, he communicated with me through encrypted emails.” There’s no point in denying my involvement. Even if I somehow managed to convince them that this is all a misunderstanding, they’re not going to apologize and fly me back to Budapest.

  I’m a dead woman walking—or lying flat, as the matter may be.

  “And what exactly was your assignment?” Yan’s voice is silky soft. “Was sleeping with me part of it?”

  Ilya visibly tenses at the question, and my face heats despite my resolution to keep my cool. “Of course not. You kidnapped me off the street and dragged me to your place, remember? I had no idea who you were that night, and in any case, I only met Henderson a couple of months ago.”

  “Really?” Yan drawls, his eyes gleaming. “So you weren’t spying on us at the bar?”

  “Not on purpose. If you didn’t want to be overheard, you shouldn’t have been discussing your business in public. I was working at that bar, that’s all.”

  “Bullshit.” Yan’s tone doesn’t change, but the temperature in the shed drops as he touches the side of my neck, his blood-smeared fingers rubbing against my tattoo. “They couldn’t locate you in their system, and you never came back—not even to pick up your measly paycheck. There was no Mina with a hummingbird tattoo on social media, either.”

  I try to ignore the effect his touch is having on my body. “So you did look for me.” I feared he might, so when I miraculously didn’t break anything during my escape, I went back to the bar and erased my personnel file in the computer. The owner never paid much attention to his part-time staff, and I wasn’t close to any of my coworkers, so I figured they were unlikely to know my address or full name off the top of their heads. Looks like I was right—just as I was right to always avoid social media.

  Even before I embraced my criminal tendencies, I believed in keeping as much of my life off the internet as possible.

  “Oh, I looked for you.” Yan’s gaze darkens, his hand moving lower to trail over my collarbone. “After all, your pussy—”

  “What did he hire you to do?” Ilya cuts in rudely as more color floods my face. His brother’s possessive touches and crude references to our night together seem to bother the big Russian nearly as much as they do me. Is it because, as Yan said that day,
Ilya is upset his brother didn’t share?

  Do these two share women often?

  Pushing away the X-rated images in my mind, I say steadily, “You already know. I was to shoot one of the arresting agents, prompting them to fire on Sokolov. Except at the time, I thought his name was Garin.”

  If I’d known my target’s real name, I would’ve remembered Ilya mentioning it at the bar, and I wouldn’t have taken the job. I’d been in desperate need of funds, but not desperate enough to cross someone as dangerous as Yan.

  “Is that all?” His fingers are now streaking fire over my ear, gently playing with every piercing I have there. “Think carefully before you lie to me, Minochka.” The diminutive Russian version of my name—something you’d call a child or a loved one—sounds cruelly mocking on his lips, especially when he smiles and adds softly, “Peter Sokolov is very good at extracting information.”

  Despite myself, I swallow, my empty stomach roiling. I’ve been trying not to think about that, about what would happen if I can’t give them the answers they’re after. I don’t fear death that much—with Henderson’s payment sitting in my account, Hanna should inherit enough to cover her expenses for a good long while—but I can’t deny that the possibility of torture chills me.

  “There is one more thing,” I say, deciding to just give them everything. Maybe if I’m cooperative enough, they won’t feel the need to resort to Sokolov’s methods of extracting information. “Henderson also needed men who’d be skilled in certain matters… and up for anything.”

  Yan’s gaze sharpens with interest. “Do tell.”

  “There’s a team I’ve worked with on a few jobs in the past.” Or rather, Gergo has—but I’m not about to drag my mentor and trainer into this. “I gave their names to Henderson. I don’t know what he needed them for”—though after watching the news, I have an awful suspicion—“or where they are right now, but I can tell you who they are. Maybe if you find them, they’ll know where Henderson is.”