by SR Jones
Chapter Sixteen
Zoey
I stare at the man fast asleep in front of me. My throat is dry, and my heart is going so fast. I think I might faint.
He’s wearing a noise-cancelling mask. A bottle of sleeping pills by the bed helps explain how he’s so deeply asleep.
The gun in my hand doesn’t shake, despite my climbing heart rate. This isn’t like with Konstantin and Cassie. This feels right.
A hand at the small of my back lets me know Vasily is behind me. I look again at Number One. I always thought he was the nicest, but the information that Damen has shows that none of these men are nice. They’re cold, calculating sociopaths, working for a shadowy organization that has carried out unspeakable cruelty to get results for its clients.
I squeeze the trigger, and the shot blasts out in the room even with the suppressor fitted. I aim right between the eyes, and Number One jerks as blood blooms on the front of the mask. Wanting to be sure, I aim and fire a second time. Two head shots. He’s surely dead.
He jerks. One arm raises up and touches the side of his head, then … nothing.
Ilya steps around me and touches his neck. “Dead.”
I expected to feel something monumental or to freak out. I’ve just taken a life. In cold blood. Instead, a sense of shaky relief fills me. One down, two to go. These fuckers will never threaten or hurt Esme again when we’re done with them, and that overrides everything for me. The man at my back did this for me. My husband. He might be one insane fucker, but he delivered on his promise.
“One down, two to go, babe,” he whispers in my ear, echoing my thoughts. “How does it feel?”
“Empowering,” I tell him.
“I’ll clean up. You two go wait in the car, and read all the information on Number Three. That won’t be as easy. He lives in a big apartment block, not out here in the country.” Ilya walks to a bag and begins to take out cleaning equipment, rubber gloves, and some tarpaulin.
Alexei is back at the hotel. In case we don’t return, and all get ourselves killed, he’s the one tasked with finding Esme and making sure she’s safe.
We exit the house, and the chill of the English air hits me, helping me breathe through the overwhelming relief that I’m doing what is needed to keep my baby safe.
We took a private chartered flight, and it has left me a little disoriented, being here so soon after being in Greece, and the shock of getting married.
Ilya is right, the next kill won’t be as easy. Number One lived alone, in a house down a country track. No one would have heard or seen the shot unless we’re seriously unlucky.
I’m grateful to Ilya for clearing up what I’ve done. I might want these men dead so they can’t harm me or Esme anymore, but I don’t relish the idea of clearing up their blood and guts.
I’m buzzing with the realization that I’ve just taken my revenge on a man who manipulated and controlled me by using my daughter. That man did it to others too. They used the most innocent lives to control and abuse their victims. An evil piece of shit has been removed from this earth, and I did that. Me. I wasn’t lying when I said it felt empowering.
Vasily pushes me up against the door of the big SUV, which one of his contacts left for us at the airport parking lot. “You took back your power,” he tells me, his hot mouth finding my neck. “Did it turn you on?”
“Eew, Vasily, get off me. I’m not so depraved that killing turns me on.” I push at him, but he doesn’t budge.
“I’m not saying killing does. I’m saying taking back your power and being in control might.”
He smiles against my neck. I can feel it in the dark.
“Let’s see, shall we?” Body bracketing me in place, he dips his hand down into my jeans and panties. One finger parts my folds, and he breathes harshly. “You’re wet.”
He pushes the finger inside me, and it feels so good. This is all kinds of messed up. I just killed a man, and now I’m humping Vasily’s hand, but I don’t want him to stop.
He adds a second finger and fucks me with them as his thumb works my clit. I come hard and fast against his hand, biting into his shoulder to stop myself from crying out. When it subsides, emotion chokes me. I blink away the tears and harden my resolve against the desire to simply curl up in Vasily’s arms and let him hold me.
Vasily withdraws his fingers and sucks them into his mouth, cleaning my arousal from them. “You know what you are?” he says.
I shake my head, scared of what he might say. Crazy? Sick? A sociopath?
He grins. “You’re epic, Zoey. That’s what you are. Damned epic. I really think you might be my soul mate.”
Then he gets into the car, leaving me sagged against the door, my poor brain trying to keep up with all that’s happening to me these days.
When we get to the apartment block where Number Three resides, the adrenaline rush has worn off. I’m shaky and more than a little nauseous. We park, and Vasily turns to me, his face falling when he takes me in.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I shake my head. “What if we’re wrong? The stuff Damen said about them not being under duress might not be correct intel. That isn’t what they told me, so what if we’re wrong?”
“Damen won’t be wrong. These men would say anything to get their victims to carry out their dirty work for them. You’ve done the right thing and probably saved a lot more men and women from your fate,” Ilya says.
Vasily squeezes my hand. “Do you want us to take this one?”
I nod, grateful to him. He squeezes my hand once more, then he and Ilya get out of the car and head into the apartment block.
I stare after him as realization hits. He’s left me alone!
Shit.
I start to breathe hard. I could escape. I could go to the police. I’m in England now, so I could ask for their help. Tell them … what? My daughter was taken by a shadowy organization who threatened her with child trafficking in order to make me comply, and now I’ve been forced to marry a Bratva Pakhan? Yeah. I’d be on a psych hold within the hour.
I could disappear, though. Run away. But then what about Esme? Would Vasily save her if I deserted him? I doubt it. I’d be alone, trying to figure this out and with no help. Look where that’s got me so far.
There’s a small, sick and twisted part of me that doesn’t want to run anyway either, even if I could. Vasily is like a mirror of myself. He’s maybe right that we’re soul mates. We’ve both done a lot of morally ambiguous things, and yet, we are both trying hard to somehow do the right thing when it really matters. He saved me, and yeah, part of him did it because he wanted to screw me again, but I also believe part of him felt it was the right thing.
Shit, am I falling for my captor? Is this Stockholm syndrome or something more?
It’s forty minutes before they reappear, and I’ve worked myself into a terrible state of panic by the time they do. Half of me is convinced Vasily and Ilya are dead, and I don’t know how I feel about it. My rational side is yelling run away. The other part of me is screaming to stay and see this through, let these men help me save Esme.
The door opens, and Vasily grins at me. “Still here. I left it unlocked on purpose. Thought it would be interesting to see whether you ran or stayed.”
“What would you have done if I had run?” I ask.
“Tracked you down.”
I bark out a bitter laugh. “You’re a Bratva thug, darling, not a tracker like Damen.”
He climbs in the back beside me, leaving Ilya to get in the driver’s seat. “I put a tracker in your shoes, darling.” He pulls back, looks at me for a long beat, and then kisses me.
Carefully, he reaches over me, fastens my seatbelt into place, uses his fingers to comb through the front of my hair where it must be a mess from me raking my hand through it in panic, and finally he takes the lip gloss out of his pocket and puts some on my mouth.
“There, that’s better. Now you look beautiful.”
“You’re sick in the head,
” I say. Then I add, “I hate you.”
It sounds like a lie to my own ears.
“I hate you too.” His breath brushes over my throat where his lips linger, and I shiver.
“You two are utterly insane,” Ilya adds from the front.
“Yes, but we fit.” Vasily shrugs. “Her crazy matches my crazy.”
Even three days ago, I’d have told him how wrong he was. Now? Now, I’m starting to think he’s right.
“Number Two, next,” Vasily states. “Or as he actually is known, Christoph Joseph Montgomery. Monty to his friends. French mother, British father. Intelligence background. Helped set up the Order, or as it is known to its clients, Complex Solutions.”
He sneers as he reads from his phone. “You have a complex problem; we can guarantee you a solution. That’s what they state when they are referred to someone. Damen says all their business is referral, word of mouth only. They did carry out some work for the French, British, Polish and Turkish governments, but the French and Brits cut all contracts when some of their less … how do I say … legal? No. Moral? No. Anyway their less correct, methods were discovered. They have been employed by various high-end individuals and private corporations to sort out a variety of problems.”
“Guns for hire are one thing,” Ilya says from the front. “These guys, though, they don’t do the dirty work. They pay others to do it, and in some cases force or blackmail other people to do it, and the ones they force are mostly women.”
“Why not just hire people and pay them, though?” I ask.
Vasily shrugs again and sighs. “Because most of the people who do the kind of work they need carrying out know one another. It’s not a big world, you know? There isn’t a union for gangsters, hitmen, and the like. You hire someone, and there’s always the possibility someone else will pay them more. You hire someone, and there’s the possibility that if they get caught, they talk. They tell the people who caught them exactly who hired them to do the job, if they’re chicken shit. That means Complex Solutions, and our friend Monty, would be in the firing line from some very unsavory people. They do hire people for a lot of their jobs, but the most dangerous, and the ones needing a honey trap, they use a variety of women it seems they’ve compiled files on and have blackmailed over the years.”
“So I was just a dumb, easy mark?”
I hate myself in this moment. If only I’d seen through them right from the start, I’d have never put Esme in harm’s way.
Vasily’s phone goes off, and he answers it. “Da.”
I hear the voice at the other end and think it must be Damen from the deep tones. I can’t quite catch what he’s saying, though. Vasily listens, making the odd encouraging noise now and then, and when he hangs up, he turns to me with a huge grin on his face.
“Guess what Damen just found out?”
“What?”
“Esme is safe, and Reece is going to pick her up as we speak. He’s going to bring her with him to Corfu in two days.”
“No,” I say. “No, I want to go to her, now.” Oh my God, she’s safe. My baby is safe. But alone. And she’ll be scared. She’ll want her momma.
“It’s not safe for you to do that.” Vasily shakes his head. “It puts her in more danger too. Right now, all the Order know is that you fucked up and failed. They don’t know you’re with me. They don’t know we’re barreling down on Number Two as we speak. You go to her school, and they’re watching it, you give the game away. Reece, though, they won’t be looking for him. He’s going to go and collect her, take a detour into the bathrooms on the way out. He has a wig and some other shit for her to put on in there. He’ll walk in unknown to anyone from the Order who might be watching, and he’ll walk out with a kid who doesn’t look like Esme. He has Luka with him, and the minute they get her, they’ll be on a plane bringing her to you.”
“He’s British Special Forces, very highly trained,” Ilya supplies. “I think what Vasily says is correct. It’s not strategically smart for you to go yourself.”
“I swear, baby, this is the best way. We go get Number Two and take him back with us for K. Reece goes to fetch Esme, and he brings her to you in Corfu.”
“I’m her mother, and I just want to be with her as soon as I can,” I say.
Ilya glances over his shoulder at me, taking his eyes from the road for a second. “If they’re sitting on Esme, merely observing, and you go, you put her in direct danger. They might act then. It’s much safer for her this way.”
I think about what he’s saying, and I know he’s right. The Order, or Fuckface Solutions, or whatever they’re called, won’t be looking for Reece. It means it is much easier for him to extract Esme than for me to do it. I sigh, but I nod. “Okay. But if she doesn’t reach me in one piece, I’m blaming all of you, and you’ll all lose your balls.”
“I think I already have,” Vasily mutters under his breath.
For some reason, his silly words make me smile a little, and it relaxes some of the tension in me.
When we get to our final destination, Number Two’s home, the tension is back full force.
“How the hell are we going to get him on a private jet unseen?” I ask. “He’ll hardly come quietly.”
“Rohypnol and alcohol,” Ilya replies. “Drug him up with something that will make him seem drunk off his ass and get him on the plane. Once he’s on, tie him up. The crew are bought and paid for, and off we go. We’re not flying British Airways, so there won’t be proper checks.”
“Okay.”
Ilya brings something up on his phone as we pull onto the side of the road about three streets away from where Number Two, or Monty, lives.
“This is the security system he has in place.” He shows it to Vasily. “Damen will cut it before we go in. He has dogs, so they’ll kick up a fuss.”
“I’m not hurting innocent dogs,” I say immediately.
Vasily throws me an unreadable look, then raises one shoulder in that lazy shrug he has and looks to Ilya. “No hurting the dogs.”
“Fuck. Okay, so the dogs are going to alert him, even with the alarms cut.”
We all sit thinking for a moment.
“Send her in.” Ilya points to me. “It’s genius. Have her walk right up to that door and bang on it. He has to be half expecting that she’s going to be looking for him. He has no idea she’s working with us. He’ll probably let her in because his ego is big enough he won’t think she’s a threat. Then the dogs will go crazy while she’s banging at the front door, and we can enter the back way, here.”
He shows the map to Vasily and me.
“No way,” Vasily says straightaway. “He could shoot her immediately.”
“Nah, he won’t. Not immediately.”
“Why?” Vasily demands. “Because she’s an asset? Don’t be naïve. He’s done with her. She failed, and he’ll shoot her.”
“Oh, I’ve no doubt he will shoot her, eventually, but he’s going to want to know what went down. He’ll talk to her first. We only need five minutes. He’s going to want to know how she found him at the very least.”
“Ilya’s right,” I say. “Vasily, let me do it.”
He punches the car door, and I wince because that’s going to hurt in a few hours, but then he slumps a little. “Okay. I don’t like it, but okay.”
Ilya calls Damen and tells him to cut power to the security system, and we get out of the car. When we’re mere feet from the house, we stop.
I stare at the building. It’s ordinary. Nice, but nothing flash. It’s cozy looking and the last place I’d expect my nemesis to live.
Squaring my shoulders, I turn to the two men. “I’ll knock loud enough to wake the dead and set the dogs off, and you guys go around the back.”
“Deal.” Ilya slaps me on the back.
Vasily pulls me into him and gives me a hard, passionate kiss on the mouth. “You’re a warrior, my wife.” Then he lets me go and follows Ilya around the side of the house.
I swallow hard and w
alk straight up to Number Two’s front door and knock.
I pound on that door hard enough to be heard in Hell. The dogs start barking, but they don’t sound big and fierce, rather small and yappy, which is not what I expected. The man is a strange conundrum all around.
I bang, and bang, and bang, but no answer. I’m starting to panic that Damen’s intel is wrong and either this isn’t his house, or he isn’t home, but then the lights snap on in the kitchen, and I see him walk toward the door. He’s broken up by the thick patterned glass, but I can make out him running a hand through his hair and yawning.
When he reaches the door, there’s the jangle of keys, and he opens it with another yawn, looks at me with absolutely no concern and smiles. “Took you long enough.”
Chapter Seventeen
Vasily
The dogs aren’t making all that much noise as Ilya and I creep around the back of the house.
“Something isn’t right,” Ilya mutters in Russian.
He can say that again. Monty has opened the door to Zoey, and I can hear him talking to her in totally reasonable tones. This is fucked.
When we get to the back door, it’s open.
We glance at one another, and I sigh as two big men with even bigger guns step out of the shadows and gesture us inside with their semi-automatics.
“This way,” a sing-song voice calls from the kitchen.
My throat is tight as I round the corner to see Zoey standing by the sink, arms crossed as she stares at Number Two, and some yappy little dogs circle around their owner, still making noise.
“Pleased to meet you, Vasily.” Number Two smiles at me, then looks at Ilya and dips his head, all solicitous and shit. “Ilya.”
“What the fuck is this?” Ilya demands.
“This is a welcome committee to ensure we can have a civilized chat. I presume my colleagues are already dead, or … worse?”
None of us reply, but we glance at one another.
He sighs. “Why don’t we all sit?” He indicates a worn kitchen table.
The room is cozy, but the depressing strip lighting ruins any comforting effect of the furniture. It’s odd. A strange place for a man who must be very wealthy, indeed.
