“Another girl!” Marat announced several minutes after Adrik had raced down the hall to his wife’s room.
Applause and congratulations shook the rafters, and I grinned as my wife hugged me tightly.
“You lost the bet, pay up,” I told Marat as he handed me a cigar.
“No way, I bet on him having a girl. You owe me.”
“Nuh uh,” I said, shaking my head.
“Are you guys still doing that stupid bet? I mean, look around you,” Destiny said, shaking her head.
“She’s right. I told you it was stupid. But if you’re too cheap to pay up,” I taunted my cousin, knowing he hated being called cheap.
“Here,” he growled, tossing the half dollar coin at me.
“Wow. Where did you even find that?” Sammy asked, picking it up off the floor.
“I don’t know. Somewhere,” Marat replied with a careless shrug.
My phone beeped, and I looked down, my eyes going hard at what I read. I could hardly believe it. After a decade of searching.
That motherfucker.
“What is it?” Josef asked.
“You two up for a little ride?”
They nodded, and I kissed Ellie on the lips.
“We’ll be back in a couple of hours. You okay here?”
“Yeah. No worries. It will be a few hours before we can see the baby. The kids are fine.”
“Ialmost forgot about this warehouse,” Marat murmured absently as we neared the Lincoln Tunnel property still owned by Volkov Industries.
The place loomed ahead and as I waited for the driver to pull up outside, I allowed old anger to fill my veins.
I wasn’t the same person I was a decade ago. But that didn’t mean I was less. If anything, my love for Ellie and my devotion to her and our children had only increased.
“So, who we got here?” Josef said, entering the place first.
“Boss,” Eduardo dipped his chin at Josef, then Marat and me.
“It’s him. No mistakes this time.”
I nodded, cracking my neck and removing my coat and tie. I grabbed a metal pipe off a shelf and walked into the room where a man sat bound and gagged.
I canted my head to the side, aware of Josef and Marat standing next to me.
“He had a little work done,” Josef said.
“Plastic surgery is good, but DNA doesn’t lie,” Marat added.
Rage filled me. This man had been responsible for hurting my wife. The ethical and moral lines he’d crossed were nothing compared to what I was about to do.
But I didn’t have to think twice about it. This was for Ellie.
“You should have stayed in South America, Doctor,” I said, then I lifted the pipe and swung.
Afterwards, we left Eduardo and a crew to clean up. Memories of that day in Central Park swarmed my brain.
I could have lost Ellie and Sammy that day. Thank fuck for the Volkov wolves. Without them. I didn’t know what I would have done.
But now I knew that whenever any of ours was threatened, it wasn’t just one wolf who went hunting.
It was all of us.
We were a pack.
And pack was family.
The end.