Their Vengeance: Siren's Revenge Book Two

10. Nikolai

Fyodor”s Rules #33 - Don’t waste words when you know you are going to attack.

Alexei had to know I found the scent of Yana”s blood intoxicating. Everywhere I went, I could smell her. Throughout the penthouse, outside on the balcony, down in the bar. It was even there when I went to the new nightclub to see how the renovations were coming along. It was like he had painted the scent of her everywhere he knew I was going to be. Or maybe he was carrying a piece of her with him. If he was ever going to become sentimental, that’s the kind of thing he would do. I wouldn”t be surprised to find a vial of her blood, or a piece of her skin from her torture tucked away in his pocket.

Luckily, Yana mostly stayed out of my way. She seemed to bounce between my brothers, inserting herself into their lives as if she had never left. Sitting on Pasha”s bed while he worked, or brushing the dogs” fur while Lukas cleaned and serviced his guns. She had even spent time in the basement with Alexei. And he”d had more information than usual to show for it, something he seemed delighted with, which was good.

She slotted back into everyone”s life so easily, but whenever she and I spoke, it quickly devolved into either a shouting match, or bitter words spat at each other like knives. It was getting under my skin more than a little. I couldn”t get her to agree with me, or even see my point of view. She had come up from having drinks with Fiorenza”s granddaughter and had tried to pull me into some plan to use the poor girl to chip away at Fiorenza”s power. It was like she didn”t understand the lengths I was going to in order to keep my family together, and it was wearing on my last nerve.

Right now, though, I had a meeting with Fyodor and Lukas to review some of the recent attacks. A shipment of building supplies for the nightclub had gone missing, and two of the bar staff we hired had disappeared. Their phones had been disconnected, and their apartments cleared out. Pasha was trying to work out what had happened to them, but from everything he had found out so far, they had left town.

We were meeting at the nightclub. As much as I preferred to do business at the hotel, we were trying to minimize the chances of Fyodor being seen. So meeting at different places made keeping him hidden much easier. It was all very clandestine, even more so than we usually were when concealing our criminal activity. It wasn”t like I could bribe whoever was attacking us.

I didn”t have an office yet. There was a room slated to be my office, but we”d had to rip the walls out. The venue used to be a strip-club, and you’d think it would be easy to convert it into a nightclub. But it had been built and decorated in the seventies, and it was easier to gut it and start again. Or so my project manager kept telling me.

We were meeting in what would eventually be the VIP room. It had walls at least, and the supervisor had a table set up with a dozen folding chairs scattered round the room. Right now, I had covered over his plans with a map. I had marked out the places we had been hit already, as well as the homes of the two bartenders who had gone missing. Pasha was checking in with all our staff twice-a-week under the pretext of updating them on how the construction was progressing. We had offered as many of them as we could work in the hotel. The service industry wasn”t the most reliable income, and we tried to take care of our staff as much as we could.

Lukas was the first to join me. Ghost and Demon came through the wall like it was made of air, and it was only decades spent with the dogs that kept me from jumping at the sight. Sometimes I wondered if Lukas had them do it on purpose. But it would suggest he had a sense of humor, and I wasn”t sure that was true. He must have come from either patrol or some other work with his team. He was in his tactical gear, heavy black cargo pants, and a vest over the top of a shirt. I knew it had enough Kevlar woven into the material he could wear it in place of his motorcycle jacket and walk away from any accident uninjured.

His eyes quickly scanned the map, and he made a couple of changes. “We know the building supplies were hit earlier on the route. Whoever did it didn”t take the gear for themselves. It was dumped here and destroyed. It just drives home that whoever doing this is trying to fuck with us, and not trying to carve out their own piece of the pie.”

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair, my fangs itched in my mouth. I was feeding every couple of days, more often than I had in a long time. A combination of constantly being surrounded by the scent of Yana”s blood, and my bloodlust boiling under my skin. I”d resorted to going out on the occasional patrol around our territory by myself to burn off some of the desire for violence. Lukas wasn”t happy about me going out alone, but I wasn”t one of his men, and he couldn”t order me around.

“Yana seems sure this is Fiorenza. But we can”t take her out. We”d be dead before the end of the night. Besides, it”s not like the other families would care if we went to them, we don”t have enough pull with any of them.”

“It isn”t just Fiorenza. And you”re only dead if they work out it was you.”

Fyodor”s voice came from the shadows a few seconds before he appeared. Demon and Ghost were both growling, hackles raised, fangs bared, but a look from Fyodor sent them both back to sitting quietly beside Lucas. I wanted to ask him how he had done it, but I know he would just shrug and say it was an animal thing, or maybe a werewolf thing. Even Lukas seemed surprised at the dogs” behavior, but kept his mouth shut as Fyodor joined us at the table.

“I”ve asked your sister and your other brothers to meet us here as well. We have a lot to plan, and we need to decide what to do together.” Fyodor picked up a pen and marked down places on the map as well. Although he neglected to explain why. It was frustrating, and I could feel the itch in my mouth getting worse as my hold on my emotions frayed further.

“If you had told me, I could have brought them with me.” I spoke through gritted teeth, and then I had to consciously unclench my jaw. I didn”t like the thought of Fyodor talking to them without me. We had been working fine without him for a decade. I had kept them alive. I had made the hard calls which needed to be made, and I would not let him cut me out.

Just because he was back didn”t mean he was in charge.

“I only got the last of the information I needed when I was on my way here. I sent them a text as I was walking inside. We have at least ten minutes before they get here to come up with the beginning of a plan. You”ve been having enough trouble with Yana. I didn”t want her interrupting every time you speak.” His reasoning mollified the predator in me a little, and I felt my shoulders drop slightly as I took a couple of breaths. I played it off by nodding and looking over the markings he had made on the map. A couple were in Italian territory, and a few were in Bratva. It was the two off in the woods, which had me a little confused.

“Isn”t that Aunt Polina’s house?” I pointed to one of the marks Fyodor added to the map and looked up in time to see as Fyodor snapped the pen he was holding with a clenched fist.

He just nodded, the muscles in his jaw ticked as he didn”t give me any more explanation.

“And that second marking, that”s Pratt”s Wayne Wood. The only people who go in there are Grandmother”s Children.”

Previously, it had been a public woodland, but once the Grandmother’s Children had decided they wanted to be closer to town than the Sand Ridge State Forest, they moved in. A couple of gruesome murders had kept the public out of those woods for years now.

Fyodor nodded, having collected himself from his moment of rage. “They are all part of this. Pasha has some notes as well.”

My brow furrowed. I knew Pasha had been looking into Alexei”s family, but why hadn”t he told me he had found something? When this meeting was over, I was going to sit down with my brothers and have a conversation about what was going on. Fyodor was our adopted father, and he taught us a lot when we were younger. In fact, we still used his teachings to guide us. However, in the past ten years, we had also made a name for ourselves and we needed to hold on to what we had carved out. Just like I wouldn”t let the Italians or the Bratva take anything from us, I would not hand it over to Fyodor either.

Lukas contemplated the map and the recent additions. “You want to hit them all at once? I don”t have enough men to hit all three. And going after the Grandmother”s Children in their home woods is a suicide run, I”m not sending my men in there.”

Lukas was protective of his team. He’d always worked better with others than alone. It was an aspect of the Wild Hunt so deeply ingrained in his soul it made his men incredibly loyal, and he got the best out of them as a result.

Fyodor shook his head. “I don”t want to die. I”ve spent too long working on remaining alive to walk into the arms of death so willingly. Besides, we don”t know if it was all of them. We know it was definitely Sasha, Darya, and Ksenia. We will need to lure them out. Fiorenza will also need to be lured out of Italian territory. Then it will need to be made to look like they vanished.”

Ksenia”s name caught me by surprise. She was the second eldest of the Grandmother”s Children in Chicago. It was hard to tell exactly how many of them there were. They came and went as they pleased, and some didn”t venture into public at all. We knew more than most because of Alexei, and Ksenia was his biological grandmother. None of us were sure how old she was, and we weren”t about to ask. She was the middle of the three daughters who ran the Grandmother’s Children linked to the city of Chicago. And she never left the woods. Ever.

“What makes you think Ksenia”s involved? Why would she care about what we are doing? Or our family? I mean, I know she”s related to Alexei, but surely she washed her hands of him once you took him in?” I knew Sasha and Darya hadn”t stopped tormenting Alexei, but they were both his age and had grown up with him until he came to live with Fyodor. Tormenting him had been part of their everyday lives during early childhood. They were both vicious little harpy cunts who didn”t enjoy seeing someone escape their clutches.

“She, Fiorenza, and Polina were the ones behind this plan. Ksenia and Polina were the driving force, according to my sources. Fiorenza took advantage of the circumstances.” He spat the words out, the same rage returned to his expression. His fingers grew longer and claws sprouted from the tips. I had never seen him lose control of himself. It was making all this easier to believe, somehow.

Lukas swore in Welsh, taking a couple of steps back from the table. He swung his arms for a moment and ran his hands through his hair. He always moved about when he was upset or agitated.

“Hold up. You want us to take out all three of them … without getting caught? How the fuck are we going to do that?” The bloodlust rose in me again. Having names to pin to all the pain and anguish we had experienced had me baying for blood. Fyodor wasn”t the only one struggling to control himself. I needed to keep my head, to stay calm in all of this. We all did.

We needed a plan. Not just a good plan, it needed to be fucking perfect. None of the women were going to be easy to take out. And all of them possessed sway in their factions. Fiorenza and her husband were next in line to the Italian throne, and if we were caught attacking Ksenia, all the Grandmother”s Children would descend on us. There would be no hope of our survival.

Through all of this, I was trying not to think about Aunt Polina being involved. When we had fled our family home ten years ago—sure we were alone in the world and next on the kill list—she had taken us in. She had given us the space we had needed to not only grieve, but to pull ourselves together and form a plan. The fact she had done it while being responsible for our pain made me sick to my stomach. However, I couldn”t imagine Fyodor claiming she was behind this unless he was sure. Family was everything to him.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of footsteps. My gun was out and raised without thinking. I was on edge. Fyodor shook his head in enough time for me to lower it, so I wasn”t pointing my gun at Pasha as he walked into the room. Although he probably would have made some quip about me obviously being happy to see him, since my gun wasn”t in my pocket.

Yana and Alexei were behind him, and the scent was there again. It was like she hid an open wound somewhere. I cracked my neck and rolled my shoulders, trying to force myself to relax. Then I turned my attention to the map, so I didn”t have to look at her. If I didn”t glance at her, maybe I could stay focused long enough to get through this meeting. Afterward, I’d drag Pasha off to a dark corner.

Alexei looked at the map, then at all of us, his eyebrow slowly rising. “So who the fuck are we about to kill, and how much fun do I get to have doing it?”

Fun wasn”t the word I would have used for what we were about to do, but I was sure we would get some enjoyment out of it.