Chapter 17 #2
Even though I know he’s scared, he meets my eyes and says, “I was watching her, or at least I thought I was. I’ve never met your fiancée, never seen a picture of her.
Lev described her, and I thought I had the right redhead.
She was the only one I could find. I still had eyes on her when you came storming in and told everyone to get the fuck out. ”
The rage I’m feeling is all directed at myself, but my Uncle Vitaly still steps in front of Pasha and shakes his head at me. “I can’t let you hurt him. You’ll agree with me when you’ve calmed down.”
“I’m not going to hurt him,” I say, but then I turn to the staff members who are still waiting, knowing the same isn’t true for them.
Alexei is the only one who speaks Russian, but I don’t mind if he understands what I’m saying when I tell Damien, “I think it’s one of the women.
” I run my eyes down the line, and as soon as I make eye contact with them, they break it, each and every one, all except the blonde at the end. She doesn’t even lift her head.
“The one at the end,” I say right before I start walking.
Damien and Luka flank me while Val steps in front of Savanna and my Uncle Matvey and Roman walk behind the group. When I stop in front of the last girl, I put my knife under her chin and use the dull edge to lift her head.
“Look at me,” I tell her, and when she doesn’t, I turn my wrist just enough to let the blade nick her skin. Her eyes widen in surprise and she looks at me without thinking. Her eyes are blue, the eyebrows dark, and there’s something about her attitude that I immediately dislike.
“Are you working for Cupid?” I ask.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her eyes dart around, but no one is going to help her. Our Bratva doesn’t make a point of hurting women, but you can be damn sure we will if they put our family at risk.
“I think you do,” I tell her. “I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. You know who I am, right?”
She tries to nod, feels the sharp sting of my knife at her chin and quickly thinks better of it. “Yes,” she whispers.
I lean in just a bit so she’ll have no problem hearing me when I say, “I can promise you the truth is far worse than any rumor you’ve heard. My fiancée was taken tonight. You fucked over the wrong guy,” I pause and ask, “What’s your name?”
“Christine.”
“Well, Christine, you’re a dead fucking woman, but before I kill you, I want to know what you know.”
Before I start asking her questions, I switch to Russian and tell Pasha, “Get the rest of the employees out of here and give them a nice bonus to help them forget about what they’ve seen tonight.”
In seconds, he’s hollering for the others to follow him to the back. They don’t need to be asked twice. Soon it’s just my family, Savanna, who’s still standing behind Val, and Christine, the woman who’s about to die.
“Who took her and where are they taking her?” I ask.
“I said I don’t know,” she insists, but her voice is shaky, and the rest of her body is starting to tremble as well.
“Look around, Christine. You’re in over your head here. The man who you think is going to walk in here and save you isn’t.”
I watch as her eyes start to turn glassy and her breathing picks up.
Her skin is pale, but there’s a slight bluish tint to her lips, and her jaw has a light tremor that she can’t get under control, despite her fear of being cut.
She’s not going into a medical kind of shock, but she is going into a psychological one.
I need to get her talking before she reaches the point where she completely shuts down and becomes unresponsive.
“Tell me who took her?” I say again. I check Cyn’s location on my phone and then hold it out to Damien, telling him in Russian to let me know the second that red dot stops moving.
Turning back to Christine, I force all my rough edges to soften.
I gentle my voice, and I make sure I’m not looking at her like I’m two seconds away from splitting her wide open.
I tell her what she wants to hear. “Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll let you go. You have my word.”
Her eyes flick to mine. Hope is an extraordinary thing, and it never ceases to amaze me. She was on her way to being catatonic, but that tiny flicker of hope is enough to bring her back around.
“You will?”
“Yes, but you have to tell me the truth. Who took her?” I ask.
Her eyes dart to the side, but she’s unable to turn her head because my knife is still pressing under her chin. “It was supposed to be her,” she says.
I don’t need to turn my head to know she’s talking about Savanna.
“So what happened?” I ask.
“I’m not sure, but he got the redhead instead, the chubby girl,” the words are barely out of her mouth before I press the knife in hard enough to part her skin.
“I’d choose my words a little more carefully if I were you,” I warn her. “That’s my fiancée you’re talking about.” I drop the nice guy mask long enough for her to remember the danger her ass is still in. “You mean nothing to me. It would be very unwise to forget that.”
“I’m sorry,” she quickly whispers. Her voice trembles and the fear in her eyes calms me just enough to have me easing back on my knife so I don’t slit her throat.
I love Cyn’s size, but I know she would hate being called chubby in front of my entire family by this dumbass.
Christine meant it as an insult, because that’s the kind of woman she is, even in what might be her last moments, she’s choosing to use part of that time to try and insult my girl.
Not the brightest move, but also not too surprising.
People rarely change. She was an ass in life, and she’s proving to be an ass in death.
“Keep talking,” I tell her. “Where is Ben taking her? Who gave him the pills?”
“I don’t know where he’s taking her,” she says, and then she stops, even though we both know she knows the answer to the next question.
“Who gave him the pills?” I repeat.
Instead of answering me, she says, “I don’t know who Cupid is. I swear I don’t.”
I ignore what she’s said and ask again, “Who gave him the pills?”
“You have to promise you won’t tell him I told,” she says, and if I wasn’t so worried about Cyn, I’d laugh at Christine’s stupidity.
“He’ll never know it was you,” I tell her. “Now give me the fucking name.”
“Tom Sullivan,” she whispers, making me really wish Niki were here right now.
“Give me any other names you know.” I lean in again and add, “And don’t fucking lie to me. I want every detail you know.”
“They kept me out of it,” she insists. “Tom is very careful. It took me forever to convince him to even go out with me, and he only agreed to it after he found out I work here. We’re dating, but he doesn’t trust me. All I know is the whole Alpha house is involved in this.”
“What about Cupid?” I ask.
She gives a harsh laugh, obviously starting to feel a little more comfortable with the situation. Poor Christine has convinced herself she’s getting out of this alive, and it’s made her bolder. I take advantage of her error and raise a brow, waiting for her to answer my question.
“Cupid’s a ghost,” she says. “No one knows who the hell he is.”
“Surely Tom does,” I say, but she shakes her head.
“He’s never met the guy. Every interaction they have is online. Cupid’s smart. He never gets his hands dirty. He leaves it to everyone else to do that,” she says. “Tom’s one of his most trusted men, though, or at least that’s what Tom says.”
For a second she goes back to looking panicked. “He can’t know I talked to you. If he thinks I’ve told you anything about the pills, he’ll kill me. I know he will.”
I don’t remind her that I’m the guy pointing a knife at her throat and that Tom is the least of her worries right now. Instead, I say, “He’ll never know you talked. So you’ve been helping them drug girls here?”
“I didn’t help them,” she says, climbing back up on her high horse. “I just made sure the side door was unlocked.”
“So you didn’t help them drug the girls, but you made sure they could escape with them?”
She can tell I’m making fun of her logic, and it pisses her off enough to say, “Whatever, it’s not like I forced them to drink it, and the women always showed up the next day at class. It’s not like any of them tried to press charges.”
“Not all the girls are showing up for class the next day,” I tell her. “Some are never heard from again.”
“I heard they just quit school and ran off,” she says, but I can tell she doesn’t quite believe her own bullshit on that one.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess. I don’t suppose Tom has said anything about that?” I ask.
“No.”
Knowing I’ve gotten everything she has to give, I say in Russian, “It’s about to get bloody, Val.”
I wait until I hear him say something to Savanna, something that’s gentle and soothing and a complete lie, but one she needs to hear so she doesn’t panic.
Once I see him lead her to the back and the door shuts behind them, I don’t give Christine a chance to react.
The blade is sliding through her ribs on her left side and piercing her heart before she even realizes I’ve stabbed her.
When I hear the familiar hitch in her breath and she starts to crumple, I know I’ve hit the left ventricle, exactly what I was aiming for.
I don’t bother catching her. She slides off my blade as she collapses in a heap at my feet.
She’ll be dead in less than two minutes.
“Damien,” I say, and he immediately says, “Still driving, but I think they’re slowing down.”
“We’ve got our men tailing them,” my dad says. “They’ll surround whatever building they take her to.”
I hear my Uncle Roman giving orders for someone to come and get rid of the body I’ve left them, and when I look at my family, I can tell they’re torn about what I’ve done, but I don’t care. They can sit around debating the morality of it all they want. I’m going to get my girl back.