24. Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Four
Nikolai Volkov
“F or the thousandth time, I don’t know where your fucking dagger is. I haven’t touched it,” Illayana growled, glaring at Lukyan from across the kitchen table.
“It was in my room last night before I went to bed. I wake up this morning and it’s mysteriously disappeared. You trying to tell me you had absolutely nothing to do with that? Huh?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you, you long-necked freak,” she hissed.
Lukyan gasped in outrage, hand flying to his throat. “I do no t have a long neck!”
I took another spoonful of my cereal, listening to my siblings bicker like a bunch of…well, for lack of a better word, idiots. They’d been going at it since they woke up this morning, and hadn’t stopped once. It was like they’d never left.
Apparently, Lukyan’s favourite dagger had gone missing, and he blamed Illayana for it.
A likely culprit, considering she used to do this shit a lot when they were kids; taking his stuff and hiding it somewhere in the house.
But she was swearing left and right that she hadn’t done it, and I was inclined to believe her.
Usually, she’d boast and taunt him about it. “Nah, nah, na-nah-nah, you’ll never find it.” Or something to that effect. The fact that she wasn’t doing that right now made me think she wasn’t responsible.
“I didn’t do it,” Illayana snarled.
“No one else could have!” Lukyan aggressively shoved some toast into his mouth and ripped off a piece.
“Unless someone climbed up the side of the house, snuck through my window, crept across my room while I was asleep, swiped it from my bedside table and then snuck back out— all without waking me up. Is that what you’re saying happened? ”
“It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if someone went to all that trouble to fuck with you, considering how annoying you are,” she hissed.
“You are pretty annoying,” Christian agreed, taking a bite of his eggs.
Lukyan slapped him upside the head. “Nobody asked you.”
“Are you sure you haven’t just misplaced it?” I asked.
Lukyan straightened and turned slightly to give me his back. “Christian, could you please inform my brother that, due to his duplicitous ways, I am no longer conversing with him. And that, although I am saddened by what was revealed, I still want to punch him in the face.”
I rolled my eyes.
Christian shrugged and faced me, opening his mouth.
“I got it,” I said, raising a hand to silence him. If that was the game he wanted to play, then fine. “Christian, could you please ask my brother if perhaps he just misplaced his dagger?”
Christian turned to Lukyan but before he could get a word out, Lukyan said, “Please tell my brother—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, you tell him,” Christian shoved him lightly in the shoulder. “I’m not your errand boy. And this is stupid.” For once, I agreed with the man.
“Wait, wasn’t your shit going missing in New York?” Luca took a sip of his coffee, brows formed into a deep frown. “Yeah, I remember you bitching about how someone stole your toothbrush or something?”
I paused mid-scoop, milk dripping from my spoon into my bowl. My gaze locked with Lukyan’s.
“No…you think?” he whispered, like he was afraid of the answer.
I was tempted to say, “thought you weren’t conversing with me ,” but thought it best not to poke the whiny child.
“Could be.” Turns out, my youngest brother had himself a bit of a stalker.
It all started after he moved to New York with Illayana.
Someone had been leaving him little love notes, declaring they were soul mates.
Destined to be together. A few of his possessions had gone missing as well.
We hoped moving him back to Vegas would get him off his stalker’s radar, but clearly, they’d just followed him instead.
“No,” Lukyan denied again. “There’s no way. How the hell did she even get in the house?!”
If it was his stalker responsible, then she was a lot more cunning and resourceful than we originally anticipated.
It was definitely possible for someone to circumvent our security.
Unlikely…but possible. The grounds were meant to be patrolled twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in two rotating shifts, consisting of six men in each.
The odds of someone making it over the fence, across the yard, past the dogs, up the side of the house and into Lukyan’s bedroom without being detected was slim.
Less than slim. There was no way. No way.
Fuck .
“Go check the security cameras and see if they picked up anything,” I told Lukyan.
I had this sneaking suspicion in my gut that no matter how slim the odds were, Lukyan’s mysterious stalker had somehow managed to do it.
He nodded, stuffing the last of his toast into his mouth before getting to his feet.
“Uh, excuse me?” Illayana called out as he began to walk away.
“You’re excused,” he threw over his shoulder without looking back.
“Pretty sure you owe me an apology!”
Lukyan…apologise? I had a better chance of crapping out daisies than Illayana had of getting that shithead to apologise for anything.
I finished the rest of my cereal and took my empty bowl to the sink, quickly washing it before popping it into the dashrack.
Luca and Christian talked amongst themselves as they ate while Illayana played with her phone and picked lightly at her food.
Lukyan came back a few minutes later with an iPad in his hands. “Look.” He flipped the device to face me.
“What am I supposed to be looking at here?” On the screen were six individual camera feeds, all showing a different angle of the outside of the house. Some pointed out towards the gate surrounding our property. Some pointed directly at the house itself. Nothing looking suspicious or out of place.
Then I saw it. A small figure dressed in what I could only describe as a black cat burglar suit darting across the lawn. The material was skin tight. Based on the slim waist and curves, I was inclined to agree with Lukyan’s original assessment of his stalker being a woman.
She moved quickly and efficiently, taking cover when needed to avoid the soldiers on patrol.
When one of the dogs—Boris, I assumed, based on the colouring—spotted her, I thought for sure she was done for.
Instead of attacking her, like they’d been trained to do to any intruder, he went right up to her and let her pat his head.
That told me two things. One: he was familiar enough with her that he didn’t consider her a threat. And two: this most likely wasn’t the first time she’d done this.
Who is this woman?
After tossing Boris what looked like a cut of raw meat, she climbed up the side of the house— freehand —opened Lukyan’s window (which meant the idiot hadn’t locked it) and disappeared inside. The timestamp on the footage read 1:59 a.m. She didn’t re-emerge again until 3:17 a.m.
What the hell had she been doing all that time? Watching him sleep?
I swiped to the internal cameras to see if she’d left the room and gone snooping through the house or something.
She hadn’t. For the whole seventy-eight minutes she was inside, she didn’t leave his room once. Troubling.
She climbed back out his window and started down the side of the house.
She paused on her descent, stopping right in front of a camera.
Using only one hand to keep herself from falling, she unzipped the front of her suit with the other and pulled out a piece of paper, holding it up for the camera to see:
You look so cute when you sleep.
She tucked the note away and then pulled out the dagger Lukyan had been bitching about all morning.
She lifted the bottom of her mask up to reveal her lips and then ran her tongue up the dull side of the blade in a sexually suggestive manner.
After blowing the camera a goodbye kiss, she dropped to the ground and left the same way she came: quiet and undetected.
I looked up at my brother. “You’ve seen this?”
“Yep.” And he didn’t look the least bit freaked out by it. No. He looked…excited. Exhilarated.
Only my brother would be excited at the prospect of having a crazy stalker.
“Why do you look like that?”
“Like what?” he asked innocently.
“Like you’re giddy with anticipation. You shouldn’t be. This woman broke into your room and watched you sleep for over an hour. She’s dangerous. And crazy.”
“I know.” His eyes practically gleamed . “My two favourite things. I can’t wait to meet her.”
“Lukyan,” I groaned, burying my face in my hands.
He laughed. “Look, obviously she has to die. I’m not stupid.
I know we can’t keep having her follow me around everywhere.
She’ll eventually see something she’s not supposed to, if she hasn’t already.
But I’m definitely going to fuck her first. Maybe twice.
Once in that cat burglar outfit, for sure. ”
“I wanna see, I wanna see,” Christian sang, coming over.
“See what? Us fucking?” Lukyan shrugged, unfazed. “Yeah, if you want. You can even join in, if that’s her thing.”
“No, the footage—wait, what?”
“Oh, my B.” He handed the iPad over to Christian and plucked an apple from the kitchen island. He took a bite, chewing annoyingly loudly as Christian watched the same video I did a moment ago.
“Damn. She really is crazy.”
Luca joined us. “My turn. Show me.”
“Okay, no.” I snatched the iPad out of Christian’s hands before he could pass it along. “We’re not glamorizing the crazy stalker bitch—”
“Hey, that’s rude. We don’t know that she’s a bitch, or that she’s any danger. She’s never done anything threatening.” Lukyan took another bite of his apple.
“Didn’t she cut the fingers off one of the girls you fucked?” Luca questioned, arching a brow.
“ To me ,” he amended, pointing at his chest, his mouth overflowing. “Never done anything threatening to me. ”