Chapter 26
Nikolai
There are times where I would prefer not to be so observant. Moments like this, where noticing every little detail is of no benefit to me. Each little addition to the horror in front of me adds another log to the fire in my chest that is my rage.
Every single detail of my father’s brutal murder is ingrained in my psyche. I didn’t need to see how he died, but it will be forever seared into my brain, as bright and clear as the day I discovered his body.
It is just in my nature.
I can see everything, the blood running down Anya’s temple from where they must have hit her, the crazed way that her eyes are widened in terror. The way the bindings bite into her skin, and the way that sweat is beaded along her forehead. She’s dirty, and her knees are scraped from having fought them, I’m certain of this. Her dress is stretched and scuffed, one of the straps on her shoulder is broken as she leans forward into the bindings in an effort to get closer to me. I can’t make out what she’s saying but she’s shouting something at me, frantically attempting to make herself heard.
Every single detail is committed to memory.
Her own father did this to her? What sort of sick bastard is he really? After all this time without a single word, no movements noted, no inquiries made on her behalf, and this is what he had been planning all along? Did she really mean so little to him?
I adjust my grasp on the gun in my hand, the smooth handle cold against my skin, but the weight of it comforting. Peter runs his hand over Anya”s hair, flattening it to her head with such force that her head is forced backward.
My teeth grind together, and the restraint I”m forced to use feels like sand slowly filling my mouth. Restraint is almost as difficult for me as patience.
“It’s okay, baby,” Peter coos, speaking in an infantile voice to his daughter.
Her wide, panicked eyes cut to him—looking at him like he’s a total stranger. She’s afraid of him. In all our conversations about the man, I never got that impression. I felt as if he was indifferent to her, perhaps even bordering on neglectful, but I never got the sense that he had done anything to harm her, or give her any reason to be fearful of him.
“You don’t have to pretend any more—it’s all over now,” he says to her.
My brows pull together in confusion, a comment like that would make my guard rise to full alert, except, Anya looks as confused as I feel.
“You’ve been such a good, good gir,l baby. Daddy’s so proud of you,” Peter spoke softly, pursing his lips together while petting her head.
Anya kept glancing up at him as if he were a perfect stranger. For a moment I feared that she might throw herself and her chair sideways, as she jerked to get away from his hands.
She muffled something against the tape across her face, and shook her head. She seemed to be pleading with him. About what? I wonder.
“You could not have done a better job.” He leaned down to nuzzle the side of her face, and straightened her dress as if she were a doll about to be placed on a display shelf.
Watching him fawning over Anya is perverse. It only reinforces the fact that this bastard has to die. The more violently, the better.
To his side, Elias, his right-hand man, clears his throat loudly, and Peter seems to remember that I was here.
“Ah, yes, you.” He straightened and smoothed down the brown vest he had unevenly buttoned over the top of a white oxford.
He had a stain on one sleeve and unkempt hair. Of course, physical appearance didn”t mean much in this situation, but my father would have cut off his own fingers rather than be presented in this manner. He frequently stated that no man alive would fear a slovenly man, no matter how dangerous he might be. In fact, Peter appears to have slept for no more than five minutes in the last few years. He didn”t look like that in the last surveillance photos I took of him—something must have happened. However, I doubt it has anything to do with his missing daughter.
“Tell me, Volkovich, does the phrase ‘fool me once, shame on you… fool me twice, shame on me’ mean anything to you?” his words were uttered in a dead voice, hollow and completely opposite to how he had sounded a second ago.
“Perhaps after today, it will hold more meaning to you—for however long you have left to live.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I ask, not lowering my gun.
“It means that you are perhaps the most supremely stupid man that I have ever had the misfortune to encounter.” Peter straightened to his full height, still a head shorter than me. “I suppose that I can relate to being lonely, to needing to find comfort in the fairer sex but I would have thought that you might have learned your lesson with Helena.” A slow, self-satisfied smile spread across Peter’s thin, cracked lips.
“You didn’t think that I would honestly allow my beloved daughter into your hands by accident, did you? Not that I’m not pleased, she’s done a wonderful job—I never thought that the great Nikolai Volkovich would fall for such an obvious ploy. Don’t you see? Young fool, you have played right into my hands not once, but twice.” Peter giggles, actually giggles in a high-pitched voice.
Something is very wrong with him. I want to discount his words as the ramblings of a mad man, but I can’t.
It made sense.
Damn it all to hell, it made fucking sense.
If it’s true, and he somehow planted Anya there for me to kidnap, or planned for me to buy up all of his properties then it would play into every paranoid suspicion that I had in mind. I don’t like to jump to conclusions and I certainly don’t want to automatically condemn the time that I’ve spent with her, but I understand the implications that he’s making.
Helena had felt real too. For the first time in my life, I had thought that I found my Queen, the one who was meant to rule my empire beside me. She was headstrong, opinionated, and materialistic, everything my father said a woman needed to be able to live in this world. A good, hearty, strong woman. Helena embodied all of these qualities and more. I taught her how to shoot and torture, and then everything turned against me. The biggest betrayal I”ve ever experienced in my entire life.
For a moment, just a moment, I consider the notion that perhaps it is the truth.
Anya, I have doubted from the beginning. Not because of anything that she did directly, but simply because there was no reason for her not to betray me. I kidnapped her, and I was very open about my intentions to use her as leverage against her father. She fought me every step of the way… until she didn’t. Could that have all been an act too? She did come up to me in the club, she made a point of introducing herself so that I would know she was Peter’s daughter. She couldn’t have acted that well. She wasn’t that talented… the things that we had shared, the way that I felt her body shake and collapse under me isn’t something that can be faked.
Could it?
No. I refuse to doubt things because of a single comment made by my enemy.
I glance to Anya, who holds my gaze with a small, subtle shake of her head. She didn’t want to be involved in any of this. I had made that arrangement with her, and her father was the one who broke it.
“If this is true, then why bother tying her up?” I ask coldly.
Peter grins. “To make sure that you walked all the way into my little trap. Honestly, I was almost hoping that you might drop the gun, run to her side in an attempt to free your new love like they do in the movies. You’ve disappointed me once again.”
He reaches behind him to grab a gun from the back of his pants while he is speaking, waving it around carelessly over his head to accentuate his words. It doesn’t seem that he cares if he aims at his own men.
“However, you are trapped nonetheless, Volkovich.” Peter’s voice deadpans once more as he turns back to me, his gun held recklessly in his hand, it almost looks like it could fall and go clattering to the floor. This hardly seems like the man I have faced in the past. “I wanted you here, and so you are. You are severely outnumbered, and you will not be leaving alive.”
“You needed to use your daughter as bait in order to get me alone?” I taunt.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Peter screams. He seems more and more unhinged with every word that leaves his lips. “You used my daughter as bait! I might as well!”
He takes a step toward me, but Elias clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth in warning which seems to bring Peter to heel.
Anya cannot tear her eyes from her father, tears are flowing freely down her cheeks and over the tape covering her mouth. She’s no longer fighting her bonds. It does not look as if she’s frightened—she looks sad.
She glances at me for only a second, but I understand the empathetic look in her eyes. She’s asking me to help, but not to help her—help her father. She must know what’s the matter with him.
“Enough talking.” I say, and lower my gun, only a bit. “Either we settle this like men, once and for all, or you step aside and let the true head of your operation speak to me without using you as his puppet!”
Peter’s eye twitches. “Nobody runs my empire, but me.”
“I doubt that.” I take a slow step forward. “It seems to me that your man behind you is the one who is calling all of the shots. Every time you say something out of hand, he clicks at you like you’re his little dog. Are you a dog, Griffith?”
His lip curls, and his eye twitches again. Peter takes a step toward me but Elias’ hand is on his shoulder, stopping him. I laugh. The sound echoes around the metal room that we’re in, rebounding off the walls until it seems a far larger sound than before and Peter loses his mind.
“You’re the dog! You didn’t think that a woman as great as my daughter could ever possibly love you! She doesn’t even know you! Does she know what you did to poor little Helena?! My beautiful little spy… and you slaughtered her!”
I don’t want to know what Anya thinks of that piece of information. I never fully disclosed what her father had done, or how I had responded.
“You sent a spy to steal my secrets, compromise my shipping routes and destroyed four of my factories—tell me, Griffith, how would you respond to dissonance in your ranks? Or rather, Elias, how do you handle it? How long have you had your advisor pulling the strings?
What’s the matter? Couldn’t get it up anymore? Not man enough?” I sneer. I don’t like how close he’s standing to Anya—not when he’s clearly not in his right mind.
Behind him, Elias’ eye gleams, and a slow smile spreads across his face. It appears that whatever plan he had in mind is falling into place.
“That was why it was so easy for me to purchase your clubs, wasn’t it?” I hate that I’m starting to see the plan, how things unraveled. “It was Elias selling off all the bits and pieces of your empire that didn’t suit his purpose going forward, isn’t it? That’s why you hadn’t come looking around for Anya—you are so up his ass you couldn’t see the world around you.”
If Peter is truly insane, that”s fine with me; but having one of your own men mutiny against your empire? It rubs me the wrong way. Neither of them will make it out of this room alive. That is a promise I make to myself.
“You figured that this would be a nice, neat way to wrap up all of your loose strings, didn’t you, Elias? You thought that you could have me handle your problem for you, take care of the entire Griffith line, assume his role and take over his empire.” I shake my head in disgust.
“If it wasn’t so damned cowardly it might be cunning.”
Peter scoffs, ready to dispute my words with more vitriol when Elias heaves a long- suffering sigh. He shifts his weight to one foot and pinches at the bridge of his nose. “Can you blame me?”
Peter spins on his heel, and extends a trembling arm toward his man, the one who is supposed to be the most loyal of all. He cocks the gun in his hand, but Elias doesn’t look even slightly concerned.
“He’s been off his rocker, without his medication he is practically putty in my hands.” Elias shrugged. “Once you’ve killed him and his daughter for me, we can forge a bright new future together, picking apart the rest of the Griffith empire.”
Anya makes a low, keening sound from behind her tape and starts furiously attempting to work it off her face. I don’t know which one of us she’s intending to attempt to talk some sense into, but she’s got a tongue lashing for one of us. She rattles in her chair, and thrashes to free herself.
“No, no, no… this is all wrong. This was my plan,” Peter says, aiming the gun at Elias’ head. He walks so close that he presses the barrel into the man’s temple, indenting the skin.
“Do you think that I am stupid enough to give you a loaded gun? You old bastard.” Elias sighed again, irritated to have been found out, but Peter cocked his head to the side.
“Do you really think that I am stupid enough not to notice that you’ve been switching out my pills?”
Peter leans in close to Elias, and fear flashes across the younger man”s features for a split second before Peter pulls the trigger. Blood and viscera splatter across Peter”s face and the surrounding areas, muffled by the tape as Anya appears frozen with shock and fear. Her eyes are wide with horror as she sucks in air through her nose and screams out of her blocked mouth over and over.
I make a break for Anya, the gunshot echoing off the massive ship”s metal walls. Peter turns the gun on me, smoke curling up from the hot barrel. He directs it not at my head, but at Anya”s. I stop dead in my tracks. He can’t be serious. He can”t possibly be insane enough to shoot his own daughter.