Chapter 34 Flynn #2
I find myself looking for her in the halls, expecting to smell shampoo in the wind, and reaching for her in the few snatched hours of sleep I get.
I almost miss our arguments because if she were here arguing with me, she wouldn’t be wherever the hell she is.
“I miss her,” I admit. “And it…hurts. Like something’s missing.”
Frank sighs deeply and leans on the edge of the desk. “You fell for her.”
My eyes snap up. “I’m not saying that.”
“Come on. I saw it the first night she was here. You let her hold a hairpin to your throat and nearly kill you. You fucked her and I know you haven’t slept with anyone since your wife passed.
And before you bullshit me and tell me it was just sex, I saw the way you looked at her.
You provoked her into fights because you like a little fire.
You let her meet Angie. You liked her from the beginning, you just didn’t see it. ”
I want to curse him out for putting me on blast like that, but there’s no denying the truth in her words. I like her.
I might actually be in love with her. It’s the only reason I didn’t keep her locked up, the reason I let her become a small part of this family, and the reason I tried to fuck her so hard she couldn’t leave.
She was my only way to save Eva and yet I knew I could lose her.
An impossible choice.
“It doesn’t matter how I feel,” I bite out after a drink. “She hates me.”
“Does she?”
“She thought I killed her brother.”
“I bet part of her wishes you had now,” Frank snorts.
“We killed her aunt.”
“Oh—about that.” Frank hops up from my desk and digs around in his pocket for his phone.
Pulling it out, he starts scrolling and then flashes me a report from his email.
“When we were cataloging all the bodies so we knew who we’ve lost and who they lost during the fire, I found something odd.
I was able to trace every guard that we killed from the bullets we put in them but there was an anomaly. ”
Taking the phone, I skim through the report and squint. “One…wasn’t ours?”
“Nope. Two bodies weren’t killed by us, bullets at least. One was in the lounge and crushed by the ceiling.”
“Anya,” I murmur. “Kaia’s best friend.”
“The other was a woman in the hall. She’d been shot, yes. But not by us. I think it was one of her own because the bullet matched the bullets we pulled out of our own men. I don’t know who it was, but we didn’t kill her aunt.”
“I remember her. I thought she’d been struck in the crossfire.”
“Maybe,” Frank murmurs. “But not by us and only a single bullet.”
“An execution?”
“A messy one.” Frank rests back on the desk. “So. What’s the plan?”
The plan. Kaia might be dead. Whatever I do next might ignite a way in the city until the Irish and the Russians tear themselves apart.
All for one woman.
“I want her back. She…I don’t even want to justify it beyond that’s what I want.”
“Alright.” Frank drains his glass. “I’ll make a few calls to some people who owe you a favor. With them in tow, that fucking armed palace of his won’t stand a chance.”
“Good. There’s one more thing I have to do.”
Satisfied that my plan to get Kaia back is the right next step, it’s already clear that regardless of whether she’s alive or dead, Antov will be dying.
There’s no world in which he lives safely after kidnapping my daughter and hurting the woman I love.
Love.
Am I really so self-absorbed that I didn’t notice what I felt for her?
Or was there simply no space in me to acknowledge it amidst the grief of losing Eva?
Now she’s back, my chest is free, and the loss of Kaia hurts just as much as the realization of love.
And she left here thinking I hated her.
Frank helps me prepare my last tool and remains at the top of the stairs as I descend to the cells to see Vic.
He remains, as always, tucked in the corner of his cell with his face twisted in anger and pain since I stopped all medication.
Keeping him healthy and alive is no longer required. He spits at me the moment he sees me, and I roll my eyes.
“That’s how you greet me?”
“Fuck you,” he snarls. “Twisted motherfucker.”
“Hurtful.” I slide my thumb over the lock of the cell and open the door. “You really should be thanking me.”
“Why?” Vic tenses and as I enter the cell, he scrambles to get to his feet.
“Without me, you’d have died a long, slow, painful death from the state of your burns. It would have taken a while and you’d have felt every second of it. Instead, you got to live here and be treated. Cared for, to an extent. The words you’re looking for are ‘thank you.’”
“Fuck you,” Vic spits. “You think you can intimidate me? I’m going to kill you, y’here me? I’m going to destroy what’s left of your family because you forget who has the power here.”
“I do.”
“No, cunt. I do. As long as I have Eva then I—.”
“But you don’t have Eva,” I murmur. “Your uncle does and he’s left you here to rot.”
“Bullshit.”
“Is it?”
“You have no fucking—ah!” He crumples underneath me after my fist crashes into his jaw and ends his rant in a spray of blood and teeth.
He hits the floor and I land on top of him with my full weight, pinning him down with my knee to his back and a fist in his hair.
“You forget one thing,” I snarl as I plunge the needle Frank prepared into Vic’s shoulder.
“People mistake my patience for caution and my calmness for stupidity, but I have always been a calculating man, Vic. I knew I’d kill you the moment I saw your body dragged from that fire, I just had to bide my time. ”
“Get off me, motherfucker!”
“You can thank Kaia for giving me the idea that poison is a satisfactory way to watch someone die,” I hiss in his ear then slowly climb off him.
“What did you do?” he yells after me as I retreat from the cell. “What did you give me, you motherfucker?”
“Oh, one more thing.” I slowly turn back to Vic, watching him pant and gasp against the back wall. “Kaia returned Eva to me.”
“You cunt!” Vic roars and he scrambles to his feet, sprinting toward the bars that clang as he hits them. “I’ll kill you, motherfucker! I’m going to skin you alive and then I’ll do the same—.” He coughs. “The same to your fucking bitch kids and then—.” Another cough.
Then another.
Vic’s sudden frantic coughing and choking follows me back up the stairs like the sound of gentle music.