Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Viktor
“Leah? Printsessa?” Staring down at the fallen baby clothes at my feet, I felt my heart lurch. It was such a weird feeling being worried about someone else, but I seemed to be feeling a lot since I had met her.
“Leah?” I called again when no one answered. Where was she? She wouldn’t have just left. Turning in a circle, I looked around. Ducking under racks in case she had fainted and was hidden from view, and there was nothing.
It was like she had never been there at all, except I knew she had been because of those damn baby clothes on the floor.
They felt like a bad omen now.
Of course, she could have run. She had run from me before, but we had been happy these last few weeks. I had made her happy, so I knew deep down that she hadn’t run.
Which meant she hadn’t left on her own.
On the far wall, I saw a small door. “What’s this door?” I shouted to one of the salesladies and pointed.
“It leads to the alleyway.” One called back, and something must have shown in my tone because she stepped forward. “Is everything alright, sir?
Eyes glued to the door, I edged forward, my gun already in my hand and pressed against my leg.
The door was slightly ajar.
“Sir?”
I nudged the open door with my toe, and it only moved halfway, like someone had stuffed something behind it.
“My God, is that a gun?”
I didn’t turn to her, “There’s a man out front called Ivan. Bring him to me. Now.”
“Leah?” I called out again and again. There was no answer. But there was a small gargling noise from behind the door. A wet choking kind of sound.
My stomach bottomed out. Keeping a tight grip on the gun, I rammed my shoulder into the door and forced it open.
Gun pointed, I swept it around the litter-strewn alley with its piled-up trash and red pooling water. Red pooling water?
Blood. There was blood mixing with the melting snow puddles. Holding my breath, I looked down and prayed not to find Leah because if I did, I didn’t know what I would do. Set the world on fire and watch it burn.
It wasn’t Leah. It was her guard, Stephen.
He lay on his back, his mouth working as bubbles of blood splurged from his lips and stained his chin. There was a hole in his chest, and a pool of blood spreading around him.
Dropping to my knees in that blood, I pressed my hands over his chest wound, and that thick hot, liquid bubbled up through my fingers.
So much blood.
Too much blood.
“What’s—” Ivan skidded to a half stop, his weapon in his hands. “Shit.” Tearing off his coat, he passed it to me so I had something to staunch the blood with. “Shit, what happened? I didn’t hear a shot. ”
“I don’t know. But he needs an ambulance.” I pressed down harder. “Hold on, Stephen. Just hold on.”
Fuck, there was so much blood. How could anyone survive losing that much?
Unless it wasn’t all his blood.
“Leah?” I asked as the wail of sirens hit my ears. “Did Leah get hurt?”
I knew my wife. If she had been here, she would have been helping.
He gargled and shook his head. “She—”
My eyebrows shot up. “She did this to you?”
There was no way I was going to believe that. Leah was a fighter, but she wasn’t a killer, and the man in front of me was going to die.
I knew it, and so did he. That’s why he was trying to talk to me. So he could tell me what happened.
“Manda.”
My heart sank. If Manda had been here, then Leah could be in real trouble.
“Piotre,” his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he didn’t say anything else.
“Fuck.” Falling to his knees next to me, Ivan shook him. “Fucking wake up, Stephen, you asshole. Do not give in to this. Don’t you dare die.”
“Poitre.” Stumbling to my feet, I stared down at the bloody body of one of my men. Stephen hadn’t been my friend, but he had been loyal.
And he had lost his life trying to protect my wife and unborn child from a man whom people told me was my brother.
“Viktor,” Ivan called after me, and I hadn’t even realized I’d been walking. “Viktor, where are you going?”
“Piotre has Leah,” I said in a cold flat voice and heard him curse behind me.
He knew as well as I did that this wasn’t going to end well.
“I’ll come with you.”
“Stay with Stephen. He may still have a chance.” I lied because I knew a dead person when I saw one. Stephen was as good as dead.
So was Manda and Piotre .
If they had hurt Leah, if they had killed her, then I would make sure their deaths were long and painful.
If she had died not knowing how I felt about her, then I was going to burn the world to the ground for her.
It wasn’t fair that the world could give me her, the sweet passionate woman who made me a better man, and then snatch her away from me, her and my unborn child.
“Any news?” Ivan slipped into the seat opposite me. We were at my city penthouse, and it was dark outside. Night had fallen hours ago, which meant Leah had been in the hands of my enemy for hours and hours.
Was she scared? In pain? Crying out for me to save her? I tried not to think about it, but I couldn’t help but let my mind wander.
I had ripped the city apart. I’d spoken to every single person I had known; I’d made deals and threatened violence, and the answer was always the same.
No one knew where Piotre was.
Or they were too scared of him to tell me. If the sun rose without me finding my wife alive, then they would all be afraid of me. They should be afraid of me now.
With everything that had been happening with Leah, I’d been preoccupied, and they had forgotten who really ran this city. They would remember, though.
“Viktor?” Ivan prompted.
Falling forward, I caught my face in my hands and shook my head. My breathing came in rasps. “There’s nothing. Not even a hint of where he is or where he would have taken her. It’s like they have disappeared into thin air.”
Ivan sighed. “No one can disappear in this city unless you want them to, Viktor, and Leah is strong. She will hold on.”
Maybe that was true. But I didn’t want her to hold on. I wanted her here with me or at home, gushing over baby clothes and making plans for the future. I wanted to hear her say she loved me so I could say it back.
I couldn’t stand the thought of not saying the words now.
I groaned and straightened. I was falling apart, and I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t get Leah back safely if I did that. I had to be me, the old me. The ruthless me.
“You’ll get to tell her you love her, Viktor.”
I stood up, ignoring his words. “That’s not what I was going to say,” I lied. “I was going to ask about Stephen.”
His face grew stony. “He’s out of surgery and alive, but I don’t know anything else. It’s not looking good, even if he lives. The bullet pulverised his insides. His family is with him, but I’ve put someone with them as well. Just in case.”
I wanted to shout at him that we needed everyone looking for Leah, but I could spare one man to watch out for the man who had been shot protecting her.
“It should have been me,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Stephen was protecting her. That’s why he got shot. That was my job. I should have been there to protect her. If I had watched her more carefully, then this wouldn’t have happened.”
The guilt was ripping into me, eating me up from the inside out, and it made me want to scream and tear it out of me. She had made me love her, and now she was gone.
I was going to lose the two most important things in my life because a weaker man was jealous.
“You were standing twenty feet from her, Viktor. You were right there, and she didn’t call out for you.
You have to think why that was.” He threw up a hand to silence me.
“I’m not saying she went willingly because we both know she didn’t, but something must have happened, and it happened fast. You wouldn’t have been able to do anything, and if it was you who was shot, who would save her?
It’s time to bury those feelings of failure and strap on a pair.
The elevator doors beeped and opened straight into the living room.
“Need you to be logical,” Ivan finished lamely as my father was wheeled into the room.
Jumping up, I stormed toward him. “You are not welcome here. Get the fuck out.”
The old man studied me just the way he always did, like I was something scraped off the bottom of his shoes. His lips thinned.
“I am here to help.”
“Like fuck you are, it was probably you.” I advanced on him. And the fear I saw in his eyes was everything.
“Did I ask her to help? Yes, I did, Viktor. I have never thought you were strong enough to lead the men properly. But she said no, and it really doesn’t matter what I think now, does it?”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Of course not. You are married, and your wife is pregnant.”
I schooled my face into indifference. “And who told you that?”
“She was taken from a baby shop, Viktor, and you have been seen with her. Leah is pregnant, isn’t she?”
I had two choices. Neither one of them was good, but I didn’t see the point of lying to the old man anymore.
He wasn’t a threat to us anymore.
“Yes.”
He nodded his head once. “Then I will help her and my grandchild, but you have to know that this has to be kept under wraps, don’t you?”
Yeah, I knew that.
“Then let’s make a deal, I will tell you where she was taken and you will—”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
Oh, I knew all about what he wanted. It was all he had ever wanted. But what choice did I have?
“I agree. Just tell me where the fuck he has taken her, old man, and you can have your empire back. You can have it all.”
The warehouse was nothing. There was nothing that made it stand out from the dozens around it, but the moment I stepped out of the car with Ivan and eight men streaming behind, I knew she was here. It was like I could sense her.
“How many?” I hissed as I surveyed the door. One small door, that’s all that was between me and my wife.
“Eight. The guards are taken care of, but we have to prepare ourselves for traps.”