Deception

Chapter 14

14

LUCY

T he boat bobs as I step in under Gregor’s beady stare. It’s not exactly the easiest to find my balance. The heels make it almost impossible, along with my chained wrists. It feels like I haven’t slept in days, and with my ears still blocked from the flight to Turkey, my head is throbbing.

“Opa, suka!” Gregor yells as I take my time. The headscarf he wrapped around me makes it hard to see my footing.

My body is achy enough from the uncomfortable journey. Turns out that a plush private jet isn’t any better than economy when you’re all tied up.

“Fucking idiot!” he spits, grabbing me by the arm and yanking me onto the bench seat at the back of the motorboat.

The driver barely waits for him to settle beside me when he speeds off towards the small island in the distance. The sun is still rising, tinging everything a stunning shade of pink that makes me smile.

I fucking hate pink. I’ve never been the girliest of girls, apart from the fact I’ve always loved a pony. However, today, pink is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in so fucking long that tears burn in my eyes as the black headscarf billows around me. The briny air fills my lungs and stings my pores. This is the closest to freedom I’ve had since the day Tomasz took me.

Eerily, my thought of him conjures his silhouette on the jetty. Tall and tanned, he is beyond handsome, and my heart races at the sight of him in his perfectly fitted, dark slacks and crisp white shirt. The boat comes to a slow stop while I’m transfixed by him. Although he’s wearing sunglasses, I can feel his eyes on me.

“I hate you,” I whisper, reminding myself that anything else I feel towards him is wrong.

As though he hears me, he tilts his head to the side, crossing his arms over his chest while his driver talks to him. All I can do is stand and stare, hoping that I don’t topple while I curse myself every which way for seeing anything other than a criminal and a monster.

This time, Gregor makes no move to touch me. Instead, he stands beside me, waiting for whatever is coming next. It seems like forever before the driver comes over and helps me onto the jetty.

“Wait here for the drop-off,” he tells Gregor sternly. “You can leave once we have the goods.”

“Her?”

“Not your concern.”

The dickhead is clearly beneath the man now guiding me to their boss. This one has an understated authority to him. He doesn’t pull me around or feel the need to intimidate me with curses. There’s no fear in him that I can sense. It’s refreshing.

“We should move this inside,” he tells Tomasz, nodding towards the fortress looking building ahead of us. “He’s here.”

I half expect Tomasz to bark at him like he does at the other men, but instead, he touches his hand to the base of my back and starts for the medieval-looking gates. The walk is torturously long, considering it’s a straight path into the courtyard. The heat of his hand permeates through the fabric of my dress and the headscarf, singeing my skin. The sound of the waves that was so beautiful before now grates on me as I try to listen to his steady breaths. Then we pause side by side in the walkway’s shadow, where it’s cool and the goosebumps on my skin could be from the breeze.

“Red,” he says.

The tone has no inflexion. It says nothing about why he brought me here. However, when he pulls his sunglasses from his face, his eyes narrow on me. The intensity of his stare robs me of my breath while my body screams for him to touch me everywhere.

I swear the emptiness that he left inside me burns with our proximity. Something about the way he keeps his distance feels off though. Even as he slips his hand over the curve of my arse to fist it at his side before turning to me, I know something has changed. My presence isn’t another of his games.

“Why am I here?” I ask as he walks through the darkened archways bordering the maze-like courtyard, and I follow. “Who’s here?”

A dark chuckle rumbles from him as we pause at the opening in the hedge, and he finally unravels the headscarf to inspect the delivery of his goods. I don’t know what’s wrong with him as he finds my gaze again and brushes my hair behind my ear. It’s such a soft action for him, it almost seems tender.

Grasping my hand, he moves to lift it. My binds stop him though. Something that clearly irritates him as he growls at the chain prisoning my hands to my hip. Without missing a beat, he grips the harness and harshly yanks it, breaking the chain and releasing my hands. The bite of the gold around my nape does nothing to detract from the ferocity of his touch when he lifts my chin with a crooked finger so that I’m forced to meet his gaze.

Eyes never leaving mine, his hand moulds to the curve of my hip as he pulls me flush to him. Confusion leaves me completely dazed as our bodies meld. There’s no part of him I don’t feel as his other hand cups the back of mine and then brings it to his face.

Lips skimming mine, Tomasz blows out a long breath, and I’m hit with the strangest sense of déjà vu. As though I’ve already been here, just like this. The longer I stare up at his eyes with my heart gonging in my chest, the midnight blue fades to ice. I’ve been in this exact position before.

The memory hits me with the force of a runaway train, and as I try to pull back, Tomasz holds me in place, studying the enlightenment on my face with a rancorous twist of his lips. I’ve been here before. Same stance, different place, other man.

This was my goodbye.

This was the moment that I realised I might never see Freddie again. Something inside me knew that our moment after the polo match was it.

“Were you watching me then?”

“Red…” he croons low, his hands going to my shoulders. “There is nothing about you that I don’t know.”

Whether it’s the truth or a lie, I’m not sure. All I know is that the longer he holds me like this, the more I suffocate in his grasp.

“You’re mine, do you understand?” When I don’t reply, he shakes me onto my tiptoes with a force he’s never used before. As though it’s coming from somewhere darker and more dangerous than what I’ve seen so far. It’s the first true glimpse of the devil I was told about. “Do. You. Understand?”

“Yes.” The reply spills before I can stop it, and as his lips quirk into a lopsided smirk, he slowly sets me back on my feet.

There’s an air of victory about him that makes my hackles rise as he coos gruffly, “Good.”

Everything in me wants to take back my “yes” and rip it to shreds. I want to bury it so deep that it’ll rot somewhere in the marrow of my bones, never to be heard again. But we’re so close. His heat is infectious, coursing through me without mercy, scorching my flesh and blood and spirit. No one has ever made me feel this conflicted, made me question myself the way he does. I’ve never hated anything the way I hate him.

Trying to find a reason for it is pointless too, because it’s all I’ve asked myself in the time we’ve been apart. There must be more to this pull between us.

Right? More than the hum in my chest and the thrill that ignites my soul. With him, I see things differently. Fuck, if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have appreciated the incredible melange of pink and lilac that painted the sky on the boat ride to him. He took my freedom, but he’s given me a longing for more that I’ve never had. That goes beyond wanting to be loved by someone else. Tomasz has made me appreciate my strength.

Drifting my gaze down the chiselled line of his jaw to his chest, I try to clear my head.

“Look at me.” My stare instantly snaps to him. “You’re mine, and if you betray me, Red…” he rumbles. The grit in his voice is as rough as the hands squeezing around my biceps.

Licking his lip, he pulls it into his mouth with a sneer before he continues. “I will kill you.”

The lurch of my heartbeat brings me nearer to him—so close that I could twist myself free of his hold and pop his elbows out of place, take the gun he’s got slipped into the top of his trousers and put bullets in a couple of his men before they could stop me.

Still, I take a deep breath, focusing on the force of his hold, the burn that stabs through me at the scent of his spicy cologne. Holding Tomasz’s gaze, I smile, licking my lips the way he licked his.

“Not if I kill you first.”

A deep, guttural laugh escapes him. All the alarms going off in my head at our proximity do nothing to dissipate the heat blooming deep in my belly, pulling me the rest of the way until our bodies are flush again while my heart pounds to the rhythm of his pulsing dick against the flat of my belly.

“Haven’t we been here before?” Tomasz whispers, the words trailing to my ear before he bites down on the lobe hard enough that I pull back.

With a dark grin, he looks down on me, blue eyes sharp, mean, filled with hate-spiked lust. He makes no move to look away, and neither do I. His will is not stronger than mine.

“You failed, remember?”

Reaching up, I push against his hold on me before I swipe the glistening spit from his lips.

“Keep flying high,” I scoff back at him. His stare narrows on me, icy slits that make my body ache to feel his violence. “It’ll be a longer way to fall.”

His laughter fades, leaving a wide smile. In a move that surprises me, he pulls his sunglasses from his shirt pocket and puts them on me, batting my hand away when I make to take them off again.

“You’re going to want them,” he tells me as he starts down the narrow hedge-lined path leading to the middle of the simple maze.

It’s not until he steps out of the way, leaving the small clearing in open view, that I understand what he meant. My heart is beating so fast that my head spins. For a moment, salvation feels so close.

I’m going home.

Fucking stupid, shitty, bloody fucking hope. It dies as swiftly as it came when the man that escorted me to the club the night I was supposed to kill Tomasz looks at me with a sneer.

“What the fuck is she doing here?” Big Ben asks Tomasz’s driver as they exchange an envelope for a briefcase. “Shouldn’t she be dead already?”

I feel sick. This man…I trusted him. He was my handler. A family friend. I’ve known him all my life, and when he looks at me, we are strangers. He’s standing in front of me, flanked by security, as though he didn’t take an oath to serve his country. Like it wasn’t his job to make sure I made it back to my life.

“You set me up.” The words burst from my mouth as realisation dawns on me. “You son of a bitch! You fucking set me up!”

My grandma was right all along.

Trust no one , she told me. I should’ve listened.

“You fucked me over!” Pulling Tomasz’s gun from the top of his trousers, I aim it straight at the bastard.

“Easy, Red…” Tomasz rests his hand on top of the pistol, slipping it down to my wrists to divert my aim.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” I bark at him, nudging his hand away. “I thought…I…I thought…”

What did I think? I’ve known all along who Tomasz is. It’s the other man that has my tears burgeoning in my eyes. My heart sticks in my throat, pounding and pounding.

This is why no one has come for me.

I’ve fought and fought. Even when I was drained of my strength, I pushed through, hoping I would live another day. I did what it took to stay alive and finish what I was sent to him for. I let him fuck me. I…I…

“Red…” Tomasz steps in front of me, hands bracketing mine on either side of his gun as he moves flush to the muzzle and cocks his head to the side.

The smirk that lives on his face when he’s taunting me falls to a stern line. This is exactly what he wanted. The mind games were nothing but foreplay.

“What does it say about you?” I sob quietly, still trying to push through because all I can hear is my grandma telling me to bolster up and keep at it.

Do what it takes to live another day.

“Huh, Tomasz? What does it say about you that the only way you can break me is by using others?”

His wordless reply is nothing but a narrowed scowl, slowly morphing into a whisper of a smile.

“So powerful,” I growl. “So strong…huh? But you needed to use them to fuck me completely. So come on, oh master of the fucking underworld…” A maniacal laugh escapes me. All logic and sanity have evaporated. The whir of my thoughts is a deranged keen that I can’t silence. “Come on, tell me! What does it say about you?”

The faint smile grows as I sidestep, and he mirrors my action. We spin around in slow circles, a dance I had no clue I’d be doing today. The world around me fades to black. Present, past, and future cease to matter in the moment. It’s just me and him and our personal warfare.

“It says that we are enemies, and in battle, everything is fair game, Lucy Stanton.”

I can’t breathe. The vice around my heart tightens with the sound of my name on his lips, making it impossible to hear anything else. It’s just my name in his part-Russian, part-American twang. It’s a song that tugs at all the anguish roiling inside me. It’s simply the lick of his tongue over his lip. The mere flutter of his dark lashes while we spin and circle under the glare of the sun. The flare of his nose as we cross-step and edge closer, as though he’s physically breathing me in. Until the gun squared to his chest is the only thing keeping us apart.

When my stare flits down to it, he urges me, “Go on. Do it.”

My pulse hiccups with my inhale before it kick-starts again, so fast that my thumbs tremble as I stroke them either side of the firearm in my grasp. His touch is so hot, and when I look up at him, there’s no smugness in his eyes. For a moment, I’m incapable of doing anything other than watching him, and for that instant, my racing heart calms.

“No more empty threats, Red. Remember?”

“Yes.” My hiss does nothing to disguise my tears as they break free and skitter down my face, fogging my vision through his sunglasses.

You’re going to want them . His remark comes back to me. Tomasz knew he was going in for the kill with this move, and yet he tried to spare me some of my pride.

I don’t understand him. I don’t understand his actions or his games. Worst of all, I can’t fathom why I’m thawing at the flicker of concern in his eyes or the warmth of his touch. The fact that he gave me something to hide my tears or that he’s keeping me on my feet when my entire being is crumbling to the ground shouldn’t matter. I should do what I promised. I should kill him. Put a bullet through his chest and physically shatter his heart the way he’s proverbially obliterated mine.

So why are you hesitating?

Confusion muddles my steps, and when I almost stumble, his hands slip down from my wrists to my elbows, gripping them hard while pressing them to my sides. It’s the only thing that stops me from toppling. He’s holding me up instead of disarming me.

“You’re mine,” he murmurs, so low that it’s a secret bringing us closer, tying us together. “You’re mine, Red. I’m inside you like you’re inside me.”

“No.”

Nodding, he traces a hand up my arm to my neck. Cupping my jaw, he continues. “Your enemies are my enemies, and I’ll protect you. Unlike them…” He pauses for a beat, teeth grinding with disgust, before he tells me, “I’ll always find you, malyshka.”

“I’m not your little girl.” My snappy response earns me a cocked brow.

A bemused chuckle vibrates from him as his other hand flattens to the base of my back. “There’s nowhere you can run. No place you can hide. No one that can take you from me. That’s a promise, malyshka.”

“I am not your baby.”

“Nothing will stop me from finding you. Ever.” Looking down at his chest, Tomasz blows out on a deep breath, “Unless you kill me.”

There’s never been something I’ve wanted more than to make good on all the promises I made to him. My trigger finger spasms with the urge to do it, and yet, I can’t.

What’s wrong with me?

This is it. The moment I’ve been hoping for. The opportunity I’ve patiently awaited.

“What the fuck are you doing? This isn’t what we agreed!” Big- fucking -Ben chimes, breaking me out of our trance.

I trusted him.

I put my life in his hands…

He betrayed me.

He’s not here to bring me home. He’s not here to save me. It wasn’t his acquaintance with the Vassilys that was a farce; it was his loyalty to his country and our mission. To me.

Twisting in Tomasz’s hold, I press my back to his front. Shooting—one, two, three, four…

His men jump in without a beat of hesitation while my traitor’s line of defence collapses like dominoes to one side. Bullets zap around us. Rage unlike I’ve ever felt scorches my veins as I keep pulling the trigger. Even when I’ve run out of ammunition and it’s Tomasz and his men finishing what I started. The recoil of each shot continues vibrating through me as I drop the empty gun to the ground. I should’ve saved a bullet for the arsehole.

The heat of my emotions overwhelms me in the silence that follows. Benny looks between his last man standing and the others on the ground.

“You’ll regret this.”

The one man he has left at his side holsters his weapon as Tomasz’s men close around us.

“You should’ve killed him,” I hiss with reproach at both myself and Tomasz.

“Not today,” he retorts, voice steady like hell hasn’t just broken loose around us.

This is just another day in his world. If I was ever looking for a reason why he’s so composed all the time, this is it. He can’t afford to have a lapse in his control and poise. Much like I was raised to play to the rules of society, he’s been reared to rule a brutal and unforgiving legacy. One that’s built on blood and violence. For the first time, I wonder what it would be like to be like him. To own all that power he possesses.

“Let me go,” I snap when I try to walk away and his arm closes around me tighter while he hands the gun in his hand to his driver beside us. “Let me fucking go!”

Surprisingly, Tomasz releases me. The loss of his touch chills me to the core, and at first, I stall in my resolve to get out of here. Of all times for my head to think to the same tune as my heart feels, this is the worst.

I need to put space between me and him. I need to push the hurt down and lock it away so that he doesn’t exploit it anymore. However, with every step I take out of the maze, all I can hear are his words chasing me.

There’s nowhere you can run.

I turn into one of the hedge openings and follow the long path until I reach another opening.

No place you can hide.

My steps become longer strides as I pursue my freedom endlessly.

No one that can take you away from me.

There’s no end in sight as I continue weaving through the shrubbery with my heart threatening to implode. As though it will help, I tear the sunglasses off and throw them to the ground. There’s no one here to watch me cry.

I’ll always find you…malyshka…

My lungs burn and ache, and the air congeals. Every bone in my body protests as I run and run and run. I don’t stop. Lost and completely alone. I have nothing and no one.

Malyshka…

Malyshka.

I don’t know if it’s him calling after me or my head echoing what my heart is too frantic to cry.

Maleeeeshka…

It taunts and taunts as I run faster and faster. Turning a corner, I slam to a stop, face-planting right into his chest. Strong arms wrap around me as my gaze finds his. Endless blue. Deep like the ocean at night.

You’re mine . His words from earlier undo me as I give in to the heat and steel of his body with my tears and sobs storming through me.

His.

Fate whispers as he tilts my face up to his and wipes my tears with the rough pads of his thumbs.

“Malyshka.”