Chapter 17
17
TOMASZ
W hat a fool.
I should’ve known that Red would’ve pulled a stunt like this. Eventually, I knew she was going to make a move outside the lines I’d set around her. Today, however, is a fucker of a day to do it.
“What’s happening?” I bark into the phone as I push the pedal to the gas on the Defender.
“There’s no sign of the girl,” Boris, Anton’s right-hand man, replies. “We’ve combed the streets around the hotel and the marketplace. Nothing.”
Anton answers his phone to another of the units he’s sent out to search the two major points of access to the town. A brow hitches as he listens intently, using his hand to signal for me to slow down. I can’t with the way my frustration is punching at my insides.
“You could wash your hands of her now,” Anton groans, bracing himself on the dashboard when I U-turn and head back towards town.
“The only thing I’ll be doing with my hands is wringing her neck,” I snap back at him.
When I screech to a halt outside the ocean club, Anton sighs. His exasperation is seeping through the cracks as he clears his throat and asks, “Are you going to keep her?”
It wasn’t the plan.
“It isn’t the plan.”
“Plans change.” He nods, pulling his gun from his holster and checking it before putting it back and doing the same with the one on the other side. “If it’s changed, I need to know, because it means we need reinforcements. The situation with the Sarapovs is precarious. Them not showing yesterday wasn’t a coincidence…”
“I’ll deal with Mikheil and Sergi after.”
“If the girl’s escape and their no-show are connected, this could be a trap. So I ask you again, are you going to keep her?”
“All that matters is that you’re wasting my fucking time with your questions.”
I’m not done with her. Maybe I’ll never be done with her, but that’s not his concern.
“Whether I keep her or kill her, I want her back tonight.”
Nodding, he exits the Defender and straightens his suit jacket while he scours the surroundings outside the private members club the chief of police likes to frequent.
“Make it quick,” I tell him when he slams the door shut and heads inside while I put a call in to his right-hand man.
“Boss,” he answers on the first ring.
“You’ll visit the chief’s family and wait for my call.” It’s all the instruction he needs before I hang up.
The sound of the waves filters in through the slight cracks of the windows. The brine of the ocean is tinged with the sweetness of the mollusc-covered rocks below, clouding every one of my senses with the memory of the girl’s own dulcet scent. The honeyed recollection has my blood heating and pounding. From lust to rage. The need to break her has never been so volatile as Anton’s logic soaks in.
If he’s right, she doesn’t have much time left. These are the moves we make, striking when we can cause the most damage. And the thought of her getting caught up between me and the Sarapovs unhinges me. The thought of anyone else touching her has my hands clenching around the steering wheel, tight enough that my knuckles protest. My vision frays red at the edges, my control unravelling fast while I keep asking myself, Do I want to keep her?
Red is wild and unpredictable no matter how long I study her. Her adaptability means that she changes with the tide. It’s what makes her interesting. What makes me crave more of her. Every time I’m near her, I get a rush that I’ve never felt. Something that goes beyond the crazed animal inside me, screaming to be set free, to hunt and destroy.
I’ve always known something like this would happen, and it’s why I’ve never allowed myself to get caught up in women or feelings. Deep down, I knew she would become a weakness—it’s why I forced myself to keep my distance. But in the end, the addiction wins because the girl’s spirit is beyond anything I’ve ever known. Compelling and invigorating. Unruly and untameable.
So why did I trust her enough to take my eyes off her?
This shit doesn’t happen to me. I don’t make these mistakes.
Except with her.
Well, this is the last time. After today, she can rot in one of the cellars. I won’t let her go, but I won’t have her either. From this moment forward, she will be nothing but a prisoner.
The frantic ringing of my phone pulls me out of my head. Staring down at it, I ignore the first call from my father and every call that follows when Anton brings our friend out of his playpen and shuts him in the back.
“What’s going on?” he demands. When neither I nor Anton replies, he continues. “What are you doing?”
“Shut up, Hasim,” Anton finally barks, silencing him.
The bastard is on edge as I hurtle to his office a few blocks down the strip. The streets are dark and quiet, with patrol cars parked along the entry to every road. The town is locked down.
“What happened?” I ask as we make our way inside the back entrance of the precinct.
“There was a shooting.” The reply is quick, making Anton look at me dubiously. The same expression he had on his face yesterday at the Sarapov meeting point.
When we reach Hasim’s office, Anton guides him straight to his desk while I look around the place. My father handed Hasim this office on a platter so that he could open all the ports for us. He was nothing but a glorified errand boy then.
Clearing his throat as I round the desk and perch on the edge, Hasim looks between me and the screen.
“How’s your family?” The words come out hoarse and strained while I light a cigarette, offering him one too.
The rage inside me roars louder while the conceit falls from his face, making the worry in his expression haggard. The usual hollowness he possesses when we talk business is nowhere to be found now.
“Good.” Finally, he answers tersely, lighting the cigarette pursed in the corner of his mouth.
Looking over at Anton, I gesture for him to hand me his phone.
“Are you sure about that?” Anton asks while I put it down on the desk in front of him. I take a long drag of my cigarette while the video call connects, and his wife’s cries fill the silence.
Standing, I meander to the window of his office. It overlooks the cordoned-off market strip with the view of the ocean beyond it.
“Do you remember what happened to your brother and his family? How you got this office?”
When I look back at him, Hasim nods in acknowledgement of what will come next if he doesn’t cooperate. He knows that I won’t hold back. It won’t just be his wife that gets hurt. With a string of loved ones, he has a lot to lose.
So do you. The echoes of the pang in my chest whisper back at me, stoking the flames of my anger.
“My father spared your niece, but I will not spare your daughter.”
With every second of silence that ticks by, it feels as though I’m going slowly insane. That alone is torture, however with all the shit that’s going on—the Sarapovs and their fucking games, the English assholes, and to top it all off, the conversation with Mama that keeps replaying in the back of my mind—it’s nearing impossible to contain the madness and bloodthirst screaming inside me, constantly leering at my clawing need to find Red. To bring her back.
“Once we’ve seen the footage, you can go back to your family, and they will be safe again.” Anton nudges the computer keyboard closer to our friend, ready for him to hand us the key to his town.
There’s an edge to the caution Hasim moves with that has me pulling back to see the bigger picture. As the police chief, he naturally possesses a surety about him. He’s not one to dither, yet he takes far too many probes and nudges from Anton to log into the town’s surveillance network.
“Other angle,” Anton bites out at him with a slap of his hand to the hardwood table that makes him jump.
When Hasim shows him all the other angles of the scene, Anton’s demeanour changes completely. Long gone is the stoic man—the former Soviet spy that remains unfazed in any storm. It’s all I need to know that whatever went down tonight wasn’t a coincidence.
“What are you hiding, Hasim?” I ask, my control rapidly unravelling as I circle the table, keeping a wide berth so I don’t follow through on the gut instinct to beat the intel right out of him.
The gun at my side heavies, making its presence felt as I come to a stop behind him and glance down at Anton’s phone. The wife’s cries are still shrill, his son’s curses barely cutting through them. It makes my mind wander to the night we took Red. She didn’t cry or curse. She showed no fear at all. Red is unlike any other woman I’ve ever come across.
The growing cries from the video call pull my focus back to it. It takes a beat for me to realise what’s bothering me about the picture in front of me.
“Your daughter.” I blow out a breath, glancing up at Anton to ensure we’re on the same page before I focus back on Hasim. “Where is she?”
It doesn’t take too long for his duplicity to well to the surface. Panic brims over the lines of his eyes as his breaths sputter from him wetly.
“Son of a bitch!” Anton bites out as I sit on the edge of the table and watch the footage from the cameras on loop.
The dark screen pops with two shots of light, fuzzing the view of the crossroads. Each of the four cameras should focus on a different angle. However, they all point to the empty traffic box in the middle with the lights completely out of sight.
“You get one shot, Hasim.” I warn, pulling my gun from the holster and looking it over in my hands.
“Sergi will kill my daughter.”
“You should’ve come to me,” Anton barks at him.
“Sergi—”
Sergi. Sergi, Sergi, Sergi. I laugh. “Sergi Sarapov is a fool.” And a dead man.
I push to my feet, grabbing Anton’s phone and throwing it at him with one hand while the other tightens around my weapon. For a moment, I stand, looking down at him.
“Your niece…”
“Elif,” he part mutters and part sobs the maid’s name.
Red liked her. It was obvious from the looks they exchanged that she trusted her. If she’s betrayed her… God help her.
“Did she help you?” Looking between me and Anton frantically, he doesn’t answer my question. “My father spared her after your brother betrayed us…and here we are again.”
This is why trust is overrated.
“I would have spared your daughter, but now, you’ll die knowing that she will spend her life whoring for your sins.”
“Plea—” The bullet to the head silences his plea before he slumps forward onto the desk with his wife’s screams filling the air.
The buzz that normally follows a kill never comes. My thoughts are all a whir of all the ways Sergi will hurt Red. My Red. The notion that he would go through her to get to me roars my rage into an inferno that blazes through my veins.
“You’ll start a war,” Anton tells me as I wipe the gun clean and plant it close to Hasim’s open hand on the desk. The words bring back Emin’s remark the night I took a bullet for her— Wars have been spurred over lesser things.
I’ll start it and I’ll finish it with the Sarapovs’ heads off their shoulders. The way it should’ve been from the beginning. Deals are for weaklings.
Walking out of the office, I pull my suit jacket closed over the blood spattered on my shirt.
“Call your men,” I tell Anton.
This isn’t war—it’s carnage. I’m going to annihilate the Sarapov name from this earth once and for all.