Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
“Vika!” Yuri thrust his hips once more, coming harder than a buffalo.
The woman lying beneath him—he couldn’t remember her name and couldn’t care less what it was—clawed at his hand around her throat. Her long blond hair was wrapped tightly in his other fist. Wide, panic-stricken blue eyes stared up at him.
Frantically, she slapped at his arm until he released her. The woman’s breasts heaved as she sucked in wheezing breaths, then squirmed from beneath him and hauled ass for the bathroom.
“You’re a good fuck,” he called out, chuckling when she slammed the door. She was a good fuck, but she wasn’t Vika. No matter how many blond-haired, blue-eyed women he had sex with, it would never be the same.
Vika was his woman. How could she have abandoned him? He’d given her everything.
Yuri threw his legs over the side of the mattress and shoved a hand through his hair. Living without her was…unbearable. How could this have happened?
He punched the pillow with the back of his hand.
The shower came on in the bathroom. He had half a mind to storm in there and take that bitch from behind. Since getting out of prison, he never tired of sex. His dick twitched at the thought of slipping between those tight ass cheeks.
Uttering a growl of anticipation, he headed for the bathroom. For the third time in the last hour, Slaughter to Prevail’s Demolisher blared from his cell phone on the nightstand. Nikolai. He wouldn’t put off another round of rough, satisfying sex for anyone else on the planet.
He grabbed the phone. “Allo.”
“Yuri, where the fuck have you been?”
He chuckled. “Fucking, my friend.”
Nikolai groaned. “She is blond-haired and blue-eyed, yes?”
“What does it matter?” He lay back on the bed and tucked a pillow beneath his head. The last thing he needed was another lecture.
“You need to quit banging every piece of ass that looks like your ex-wife. I told you not to marry an American, even one born to Russian parents. They’re boring, two-dimensional, and uncultured.”
But his Vika was so beautiful, a priceless gem on his arm to be shown off at parties.
A sign that even he, a rough, uncultured street thug covered in Gulag tattoos, could land such a stunning woman.
And she made the best borscht he ever had, a worthy and mitigating factor for marrying an American-born Russian woman.
He pressed the phone tighter against his ear.
“She is my wife. Not ex-wife,” he reminded his friend.
The divorce papers had been delivered to him while he was in prison.
He’d never signed them, therefore they were still married.
No judge’s signature on some worthless piece of paper could sever that eternal bond.
Vika was his and his alone until the day she died.
His wife, his woman and, most importantly, his property to do with as he saw fit.
“I miss her. And how do you know what I’ve been doing with my time? ”
“Bah.” Nikolai laughed. “I have people everywhere. Besides, you don’t miss her. I know why you want to find her.”
Yuri was tempted to hang up. But this was Nikolai—Nikki.
Nikki knew him better than anyone, including why finding Vika was so important to him.
They’d been in a Russian Gulag together.
They’d even come to America together and run scams in Chicago that had made them both rich. Including one in particular.
Before the FBI had crawled up his ass and taken everything from him, Yuri had been first in line for the top brigadier position with Semyon Novikov.
When Novikov died in prison, so had his chances to be the old man’s right hand.
Novikov had done one good thing before kicking the bucket.
Since Yuri hadn’t squealed on him or Nikki—and he so fucking could have—the old man had gotten half the sentence he’d expected and issued an order that no one else could take him out for bringing that Fed into their world.
Even Nikki had benefited from Yuri’s silence.
He’d walked out the prison door six years before Yuri had.
He ground his teeth. While he’d been in prison, Nikki had relocated to New York and risen to become boss of the Brighton Beach Bratva. The man who’d once answered to him was now his boss. Yuri pinched the bridge of his nose so hard, he welcomed the pain.
“Vika will turn up,” Nikki continued, “and when she does, you will tell me, and we will figure things out. I have an interest in finding her, too. For now, there’s nothing left for you in Chicago.
Do you really want to take orders from those baby-faced brigadiers?
You’d have to start from the bottom again.
You’re better than that. More valuable. Come to New York. I need your…specialty.”
“My specialty?” His specialty was killing people.
“May I remind you, my friend,” he emphasized with unconcealed derision, “before prison, you told me Semyon wanted a new breed of clean-cut businessmen—without tattoos—for the Brotherhood, to beef up his stock portfolio and buy more buildings. People like Alex Tarankov. Look where that got us.” He paused for effect. “Prison.”
Nikki sighed. “There will always be a place for you at my side, Yuri Petrov.”
“Right. Because the great Nikolai Lebedev won’t bloody his hands anymore. You want me to do your dirty work for you.”
“Yuri,” Nikki growled.
“No!” he snapped. If Nikki were standing before him, he would be tempted to smash his teeth in.
“After our last job together, you said no more, that dirty jobs like that were a thing of the past and no longer meshed with the Brotherhood’s new direction.
Yet here you are, needing my ‘specialty’ again.
” Even in Chicago, everyone knew Nikki’s first-line brigadier, Boris Kolbayev, was in trouble with the Feds.
Whatever he needed, he could do it himself.
“Nyet. I will not go anywhere until I find Vika.”
“Dammit, Yuri!” He held the phone away from his ear. “This is not a question. It’s an order. I need you here. Now!”
Yuri ground his teeth, swallowing enough deadly threats to fill a keg of Stoli.
Officially, the Russian Bratva had no hierarchy and no “mob boss,” like the Italian Mafia. Unofficially, Nikki was his boss. Shit.
“What do you need of me?”
“You may have heard, my man, Boris Kolbayev, has a problem. Somehow, the FBI got to his wife, Alyona, and she’s testifying against him.”
“That tiny mouse of a woman?” Yuri had a vague recollection of meeting Kolbayev’s shy wife before he went into prison. The woman was so timid she’d flinch at the sound of her own name. “Doesn’t she know what will happen if she talks?”
“My sources say they got her a shrink,” Nikki continued.
“There’s a ticket waiting for you at O’Hare.
I’m texting you the information.” Yuri’s phone dinged.
“I’ll explain more when you get here. After this is taken care of, I’ll help you find your woman.
But remember… Before Semyon died, he issued you an order when you got out—leave that FBI agent alone.
That order still stands in New York, and it comes directly from me.
After what happened last year with the agent killed by the Mafia, their business went to shit.
I don’t want my business to go to shit. So stay away from the FBI. ”
The phone went dead, and he slammed it on the table.
Damn the FBI.
One minute he’d been rich, and the next, it had all been taken from him. Everything that had happened to him was all their fault. Alex Tarankov’s fault.
Fucking. Alex. Tarankov. Fucking Kyle Gates.
After his arrest, his lawyer had given him the news that Tarankov was really FBI Special Agent Gates, and the evidence Gates had amassed was so overwhelmingly solid, he’d recommended Yuri plead guilty rather than be subjected to a trial that would undoubtedly put him away for life.
Gates would pay.
For everything.
Rage boiled in his blood, and he started to sweat. That fucker took away his freedom…and his wife. He should have seen it coming.
After Semyon’s last New Year’s Eve party, Olga had warned him they were all over each other, practically fucking right there on the dance floor.
Then, Gates had kidnapped Vika out of Sasha’s.
It was bullshit, but additional time had been tacked on to Yuri’s sentence simply for giving his own wife a lesson she had deserved and brought on herself.
She was his wife. His possession. Why was he the only one who understood that?
While in prison, he’d had people searching for her.
They’d checked all the hospitals in Chicago but were told no such person had ever been admitted.
He suspected Gates had paid off the doctors and nurses not to tell anyone where she was.
Later, he’d even had his people search for Vika’s mother.
He’d nearly torn his cell apart after hearing the old bag had also disappeared into thin air.
He would get his wife back and everything else owed to him. He still loved her, craved her like a drug he could never get out of his system. She was the key to all that was missing in his life.
“Bad for business my ass.” He hurled the phone against the wall, denting the Sheetrock.
Two months before getting released, he’d been told Gates was in New York City. But violating an order from Nikki—the New York Bratva’s new head guy—would be a death sentence.
Somehow, he would get Vika back and find a way to kill Gates. Quietly. Maybe he would make her watch as he killed the sonofabitch.
“Then she will beg me to take her back. Fuck orders.” There was no way he could let it go. And speaking of fucking…
Yuri tugged out the plastic bag from his slacks on the floor, tapped out an Anadrol, and washed it down with a swig of Beluga.
Perhaps, after he took care of this little business for Nikki, he could pick up where they’d left off in Chicago.
Kidnapping businessmen for ransom, then killing them.
New York was loaded with rich people. He could throw a dime in any direction and hit one of them. Who would miss a few here and there?
That decided, he smirked and went into the bathroom. When he yanked open the shower door, the woman—he thought her name might be Anya—gasped. Without a word, he spun her and pushed her against the wall. Her struggling only made his dick harder. He nudged her legs apart and thrust deep.