Chapter 44 Malice #2
Reaching down, I grab the gun from the man’s limp, lifeless fingers, training the weapon on him as I nudge him with my foot. Across the room, I can hear my brothers talking to Willow, her soft, shaky voice a counterpoint to their deep baritones.
I nudge the man’s large body harder, rolling him over onto his back so I can see his face.
The room is still dim, the single bright light pointed against a wall now, but there’s enough illumination that I can make out his features. And as soon as I do, shock jolts through me, edging out the adrenaline and anger I’ve been running on since we burst in here.
Willow’s kidnapper isn’t just some faceless asshole. I know this guy.
It’s Darius fucking Ledger, and he’s dead.
“What the fuck?” I mutter under my breath, my brow furrowing.
This is who abducted Willow? Why?
“Hey,” I call to the others. “Get over here.”
They make their way over to join me, Ransom supporting Willow around the waist and Vic hovering on her other side. His hands aren’t on her the way Ransom’s are, but he’s close enough that he’s almost touching her.
As soon as they stop by my side, I reach out, pulling Willow into my arms and crushing her to me. We need to figure out what the fuck Darius was doing, but right now, I just need to hold my Solnyshka.
My sunshine.
Willow squeaks in surprise at the sharpness of my movement, but she doesn’t fight my hold, melting into it as she wraps her arms around me as well. I can feel her shaking, tremors of fear running through her even though she’s safe now, and it just makes me hold her tighter, my jaw clenched tight.
We got here in time.
We managed to save her.
Thank fuck.
“I thought…” Her words choke off in a breathless sob, and she shakes her head, burying her face against my chest.
“You’re safe,” I tell her, my voice strained. “We’ve got you.”
She nods but doesn’t pull away, and I breathe her in, wishing I could keep her wrapped in my arms forever.
Finally, we separate. I run my hands over her, checking for injuries even though I’m sure both Ransom and Victor did that already. There’s a bruise blooming on her cheek, and it makes me want to bring Darius back to life again just so we can kill him more slowly and a hell of a lot more painfully.
“I’m alright,” Willow whispers as my fingertips ghost over the mark on her face. “Really. I’m okay. It… it could’ve been so much worse.”
“He deserved to die screaming for this,” I tell her, not even caring that it makes me sound like a violent psychopath. Willow knows who I am and what I’m capable of by now, so the fact that I’d be willing to kill for her—to torture and maim for her—shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise.
She lets out a shaky breath, reaching up to trail her fingers over my cheek in a mirror of what I’m doing to her. Her large brown eyes gleam in the dim light as she holds my gaze for a moment, and then she finally turns to look at her attacker where he’s sprawled on the ground.
“So he really is dead?”
“Yeah,” I confirm. “Vic got a clean shot. The bullet probably stopped his heart. He’s gone.”
“Wait.” Ransom drags out the word, frowning as we all stare down at the body. “Is that…”
“Yeah. Darius Ledger.”
Willow blinks, glancing between us. “Do you know him?”
I nod. “Yeah, he was friends with our dad back in the day. We’ve had a few run-ins with him.”
Her eyes go wide, her brows pulling together as if she’s working something out in her head. “He said he planned to use me against you guys. Because you cared about me. He was going to use me to get revenge.”
“Revenge for what?” Ransom murmurs, shaking his head.
“I think… this is X,” she whispers.
Ransom’s head shoots up, and Vic stiffens, glancing over at Willow. I tense up too, wary and confused.
“What do you mean, Solnyshka?” I press.
“He was there the night Ilya abducted me. He’s the reason I escaped. He saved me because he wanted me for something else. And he referenced you guys when he was talking to me. He knew we were… together.”
She leans closer to me as she speaks, as if she needs the warmth and comfort of my body. I wrap an arm tightly around her, listening intently to every word she utters as Victor taps his fingers against his leg next to us.
“I think Darius might’ve figured out you were trying to track down his identity,” Willow continues.
“He said he planned to use me to get what he wanted, and that he’d kill me anyway in the end.
So maybe he was going to either blackmail you into doing a job that would definitely get you killed or keep me captive until you agreed to give up trying to figure out who he was. ”
“Son of a bitch,” Ransom mutters. “What the fuck? So this is X? Our dad’s old friend?”
“It makes sense,” I say slowly, trying to piece it all together.
“When I ran into Darius a while ago, he was talking all this shit about how our dad trained us up, gave us all these skills, and then we turned around and used them against him to kill him. He seemed impressed by what we’d done.
And he knew I’d been to prison, and he seemed pretty fucking amused by that fact. ”
“Because if Willow is right, he was the one who pulled strings to get you out,” Victor adds, studying the body on the floor as if he could somehow revive it and make Darius spill all of his secrets.
We all go quiet for a long moment, staring down at the blood soaked body. Then Ransom leans in and spits on the corpse.
“I guess you won’t get a chance to scrub more footage from the second drop to try to find X, Vic,” he says. “It looks like we’ve already found him.”