Epilogue
Aurora~
A good admiral-a strategic admiral-never would have answered Viktor’s phone call, but my pride had been steering that wheel. Even though I wasn’t one-hundred percent certain that he’d been the one behind my attack, letting him know that I wasn’t so easily taken down had felt important.
I also couldn’t lie and say that my body didn’t hurt from head to toe, my face looking like it’d been smashed in. Even though they’d only gotten one hit in, that elbow had hit me perfectly, and I had two blackeyes and a swollen nose to prove it.
My arm and side were also burning like a sonofabitch, choosing to brave through it than let Dr. Baruch drug me up.
Not only did I need the reminder that I was alive, but I didn’t need my senses dulled for any reason.
Whether Viktor was really behind wanting me dead or not, this was as serious as it got, and I knew this.
Someone had put a hit out on Roman Marchetti’s only daughter, and for all that my father and brothers were doing their best to let me lead this thing, I knew that they were itching to avenge me.
There was also no arguing that the order could have come from anyone, and that was something else that was preventing me from getting any sleep.
Just because the men had been Russian...
well, money wasn’t selective. In fact, money was the most non-discriminatory thing in existence.
So, those men could have easily been paid off by the Germans, Romanians, or Chinese.
Not to mention that Viktor and his family had their own personal enemies, ones that had nothing to do with us or the other territorial syndicates.
In fact, with his charming personality the way that it was, I could see Kasimir Korolev making enemies everywhere that the man went.
So, no, I didn’t know for sure that Viktor had ordered the hit on me.
While the comment about not being able to rape me before killing me pointed all of this in his direction, I still didn’t have proof.
I still didn’t have proof, and I needed it to justify putting my family’s lives at risk.
Though they’d all be more than happy to die for me, if I could avoid that, then I would.
As I laid in the hospital bed, staring at the ceiling, I also knew that I had to come clean soon.
I knew that I needed to tell them everything, but I was still trying to process what it could all mean.
While a lot of fingers pointed towards Viktor being behind all this, he was Viktor Korolev, and I couldn’t imagine that he’d gotten to where he was today by being sloppy.
In fact, none of the Korolevs would be where they were today if they weren’t good at what they did.
So, why was I still alive?
Of course, the obvious answer was that they had all underestimated me, but that didn’t ring quite true.
After all, Viktor had already seen me take one of his men down, so he’d already known what I was capable of.
Yeah, you’d think that sending four men would have done the job to his satisfaction, but again, Viktor didn’t strike me as sloppy, and this had been sloppy.
One shot to the head by any of the four men would have done the job, but none of them had been efficient enough to even do that.
That fifth guy.
While I’d been fighting for my life, I had also noticed a fifth guy hiding near the green Stratosmore container, but instead of sticking around to make sure that the job had been completed, he had vanished after I’d been shot, and that was the very definition of sloppy in our line of work.
Granted, he could have just been some random homeless person or just someone who wasn’t supposed to have been there, but you’d think that he would have called for help if that’d been the case.
Of course, fear was a real motherfucker, so I could understand him being too scared to intervene, but still.
Who was he, and why had he been there?
Just then, my phone rang again, and when I picked it up off the medicinal tray, I saw that it was Viktor calling again, but as far as I was concerned, he didn’t need to know anything more than that I was alive and well, though well could be considered subjective right now.
Besides, there was no way that the piers didn’t have cameras, and so whatever he wanted to know, he could get from the security feed in any of the observation decks that littered Korolev territory.
I also didn’t owe him anything. Even if he wasn’t behind what had happened to me, the man had been fucking a whore to prove a point, and there was just no coming back from something like that, and it had nothing to do with love.
I’d been raised in a world where respect was everything, and if there was one thing that I’d never tolerate, it was disrespect.
Something that Viktor Korolev was going to learn the hard way.
The End.