Untamed Beast (Heirs of Obsession #3)

Prologue

LEKS

If I was a monster before, this god-awful place only made me worse.

Fuck it all.

Punishments, interrogations, mind games, impossible-to-follow rules. For a full decade.

The manual labor and hypothermia wasn’t the worst of it. Not even the electroshock therapy. Pain, I can handle. The isolation was the real torture. Nothing but a windowless cell and your own desperate thoughts rattling around in your head.

Now the Ivanov Center is headed where it belongs. The fiery depths of hell.

I lifted a lighter from a careless guard two days ago. Scheduled one final session with Yulia to avoid the nightly search, hating myself even as I did so.

Then I joined the unlucky newbies who’d been assigned to the forest. It’s not like anyone checks the damn roster, because no one is volunteering to do back-breaking logging work. This kind of hard labor is a punishment.

The second they shoved the axes into our hands, I disappeared into the trees.

Ten years have left me with enough sense of direction in that forest to know how to get back here. Years of special treatment, extra rations, have made me stronger than they realize, but the run is still hard.

The Ural Mountains aren’t exactly flat.

I make it back just in time, my muscles screaming at me, my mouth dry, but I’m satisfied by what I see.

I was right.

The facility boss, Anatoly Ivanov, is visiting tonight. He never shows up to this place without an army of guards.

Every person here would stick a knife in his back with no regrets. We have nothing to lose. We’re already in hell.

His well-founded paranoia means there’s a fleet of vehicles out front. Big trucks to carry his private military guards. A couple of armored SUVs for Ivanov and his aides.

All well-stocked with fuel.

All I need is one good spark.

My hand itches to reach for the lighter in my pocket and just do it, blow the place skyward.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I stay under the cover of the trees as I watch the asylum.

Knowing that Yulia’s inside with no idea what’s about to hit her, probably sucking up to Ivanov the way she always does, gives me a twisted sense of satisfaction.

She thought she had me wrapped around her finger, but I was using her just as much as she was using me, every time we were together.

I wish I could see her face when she learns what I’ve done.

She did say I seemed unstable during our last session.

“Increasingly manic.” Those were the words she used, hiding behind her clipboard and checking boxes to categorize me.

Boxes that deny that this place, and her, are ninety percent of the reason I’m so fucked up.

Well, maybe not ninety percent… but I’d credit them with at least half of my fucked-up brain.

From the quiet of the forest, I slow my breathing and focus on what’s happening outside the center.

There’s a team guarding the vehicles, but they’re keeping watch on the building. They know locking up the Bratva’s most inconvenient secrets under one roof is a recipe for disaster. They never so much as glance in the direction of the forest as I approach silently.

The energy that throbs through my veins is pure desperation. My pulse skips a beat when one guard reaches for his gun, then adrenaline spikes through my veins.

Instinct takes over. My body hasn’t forgotten the Bratva’s lessons. How to anticipate my opponent’s next move. How to disarm in one quick sweep. How to take rage and brute force and use it for calculated lethality.

I bring the axe down.

One. Two. Three.

Powerful, thudding strokes.

They don’t see me coming until the axe is falling on them, one by one, their heads bursting into crimson liquid.

I’m making a mess, but that doesn’t matter. Not for what’s coming next.

This is the moment of truth.

Panting and blood-soaked, I pull off my filthy, sweat-stained shirt, rip open the gas tank of the largest truck and stuff it inside to soak the fabric with gas.

The fabric will work as a fuse to delay the explosion for a few seconds.

Long enough for me to take a car and get out of this place.

I have one set of keys from the guards. I try one car after another until finally, the engine of a SUV starts to turn over. It looks armored.

Good. I might need it, if there are any survivors left here.

I return to my makeshift fuse and take one deep breath. The petrol fumes clear my head a little.

I spark the lighter.

A voice makes me falter, sending me into full alert mode. I swing around, axe in hand, and Arkady Romanov looks back at me with a raised eyebrow.

“Fucking hell, kid, I could’ve blown us both up.”

“Zhukov, you weren’t going to leave me behind, were you?”

His Chicago accent always transports me to another time and place. A time when Bratva royalty like him never would have been caught dead with me.

He gives a rattling cough and I hear the wheeze of his lungs that has been getting worse this summer.

It’s like seeing a ghost from my guilty conscience.

“Where the fuck did you come from?”

I grab his arm and shove him down behind the truck. I don’t know how many guards Ivanov had and I can’t be sure that I’ve killed them all. What if someone was on the perimeter?

I lost sleep over whether to bring Arkady with me. He’s the only other patient — or prisoner, if we’re being honest about what this place is — who still has a spark of life in him. Who still seems capable of some resistance, even after spending his teenage years staring at padded walls.

I didn’t think he could make it. Arkady has been weakening lately. Mostly, I didn’t trust myself to keep him safe. Not him, not anyone else.

Arkady is twenty, but he looks seventeen, shrunken and too thin after too many years in this place.

“I knew you were up to something,” he hisses at me accusingly, staring at the silver lighter in my hand.

Fair enough. He’s right.

I don’t have time to waste with explanations or apologies. Arkady knows exactly what was about to happen to him.

I point at the car that I’ve got the keys to.

“We’re going back to New York. If you’re too slow, I’m leaving you behind.”

His jaw sets in determination and he nods his head.

“Once I light this, we’ve got three seconds.”

At least, I think we do. I’ve never blown up the fuel tank on a military-style personnel truck before.

This plan is insane, but it’s all I’ve got.

Desperation makes you do crazy things — and after ten years in this place, desperation is all I have left.

Arkady looks at me, gulping in a nervous breath. I see my own nerves reflected back to me in his face.

Maybe the kid does have it in him to make it back to New York. Maybe I do, too.

We’re caged animals not sure that we can survive in the wild anymore.

We’re about to find out, or die trying.

I light the fabric and run like hell.

Burning fuel.

The splutter of the SUV engine.

The slam of a door.

Then one inescapable explosion of flame.

Boom.

We’re pulling away in a haze of smoky air, Arkady in the passenger seat beside me. The car jerks forward as a fireball rises skyward behind us.

I take one last look as the building vanishes rapidly in the rearview mirror. Arkady lets out a yell of relief. I can’t, not yet.

The flames lick at the walls that confined me. The fire won’t make a dent in the thick stone of these walls, but it will consume everything it can.

Including the evil inside.

I don’t know if anyone other than Arkady will make it out.

Many of the patients are beyond saving. Some were in there for good reason. Others, like Arkady, were living on the brink of death anyway.

The Ivanov Center.

The bland name concealed what it really was. A specialized torture chamber.

It was a dumping ground for the Bratva and its problems, like me. The foot soldier who flew too close to the sun.

The orange flames race across the dry grass towards the forest on the outskirts.

I round a bend and it slips out of sight, only a pillar of smoke on the horizon. Soon that will fade into the mountains.

It’s only when I suck in air, gasping and winded, that I realize I’d stopped breathing. My lungs burn with relief but guilt lodges in my stomach like a stone.

Saving Arkady doesn’t stop my pain at the other person I’m leaving behind… We pass the house in the mountains and I want to go in, to explain, to apologize. Instead, I tighten my fists on the steering wheel and force myself to keep driving.

He doesn’t need me. He’ll be okay. There are people here to look after him. I can’t put his life in danger by taking him with me.

The only good option is to survive. And the only way to survive is to escape Siberia.

I push my foot harder on the gas pedal until we’re going so fast I can almost forget about the past ten years.

It’s for the best to leave the past right here — I’ve never been able to protect the people I love, and now would be a hell of a time to start trying.