3. Kirill
Kirill
Scottsdale, Arizona is too hot, too dry, too clean for the kind of work I do. Chicago’s cold, raw temperatures are perfect for the ice in my veins.
My grandfather sat me on his knee and told me Russians are part polar bears. That was a fucking joke for a seven-year-old, but the way this desert air feels wrong in my lungs, I can be convinced I have polar bear DNA somewhere in my body.
I’m fucking melting in this heat. And getting angrier by the second.
I’ve been livid for two weeks since I got that lawyer to talk. The trail leading us here to Arizona and to a Jessica Parker didn’t take five years to uncover, but we still chased more ghosts to get here.
“Marlowe Rehab,” I mutter to myself, leaning against the rental SUV.
The signage is almost intentionally vague. No hint of the type of illnesses or damage they treat.
Heat shimmers above the pavement. I’m not immune to the beauty here. If this were a photo of mountains with pale gold sunlight pouring over the canyons, I’d enjoy it. All I see is how easy it is for a person to disappear here. Simply fade away and become someone else.
Jessica Parker.
The name sits on my tongue like a bitter pill I refuse to swallow.
Drago strides away from the administrative office, looking satisfied. He got someone to talk, as usual. It’s what he’s good at. He’s been at my side for years. His quiet violence has made him indispensable to me long before he married my sister and became family.
“It’s confirmed,” he says, standing at my shoulder with his familiar steadiness. “Marlowe Corp LLC has a resident by the name Jessica Parker that matches Sandrine’s description. But she’s only been here for the last three months.”
Three months.
This resort carved into the desert with its low buildings, wide paths lined with lush greenery, and water features is where Sandrine has been.
My jaw tightens until it aches.
“Residences are in those buildings. Rehab wing is to the left,” Drago continues, nodding subtly toward a structure set slightly apart. “Spa complex on the right.”
“Spa,” I mutter to myself.
I push away from the car and stride forward, my shoes striking the pavement in a rhythm that matches the pulse building at the base of my skull. My bratoks are already in place. I brought my whole fucking force to bring the runaway queen home to Iron Keep, the Volkov family mansion.
Drago and I cut across a stretch of sunlit stone toward the spa building. As we near it, my fingers flex, remembering the feel of Sandrine’s wrist beneath them, the way she used to let me be who I needed to be with her in bed. Like no other woman had.
Five years.
All that time apart and she’s finally somewhere close, breathing the same desert air as me. Only she’s using a different name.
Drago slows just enough to let me take the lead. I angle toward a vantage point that gives us a clear line of sight into a courtyard without exposing us.
A set of glass doors for the spa ahead slides open with a whoosh, and then she steps through them.
She’s right fucking there, and my world narrows to her slender frame. She’s not a memory. This is not a hallucination. And I’m not dreaming. I’m gawking at the physical body of my wife.
My heart starts to pound so fucking hard I might collapse. Everything around me has been stripped away, and I’m left with only this single point of focus.
Sandrine.
She’s smaller than I remember. Or maybe my angry memory built her up to be too large and untouchable. A monster that could never quite be real again. Her hair falls differently now. It’s shorter. She said she didn’t like how she looked with short hair.
Yet she cut it to look different and lived with a hairstyle she hates to get away from me.
From…
I can’t even say it. It will make me throw up.
Long hair or short, that’s my Sandrine. I see it so clearly now.
I know the line of her neck, the tilt of her head as she speaks, the way her hand lifts absently to brush a strand of loose hair behind her ear.
That small, unconscious gesture hits me harder than anything else, because it’s the same, exactly the same as I remember.
She’s unchanged by time or distance or whatever lies she has wrapped herself in.
I fucking found you.
The impending confrontation weighs heavy on my heart.
My chest tightens and twists so sharp, so violent, it leaves me breathless.
I never thought she was dead. I would have felt it.
And Ares Zervas confirmed she was alive by telling me he had her, but that I would never see her again.
Being married to Sandrine’s sister is a mess I’m sure he didn’t know he was stepping into.
My original plan blew up spectacularly in my face. Lourdes’s first husband was supposed to give her to me. But he ended up dead. Next, Lourdes married Ares fucking Zervas.
I’ll deal with him next. The only question is: do I wait for my next trip to Winterhall, my gambling club in Manhattan, or do I just drop a fucking bomb on Zervas’s Wall Street office tower?
Something fun to plan later.
“Who is that woman beside her?” I ask Drago, pointing to a brunette walking with Sandrine.
He snaps a photo. “Sending to the team for facial recognition.”
The woman with dark hair steps close enough to Sandrine for their arms to brush. They carry a familiarity and a look of comfort with each other. The brunette says something to Sandrine, and my wife tilts her head to listen, and then she smiles.
She smiles.
But it’s not the wide, reckless curve I remember when she’d see me. I worked hard to make sure everyone in the Midwest was afraid of me. Everyone except Sandrine.
That smile, that warmth I can feel from fucking over here should not exist in a woman who disappeared from me without a word.
“Who is that other woman?” I scrape out, my voice low and wrecked.
“Working on it,” Drago replies, talking on his phone.
The women move further along the path, the sunlight catching in Sandrine’s bright blonde hair. My chest goes tight watching the familiar rhythm to her steps. Then she hesitates. She’s holding on to the brunette’s arm, carefully testing the ground beneath her feet before committing to it.
It’s subtle. Anyone else would miss it. I don’t. She’s having trouble walking.
Marlowe Rehab… Did she get physically hurt?
A fury builds behind my eyes when a man steps into their path. He acts casually, as if he knows them. Both or just Sandrine? Has she known another man all this time?
Jesus fucking Christ, I didn’t even consider that. I am ready to commit mass murder.
I took Sandrine’s virginity. And she might as well have taken mine. Before her, I was only interested in violence and power and the occasional blow job in my club. I had a quick fling with Tamara, but that was a mistake.
Then I met Sandrine, and I knew. I knew the moment I saw her. She was it for me.
The man in the distance says something, and Sandrine turns toward him, giving him her full attention. Her body opens in a way that sends a sharp, immediate spike of heat through my veins when she answers him.
She’s speaking to another man.
I see it in the movement of her lips, in the slight lift of her brows, and then, he makes her laugh. It’s soft and brief. But it’s enough to snap every nerve in my body.
Oh, this motherfucker is going to die.
My hand curls into a fist so hard my knuckles ache. For a second, I consider just crossing the courtyard and gunning him down right here in broad daylight. The vision of him dead is brutally satisfying.
“I hear your molars grinding. You want that man gone, don’t you?” Drago asks, as if he can read my violent mind.
“Yes, but not yet.” I struggle to keep calm.
Sandrine, the brunette, and the dead man move toward an outdoor seating area beside an ice cream parlor.
I follow at a distance and stare at the absurd normalcy of Sandrine stepping up to the counter.
She points to something on the menu. The server says something back because Sandrine nods that big grin of hers, and I’m ready to crumble to my knees.
The server hands over cups of overflowing ice cream topped with sprinkles. That’s what made her giddy. Red sprinkles. She loves them. I used to drive for hours looking for them when she was…
That memory makes me sick.
The trio take their cups and move to a set of tables beneath wide umbrellas that cast patches of shade across the bricks.
Sandrine and the brunette sit on one side, and the man sits on the other.
I see the last of her hesitation burn away.
Sandrine isn’t struggling. She isn’t searching. She isn’t trying to come back.
She’s comfortable here.
Without me.
Without us.
She’s happy enough to laugh with another man in the sun while I spent five years tearing cities apart looking for her.
“Kirill.” Drago looks up from his phone. “The rehab where this Jessica is registered treats patients for mental disabilities.”
Marlowe Rehab. The sign catches my attention again.
For a fraction of a second, empathy threatens to soften me. To listen. To understand. To find out what happened to her.
Fuck that.
This is no time to be soft. Regardless of why she ended up here, she left me five years ago.
But why did she leave?
Was she struggling mentally even back then? Suffering in ways she didn’t trust me to handle?
Or does she know I’m close? Did the sheer terror of what I would do if I found her make her snap and need psychiatric care?
“Even if she’s here for some kind of mental treatment or anxiety, she knew, Drago,” I say, my jaw aching. “She knew where I was. All this time.”
The Bratva doesn’t hide.
Drago doesn’t answer, doesn’t guess at innocent reasons why Sandrine is in a mental facility. There’s no argument to make, even as I grasp for a reason to forgive what she did. The harsh reality locks into place with a clean, brutal finality.
Her father hid her, and she let him. He gave her a new name, and she took it. She used it, and she stayed away.
On purpose.
I exhale slowly, the air tasting faintly of the sugar from the ice cream, mixed with the desert heat.
My stomach turns when I look at her again.
I no longer see the girl with paint in her wild hair.
The girl who kissed me with a hot mouth, touched me with color-stained fingers, and had eyes that sparkled only for me.
Now, I see a woman who chose to erase me from her life. The realization settles into my bones. My unyielding calm is melting into a dangerous rage.
Drago puts a hand on my shoulder. “I can’t identify that other woman. There’s some kind of block. She could be law enforcement. Or a witness.”
My gaze stays on Sandrine, on the way she lifts the spoon to her lips, tasting something sweet as if my stomach hasn’t burned missing her taste for five years.
“It’s no longer important who the brunette is. And I’m done watching,” I mutter, turning away before she can look up.
Before there’s any chance that our eyes might meet across the distance and unravel me even further. Or give her a head start to run in the other direction.
“You had your chance, Mrs. Volkov,” I whisper, the sentiment cold, precise, and final. “In a few seconds, I will remind you exactly who you belong to.”