Chapter 29 Laszlo
Laszlo
Ipull out of her slowly, watching her face, and she exhales. I stash my dick while she slides off the table and bends to retrieve her knickers and leggings from the floor with a complete lack of embarrassment that I find deeply attractive.
I watch her dress. She is unhurried. Unbothered by the fact that two of my men definitely heard that.
The dining room now looks like a crime scene of scattered crockery and upended cutlery, her arse print on the polished wood and more than a bit of cum smearing the surface.
We are standing in a house with reinforced windows and a patrol on the perimeter because someone tried to shoot her head off last night.
She is simply here. Getting dressed.
I drag a hand down my face and feel the stubble rasp against my palm. I need to sleep. I know I need to sleep. Every cell in my body is running on rage and adrenaline and the specific terror of watching a bullet slam into the headboard next to my wife’s head.
Galina turns to me when a loud banging and clattering occurs from upstairs.
“Bulletproof windows,” I say shortly.
She purses her lips and nods as someone raps loudly on the door.
“Yeah?” I call out.
“Is it safe to come in?” Leonid calls out in that clipped, almost posh tone of his.
“Yeah,” I call back with a smirk. “He is going to lose his shit when he sees the floor,” I add to Galina.
“The new mattress is here, sir…” Leonid trails off as he sees the mess, his expression prim and proper.
“Has it been scanned for explosives and the delivery men searched for weapons?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Keep Grisha and Yuri on them, every single move clocked.”
“Already in motion.”
“Good,” I say, and set my chair upright that was knocked over at some point during the impromptu sex. Leonid backs out and closes the door quietly.
“Another mattress,” Galina murmurs.
“As many as it takes.”
“You need to sleep. What do I have to do to make sure you get some rest?”
I consider that for all of two seconds. “Stay where I put you.”
“And where is that?”
“Next to me in our bed, once the workmen are done.”
She nods slowly.
I narrow my eyes at her. “Is that okay? Do you not want to go back in there?”
She takes a moment to answer, which is answer enough.
“It’s our room,” she says finally. “I’m not going to let a bullet hole in the headboard chase me out of it.”
“No,” I say. “You’re not.”
Her mouth curves at that. Small, but real. “How long?”
I shrug. “Could be hours yet.”
“So, what now?”
“Now, you go about your day, and I have to get back to work.”
“Las…” She trails off with a sigh. She knows she can’t move me on this.
“Good,” I say. “So, we agree.”
She gives me a look that says we agree on nothing, and she is simply choosing her battles, which is close enough.
She disappears as I start to clear up the mess from the floor, and she reappears moments later with a packet of anti-bac kitchen wipes, polish wipes and a tea towel.
I glance at them with a raised eyebrow.
“What?” she demands. “It’s all I could find.”
I chuckle as she starts wiping the table, then gives it a thorough polish, while I dab up the coffee with the tea towel. “Leonid is going to freak that the carpet smells like coffee.”
“I’m sure he has a carpet cleaner around here somewhere.”
“Oh, he does. Industrial scale. Doesn’t change the fact that he has to get it out to clean up coffee.”
“Why? What does he usually clean up?”
I give her a look that makes her swallow.
“Oh.”
After we have done our best, I pull the chair out properly and sit, and she takes the seat next to me with the particular ease of a woman who has decided the dining room is as good a place as any to be, bullet-ridden headboard or not.
Leonid reappears with fresh coffee and sets them down without comment, sweeps a pointed gaze across the floor, and leaves again in silence. The restraint it costs him is almost impressive.
Galina wraps both hands around her cup. “You’re not sending me off to go sew something, so you might as well tell me what you’re actually working on.”
“Petyr’s contact. The shooter.”
“And?”
“Dmitri pulled footage from three cameras on the street and the one on the corner of the mews. We have a partial plate and a build. He’s running it now.”
“How partial?”
“Enough.”
She considers that. “And when you find him?”
“Do you want details or just to know he is dead but just doesn’t know it yet?”
“Just the second one,” she says.
“Good.” I pull my phone back towards me and glance at the screen.
Dmitri has sent through three still frames from the corner camera.
Grainy, but workable. A man in dark clothing, face angled down, which tells me he knew the camera was there and knew enough to keep his chin tucked.
Professional. Not some hired thug, Petyr scraped off the street.
This was a snap decision executed properly. Except it wasn’t followed through. He missed. Twice. Men like him don’t miss, not on purpose. Was it a warning shot? An excuse to not get involved? Wind? Angle?
“You’ve got that face again?”
“What face?”
“The one where you look like you’ve figured something out, only to have it discredited.”
“That could be accurate.”
She watches me stare at the frames on my phone for another second before I set it face down on the table.
“He missed twice,” I say.
“He did. Lucky for me.”
I give her a scathing glare. “Men like that don’t miss.”
Galina is quiet for a moment, both hands still around her cup. “He’s either not as good as he looked on paper, or he didn’t want to finish the job.”
“Exactly.”
“Which means someone hired him to scare, not kill?”
I shake my head. “Or someone hired him to kill, and he decided against it. Those are two different problems.”
She sets her cup down. “Why would he decide against it?”
“Knowing I’m a Voronov, and he would be getting his arse handed to him in a paper bag before his windpipe was forcibly removed?”
“Lovely imagery,” she murmurs.
“Whoever the marksman was, he knew who he was aiming at and missed on purpose.”
“So that potentially means he won’t be back now that Petyr is dead.”
“Potentially. But I’m not risking your life on potentially. We proceed as if this is an active hit.”
She nods slowly. “Okay.”
I study her face for a moment, looking for the fear she is hiding behind practicality. It’s there. Banked down, kept in check, but there. The set of her jaw and the way she keeps her hands very still around the cup are tells I’m already learning to read.
I don’t call her on it. She wouldn’t thank me for it.
My phone buzzes. Dmitri.
I pick it up and read the message twice. Partial plate confirmed to a registered hire car, returned to a depot in Bermondsey at half four this morning. The driver gave a false name and paid cash. Depot camera footage is being pulled.
“Anything?” Galina asks.
“Hired car. Cash. False name.” I set the phone down again. “Professional enough to cover the obvious tracks, sloppy enough to use a depot with cameras. This is more evidence stacking up that he failed on purpose.”
She sighs, then jumps again as the banging starts up.
My phone buzzes again.
Dmitri. Depot footage confirmed. The driver wore a cap and kept his face down. No usable image. But the car was returned clean, no prints, no equipment, nothing left behind. Which means he swept it before he handed it back. That is not a panicked man covering his tracks. That is routine.
I set the phone down.
“Well?” Galina asks.
“Depot footage is useless. He swept the car.” I lean back in my chair.
Galina is quiet for a moment. Not the thinking quiet. The processing quiet. The kind that means she is adding something up and not entirely happy with the sum.
“We have a professional who missed on purpose, swept the car, and left nothing behind,” she says.
“And he is not coming back.”
“You sound certain of that now. What happened to proceed as if it’s an active hit?”
“I am, and we do. But a man who makes a deliberate miss and then disappears cleanly is a man who has already decided this job is not worth what he was paid for it. He knows Petyr is dead. He knows the Voronov name is attached to this. He is gone.”
She absorbs that. “Then why are we still on full lockdown?”
“Because I could be wrong.”
Her mouth twitches. “That must have hurt to say.”
“You have no idea.”
She picks up her coffee again. I watch her drink it, and the normalcy of the gesture does something strange to me. My wife is sitting across a table from me in a cream jumper, drinking coffee, while my men fit bulletproof glass upstairs, and Dmitri chases a ghost through Bermondsey camera footage.
Normal Bratva shit.
“So what do we do today?” she asks. “Genuinely. Not the security answer. The actual answer.”
I think about that for a second. “We wait for the glass to be fitted. We sleep. We don’t go near uncovered windows.”
“Riveting.”
I pick up my phone again and fire a message back to Dmitri, asking him to cross-reference the hire depot with any known contractors in the south London circuit. Long shot, but it costs nothing to ask. “Give it forty-eight hours. If nothing moves, I’ll reassess the lockdown.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Forty-eight hours.”
“Forty-eight hours.”
“Or we could step outside and see if he shoots again.”
I glare at her. “Are you fucking joking?”
“Nope. I’m not sitting around here in lockdown waiting for something that might never happen. We go out to dinner or something.”
“You have got to be the most frustrating woman on the planet, you know that?”
“Maybe. But I am not good with waiting around, Laszlo. I’ll wear a bulletproof vest—”
“On your head?”
She glares at me. “Bulletproof hat, then. And we go out. If the shooter is watching, waiting, he will make a move. If not, then maybe this isn’t as bad as we first thought.”
“You are willing to risk your life and my sanity on drawing out this fucker?”
“Or not.”
“Galina—”
“She’s right, sir,” Grisha says, looming in the doorway. “You know you would do this yourself.”
I look up at him slowly, promising him a world of pain with just my gaze. He doesn’t back down. “My wife’s life is not a gamble.”
“Neither is it a gamble to sit in a fortified house waiting for him to grow a pair and try again,” Grisha says, and I genuinely consider shooting him where he stands.
He knows it, too. He doesn’t move.
Galina looks between us with the expression of a woman who has just been handed an unexpected ally and is deciding whether to use him or feel sorry for him.
“Get out,” I say to Grisha.
He moves back to just outside the doorway and stops, but I let it go because he is not wrong, and I hate him for it.
I drag my hands through my hair and stare at the table.
Galina says nothing. She learned that from her father. I recognise it because Viktor does the exact same thing. Baron taught me the same move. That could, unfortunately, force us to sit here for the rest of the day.
A man who missed on purpose, swept his car clean, and handed it back at half four in the morning is not a man lying in wait somewhere with a rifle, a packed lunch, and a pee bottle.
“Fine, but if you die, I will bring you back to life to spank you so hard, you feel it for the rest of your afterlife.”
“Noted,” she drawls, shooting a look at Grisha, which conveys a world of thanks, and it makes me growl possessively.
She shouldn’t need my man to stand up for her.
I should be doing that. But I’m too close to see it.
If it were me, I’d be out there now, walking around, taunting this fucker to have another go.
But her… fuck. The thought of losing her, especially in that way, does something to my soul that I don’t appreciate.
She lets out a slow breath and looks at her cup, and I watch the small war play out across her face. Not fear. Not relief. Something more complicated than either.
“Give me two hours,” I say. “Glass is being fitted. I need to shower, sleep for an hour, and I want Dmitri’s report before we go anywhere.”
She nods, knowing not to push me.
I stand, and she looks up at me with those green eyes that have been the single most inconvenient development of the last week of my life.
“Come upstairs,” I say.
She stands without argument, which tells me she is more tired than she is letting on. She follows me out of the dining room and past Grisha, who has the good sense to look at the wall as we pass him.
Upstairs, the workmen are finishing up. The new glass is in. The frame has been sealed. One of them is gathering tools while the other runs a cloth across the sill, and both of them notice me in the doorway and move faster without being told to.
Leonid appears behind me. “The mattress is fitted. The bedding is fresh.”
“Thank you, Leonid,” Galina says beside me, and the warmth in it makes the older man’s expression soften by precisely one degree before he reassembles himself and retreats.
The workmen file out past us with their tools and their discretion, and then it is just the two of us standing near the doorway of our bedroom.
The new glass is clean and whole. The headboard still has the split in it, the raw wood showing through the dark lacquer where the bullet buried itself.
The new mattress is dressed in fresh white linen, tight and smooth, and the room smells of nothing except clean fabric and the faint trace of the window sealant already drying.
Galina walks in ahead of me and stands at the foot of the bed for a second, looking at the headboard. Her jaw is set.
“The new bed should be here in a few days.”
“Don’t,” she says, shaking her head. “Leave it.”
I look at her when she faces me.
“I meant what I said downstairs,” she says. “I’m not letting a bullet hole chase me out of my own bedroom.”
I study her face. The set of it. The particular kind of stubbornness that drives me crazy.
“Good,” I say.
She pulls back the duvet, climbing in, still in the cream jumper and leggings, and I don’t tell her to change because she is already half gone, her eyes heavy the second her head finds the pillow.
After closing the curtains tightly, I toe off my boots and strip off my shirt and pants, dropping them on the chair.
I keep the gun on the nightstand. I keep my phone beside it.
Old habits. I can’t sleep without an exit mapped and a weapon in reach, and I stopped apologising for that a long time ago.
I climb in beside her.
She doesn’t move, but I feel the small shift in her breathing that means she knows I’m there. Her hand finds mine under the duvet, fingers loose, not gripping. Just contact. Just the warmth of it.
I stare at the ceiling, then close my eyes, letting exhaustion drag me under.