3. Viktor
VIKTOR
Idove at her, snapping my arm out to wrap it around her waist.
I didn’t have all night for this shit.
If she continued alternating this walk and run down the alley, she’d eventually reach an intersection she could try to run down and escape me. Capturing her where someone could see would complicate matters when I intended to keep this as simple as possible.
She had to have heard me rushing after her, because she started to run.
Panicking.
Terrified.
She’d held out long enough, but now that I’d lunged for her and had her in my arms, I wasn’t letting her go.
It was over.
No matter how hard she resisted.
“Let me go! Let me—”
I slapped my hand over her mouth as she bucked to get away.
We crashed together, and I rolled to avoid crashing into the corner of some busted-up rebar and concrete blocks piled together.
Landing on my side, I took the brunt of the drop.
But she didn’t sink down on me and weigh me into a bad position.
She was too light, nimble and slender and athletic with the press of her faint muscles in her legs and arms. But she wasn’t small. Shorter than me and manageable from the difference in size alone, she wriggled and fought.
My arm flew back with the hard landing, and without my hand over her mouth, she prepared to scream for help. Her chest rose, pushing her huge tits against my forearm. That deep inhale was her preliminary step to letting a scream loose.
“Shut up.” I jammed my hand back over her mouth, but this time, instead of letting my palm close over her face, I rotated my wrist to force my hand in like a gag. So she couldn’t scream or bite me.
Because she would. She had that fighting spirit, the will to go down swinging and protesting until her last breath.
Her muffled pleas and curses and whatever else she might have been trying to say fell on my deaf ears. She couldn’t alert anyone to the fact that I’d caught her. I wasn’t in the mood to hear her excuses or tolerate her talking back.
I held her tight despite her valiant efforts to break free. She wasn’t just fidgeting and struggling for the sake of not surrendering. I felt the push of her against me, the trembling desperation like a caged, rabid animal as she tried to jab her elbows and flip me to get free.
She knew.
She knew how to do this, like she’d been taught the basics of combat and self-defense.
It was a trivial thing to notice, but since I’d just been involved in helping to teach Mila self-defense, I could tell the difference. This woman, this person who’d run from the scene when a shot had been made on my brother, had been trained before.
A cop?
I had to know. I had to get everything I could out of her to determine when she needed to die for her part in that failed hit. But not like this, with her fighting and not giving up at all.
Moving my hands up toward her neck, aiming for the pressure point that would knock her out, I strained to keep her close and swiftly apply accurate pressure to stun her.
Her skin was soft, too delicate for her to have lived a hard life. But I ignored the smooth, satiny feel to knock her out.
She gave way, slumping as she went unconscious, and I heaved out a deep breath as her head rolled against me.
Auburn hair made a halo on my chest, but I didn’t have long to rely on my mechanism of a sedative.
I picked her off me as I sat up, and with her limp over my arms, I furrowed my brow and got my first look at her.
What the fuck?
I didn’t know what to expect, but this twinge of desire that shot through me was bullshit. She was connected to an attempt on my brother’s life. I couldn’t be…
I grunted as I stood with her in my arms.
I wasn’t attracted to her. Objectively, I had to admit she was stunning. High cheekbones, almost porcelain skin. Freckles smattered over her nose and cheeks. Her long lashes so dark and thick, but that hair… She stood out, those almost fiery flames of pure glossy silk draping over my arm.
She was out, but I couldn’t know for how long.
In this professional look, a short-sleeved white blouse, thin jacket, and slacks, she looked like she’d come out of an office.
I jostled her, ready to carry her away, and that was when I felt the bulge.
She was armed, a standard-issue firearm in a holster under the fabric of her jacket.
A cop?
I carried her, scowling down at her.
No.
She looked too formal for a cop or detective.
I had no proof yet, but as I carried her toward where a car could come to get me, I had a hunch my deductive reasoning was accurate.
A federal agent. An operative to kill Adrik.
That slowly simmering anger coiled inside me.
A fucking agent.
We knew that Gregori was expanding his angle of attack on us.
Thanks to the documents and correspondence trails that Mila had grabbed when she and Lev were recently undercover, we knew that federal agents were being paid off to target us.
Already, we were facing more heat in the form of legal issues and minor arrests of our drug dealers and prostitutes.
Trouble was brewing, all thanks to Gregori.
I had this redhead now, though, and I would get whatever I could out of her.
Shifting her to drape over my shoulder, I carried her fireman style to get my phone. A quick text clued in the closest Bratva soldier Maksim had sent to be ready to get me, and I headed in the direction of the car.
He was idling nearby. As soon as I approached, I lowered her into the backseat and got in after her.
“You got anything?” I asked him.
He nodded at the bag of supplies on the floor.
I didn’t wait to give her a syringe of a sedative. Tying her hands would be smart, too, but with how out of it she was, they weren’t necessary.
“Take her to my place.” I had a holding cell that would do.
Lev’s property had the dungeons, but I wasn’t sure she needed to be questioned by my cousins.
Lev and Alexei were enforcers for the family, but I could take on this redhead.
Markus and Rueben, the dungeon wards, would probably be too rough to get anything from her.
I watched her sleep, already familiar with this annoying connection we’d forged.
As predator and prey.
As object and seeker.
“Is Adrik okay?” I asked, reaching for anything that might be in the woman’s pockets.
“He is,” the driver confirmed.
The soldier riding shotgun added, “A crew is searching the area for evidence the sniper might have left behind.”
I scoffed. “It wasn’t her.” I took her wallet out. “I saw her fleeing the scene where the meeting was supposed to have taken place.”
She was a person of interest, for sure.
I opened her wallet.
I knew it.
I narrowed my eyes at her official ID.
Agent Wren Green.
I glanced at her.
“A Fed, huh?”
It wouldn’t change my plans. The driver brought me to my house, only a few miles from the Volkov mansion Adrik lived in with Elena and Luka, as well as our father.
I carried Wren inside and left her in a holding cell.
No furniture was in here but a chair. She wouldn’t stay upright in it, though. I laid her on the floor and backed out.
With her locked in, I strode through the basement floor until I reached the stairs to head up. “Paul?”
I never knew what to call him. Butler was too elegant of a title. Soldier was outdated since he was older than dirt. Assistant seemed like a mockery.
He did whatever I asked as the head of security at my property.
I’d spotted him around earlier.
He approached, not speaking up because he didn’t “do small talk.”
“Run a scan on my newest ‘guest’.” I handed him the ID I’d taken from Wren’s wallet.
He took the card and arched a brow. “An agent?”
I nodded, backpedaling. “Let me know what you find. I’m going to check in with my brother.”
She would be out for at least an hour, and when she woke up, I’d give her exactly one minute to explain her part in this assassination attempt on my brother.
I drove to his place and instantly felt bad.
Elena was crying, her eyes red and puffy.
She sat with Carina, who comforted her as Adrik paced with Luka in his arms.
He shot me a look that he was at his wit’s end.
“He’s fine,” I told Elena, already clued in to how worked up she was.
“But he almost couldn’t have been fine,” she protested.
Carina hugged her and continued to console her.
“What’d you find?” Adrik asked as Luka fussed.
“An agent. She ran from the scene and I followed her.” Maksim entered the room just as I explained. “I’ve got her in my holding cell.”
Luka looked more agitated, and even though I didn’t know what I was doing, I gestured for me to try to hold him. He gave me the baby, and I let him kind of swing, like he was a football on my arm rather than a bundle to hug.
It worked.
Adrik furrowed his brow as he watched. “He never likes it when I do that.”
I shrugged. “Call me the baby whisperer,” I mocked.
“An agent?” Maksim asked.
I nodded. “Paul’s running a scan on her now. She’s out for about another forty-five minutes.”
“Why didn’t you take her to the, uh, accommodations at Lev’s?” he asked, shooting a side-eye to Elena. She’d come to live with Adrik as an outsider, not someone who’d been born and raised in our world of organized crime. She never wanted to know the “details” and we all tried to humor her.
“Because I can question her.” I shrugged again.
“It’s got to be Gregori,” Maksim mused angrily. “He had to have ordered the damn hit on him.”
“I’m not so sure. She was there, but she wasn’t in the right position to have pulled the trigger.”
They could postulate all they wanted one way or another, but we wouldn’t be able to puzzle anything out until we had answers to plug in where they belonged.
“She’s got to be involved.” Adrik scowled at me.
“Obviously,” I replied.
I’d never been a big believer in coincidences. She was an agent near a private meeting among the elite of crime bosses and their associates. Then she ran when a sniper took a shot. There was no chance of this being an epic coincidence.
Yet, in the meantime, while I waited for her to wake up and talk, I was confident I could get answers from her.
“Even if she’s not directly tied to anything Gregori wants,” I said, convinced that Wren looked too new and young of an agent to have been bought or bribed by him, “she should have some intel to share with us.”
Maksim scoffed. “Not tied to Gregori? He’s been the sum of all the bullshit we’ve been dealing with for a year now.”
“She’ll just have to explain what she was there for, and then we can go from there.” I raised my brows, waiting to see if they’d insist on another course of action. Adrik was the leader. Maksim often acted as his unofficial second-in-command, the problem solver we all relied on.
But I had a hunch that there might be more to this agent being near that assassination attempt than what we might assume.
You’re going to tell me everything, Red.
I ignored the slight thrill of a challenge that I anticipated to make that happen.