Chapter 7 Alexsei
ALEXSEI
Raisa left the room with me. She was shaken, distraught with how wildly Kalina had reacted when she woke up.
Wrapping my arm around her shoulders, I steered her down the hall. In my free hand, I checked my phone for a reply from Ivan.
Alexsei: Get here NOW
Alexsei: Raisa needs you.
That message alone would always have him come running. But knowing that he was in a meeting with Emil and a couple of supervisors near Brooklyn, I doubted he’d have reception in the specific warehouse he was at.
He’d been worried about his wife being stressed about Kalina being missing.
Now, though, she was enduring a worse fate of more stress and anxiety. It couldn’t have been easy for her to witness her cousin lashing out like that.
“It’s expected that she’d be scared,” I said as gently as I could.
She heaved in a deep sigh, walking further with me since Kalina had fallen back asleep. Due to how severely she’d panicked, though, I asked for the nurse to monitor her with a guard as backup in the room. No one needed to be injured.
“Is it?” Raisa glanced up at me. “What kind of life was she stuck in to be that scared?”
I shrugged as a way to hedge telling her what I really thought. Simon and I were still piecing together what we could about where she might have been.
“Never mind. Stupid question.” She shook her head. “With all those bruises, she was clearly beaten and suffering for a long time.”
I cleared my throat, knowing it would be futile to keep anything from her. Because our gaits couldn’t match, I released my arm from around her. She’d have Ivan to lean on soon enough. The second he saw my texts, he’d come.
“Well, the X-rays showed previously broken bones.”
She nodded.
That was also how we’d been able to determine her identity. The doctor who’d come on the house call for Sadie had suggested running a check with dental records. With no identity on Kalina and with her face so bruised, we guessed that we’d need to wait for her to wake up and tell us who she was.
Which sure as hell didn’t happen.
She had only woken up today, two days after I’d found her. And the state of utter panic that shone from her scared eyes told me that she wouldn’t be open to speaking at all.
“She was terrified, Alexsei.” Raisa furrowed her brow. “Like a scared animal. She looked at me like she expected me to hurt her or something.”
“Maybe with time, she’ll open up and tell us more.”
She scoffed. “My husband can get it right out of his head that he can interrogate her.”
Ivan did say that he wanted to question her. That was his job. He negotiated. He arranged deals. He also got prisoners to fess up.
Kalina wasn’t a prisoner.
She was… a refugee.
A victim I’d managed to save from freezing to death at just the last minute.
The doctor confirmed that she wouldn’t have lasted longer. It was a miracle that she hadn’t gotten frostbite from whatever led her to end up on that bench. Simon was tracking through surveillance footage for what could’ve led to her getting to that bench.
Dehydrated. Malnourished. Beaten.
And so damn scared.
Raisa noticed how her cousin had viewed her as a threat, but I witnessed the pure shock that led to her defense mechanism of shutting down.
She’d clearly experienced trauma.
But what?
“I don’t think I can be mad at you for not telling me at first,” Raisa admitted. She stopped at the end of the hallway. Ivan was here, just now entering through the front and hurrying toward us.
“I didn’t want you to be shocked,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to keep you from her. But when I brought her here, I didn’t even know if it was her.”
She nodded sadly as Ivan joined us.
“What happened? What’s wrong?” He peered at Raisa, then glanced at me.
“Let’s go in the lounge and talk before the boys are home,” I said. Luka had gone with Emil to pick them up today.
Together, Raisa and I told Ivan about the chaotic moment Kalina had woken up. The room was under surveillance, too, so he could watch it all. The others could too. Gabriella found us and joined us mid-conversation, so we caught her up too.
About how terrified Kalina was.
How she fought to break free.
None of us knew what to do about her, but from the gauntness of her face and the weakness of her body, it was clear that she needed to rest. To recharge. That IV was to help bring her further from the brink of starvation and to hydrate her.
Luka and Emil joined us with the boys. One look at us had Gabriella and Sadie suggesting they keep Misha, Lev, and Andre busy in the kitchen. Allan could supervise the baby monitors while the girls napped.
“Simon forwarded news,” Luka said.
I frowned, glancing down at my phone. Sure enough, notification showed that Simon had reached out to me in the last hour. I’d been too busy discussing Kalina waking up to pay attention.
“What is it?” I asked. Luka would know it all in the end, anyway. He supervised all that happened in his family.
“It appears that she was expected to be sold to the Riveras.” His face turned stony. “As a bride.”
“Those fucking Italians,” Emil said, shaking his head. “We kill them off and they keep popping back up.”
“The Riveras?” I asked, needing to know what we were dealing with. I thought I’d be retrieving Kalina because Raisa wanted her found and Luka wished her to have her connection with her family. But I didn’t want to embark on more trouble with the Italian outfit who had been our enemies for so long.
“He’s looking into it,” Luka replied.
Emil nodded. “Give him an hour or two. He’ll have all the information there is to find.”
“It could be just a rumor,” Ivan said. “Which is why it’d be nice to ask her about what her brother had planned.”
Raisa shook her head, seated next to him. “No, Ivan. She was…” She glanced at me as if needing my help to describe it.
“Mute,” I said. “Locked in her mind. Scared and unable to even speak.”
“Yeah. That,” Raisa said. “She’s not in any state to be questioned.”
“Give it time,” Luka advised, standing. “Give it time. Maybe if she isn’t forthcoming with intel about what Marco Rivera’s son is plotting, we could use her as bait to see what their reaction is and—”
“No.” Ivan scowled. “No. Raisa wanted her to be found to make sure she was safe and well. Not to use her.”
Luka held his hand up in a truce-like yet dismissive manner.
“It was just a thought. Nothing can be done now but to give her a chance to recover. Maybe with more rest, she will be willing to talk.” He sighed and gave Raisa a sympathetic frown.
“Maybe then, she’ll be more willing to reconnect—so long as she proves she’s not a threat to any of us while she’s here. ”
She nodded.
I did too.
It was a risk to bring an unknown like Kalina here. If she would induce more violence, then she should be moved to another location.
Deep down, I knew that she couldn’t be a spy, not a tool or asset who’d harm us.
No one was that good of an actor. The fear that shone from her light-blue eyes was real. Stark. And serious.
Once the others all left the lounge, though, I used my phone to get onto the security app that would enable me to view the footage in her room. I didn’t need to rehash the scene of her waking up and lashing out. Nor of my sedating her to calm her down for our safety and her own.
I was among the few who had unfettered access to the footage like this, in charge of security at large.
As I sat there for a while longer, I watched her sleep. Not for the sake of checking on the security of her room, but to know she was peaceful. At least I hoped she was.
Whatever nightmares plague you, trust us—trust me—to help.
She was but a slim figure on the bed, asleep and unmoving.
Yet, as I peered at her and familiarized myself with the features of her face, I saw past the bruises.
I tried hard to consider her not as a wounded, feral animal who had been unable to snap out of the horrors in her mind when she woke, but as a woman who needed help. Who was desperate for it.
I will protect you, Kalina.
Luka had given his approval to rescue and retrieve her.
His standing orders were to give her time so she could rest, and then we would reassess how to approach her.
Even if he hadn’t told us to do that, I was already committed.
One look into her scared eyes was all it took for me to want to give her a sacred vow.
Of protection.
Security.
And I refused to fail her.