32. Leo
LEO
I never should have agreed to let Peyton stay home. Once again, my intuition pecked at me through the whole day of meetings. We should be there with her. She needed us.
But she’d asked for space, and we’d promised to give her what she needed.
Allowing her freedom, despite the risks, was essential, especially when I felt her slipping away inch by inch. Peyton changed after the kidnapping.
She looked at us differently. We’d all expected it, and we agreed that if we pushed her too hard, we’d lose her for good.
So we went to work. We didn’t call her every hour like Misha wanted.
But when we arrived at the penthouse and she wasn’t there…
“I knew something was wrong.” I threw my jacket across the back of the couch. “She said she’d meet us at work.”
“Got a ping on her car.” Viktor didn’t even flinch when I spun his direction. His eyebrows went up, and he glared right back. “Don’t even think about giving me that fucking look. I put a tracker on her car months ago.” He showed me the phone screen. “It says she’s at the mall, like she said.”
“Let’s go meet her.” Misha strode toward the door. “She can yell at us if she wants. Fuck. I wish she’d yell at us. Anything is better than the hurt way she looks at me.” He left the penthouse without waiting on any of us.
Viktor and I shared a look and followed.
Minutes later, we followed Viktor’s tracking device to a side parking lot.
My stomach dropped at the sight spread out in front of me. “Fuck.”
Misha’s wounded sound of pain ricocheted off the asphalt. “No.” He grabbed the open car door, his leather loafers sticking to the blood beneath him. “No.”
Viktor swayed on his feet, his face ashen. “Misha. Could she have survived?”
Misha’s head swayed from side to side. “Too much blood.” His knuckles whitened on the door. “This is a fatal amount of blood loss.”
I wanted to argue, but we all knew Misha was right. No one could survive losing this much blood. “Where is she?” I turned a slow circle.
“He would have taken her.” Misha’s head bowed, his breaths sawing in and out with enough force to make his whole body slump forward.
Fuck. I ran a hand through my hair and around to the back of my neck. Anton had come for her again, and this time, he hadn’t left us anything. Hadn’t given us a chance to save her.
He’d decided to punish our weakness by killing her.
Fine. He thought he could tear us down. We’d show him what happened when he fucked with the Petrov empire.
“Misha.” I called his name with a crack in my voice. When he lifted his head, his eyes red and the darkness swallowing them whole, I gave him the only comfort I could. “Kill them all.”
He slammed the door so hard, the car rocked to the side. “Yes, sir.”
It took us less than an hour to storm Anton’s empire. He never saw us coming, and by the time he did, it was too late.
Two hours of bloodshed later, we found ourselves in Anton’s office. Blood soaked through my clothes, making my skin itch. The smells of gunpowder and blood flooded my nostrils.
Misha rushed the room, catching up to Anton and smashing a fist into his jaw.
Anton toppled, only for Misha to catch him with an arm around his neck. He kicked Anton’s legs out from under him, putting him on his knees in front of me.
“You made a serious mistake.” I shoved the barrel of my Sig into his mouth. “You had everything. You could have let it go, but you decided you could not let us have this one thing.”
“What?” The word came out garbled around the gun, and I shoved it harder, cracking one of his teeth in the process.
“Don’t play dumb with me. It does not suit you.” My hand shook, my grip on the gun so tight I almost couldn’t stop myself from pulling the trigger and ending it all here and now. “You’re not worth the bullet.”
“I’d rather watch him burn alive.” Misha tightened his hold on Anton’s neck. “He deserves to suffer for taking Peyton from us.”
Anton’s eyes went wide. “No.”
I removed the gun from his mouth. “Yes. You brought this on yourself. All you had to do was let us keep her.”
“I did nothing to your little whore.” Anton tried to lunge at me.
Misha clapped a fist on top of Anton’s head. Between his forearm on Anton’s windpipe and the clout on the head, Anton fell silent.
Viktor moved around the room, and within minutes, smoke curled around his feet.
While Anton preferred to conduct business in his high rise, we’d made sure we caught up with him in his two-story building next to the warehouse where he’d held Peyton. My father would have been disappointed in me for giving in to such baseness as love.
To hell with him. Peyton had been the one good thing in all of our lives. Money and power were nothing compared to our feelings for her.
“Burn it all down.” I nodded at Misha, who bared his teeth in that savage smile I hadn’t seen since the day Peyton walked into our lives.
“You brought this on yourself.” I pointed from Anton to Misha. “You took our world. Now we take yours.”
I turned my back, giving Misha permission to do whatever he felt necessary to ensure Anton’s demise.
Fists on flesh sounded behind me, Anton’s cries starting out loud but quickly fading.
“Meet us downstairs.” I nodded at Viktor, who followed me to the lower level.
We lit fires as we walked. Misha would catch up. He knew what to do, and I trusted him not to give in and die alongside Anton.
The three of us met up in the parking lot outside the building. Our men surrounded it, watching every exit.
“No one leaves.” I gave the order with a pointed look. “No one puts out the flames.”
Viktor pressed a phone to his ear, my orders going straight through to the fire department and police under our payroll. This was my decision, and I would not have it contested or taken away.
We stood there until the building crumbled, leaving behind nothing but rubble.
I felt nothing since losing Peyton. Even revenge did not give me peace. It did nothing to ease the emptiness her death left behind.
As the building where Anton worked turned to nothing but embers, Viktor, Misha, and I walked away.
Misha didn’t speak.
Viktor glared at anyone who looked our way, which wasn’t unusual, but the ferocity in him doubled as the car doors closed around us.
Smoke and death rode shotgun, and in the days that followed, the feel of the Sig between my own teeth became a daily ritual. Living without Peyton was merely a ghost of an existence.
Misha retreated into himself alongside Viktor.
Nothing mattered anymore. Business continued, but only because we’d already built it to sustain itself.
Sitting on the edge of my bed every single night with Peyton’s presence lingering in every breath as I buried my head in one of the dresses I’d found in her closet, I finally faced the truth.
My truth.
I loved her. I’d fallen so deeply, completely in love with her. I never gave myself permission to say it, afraid she would abandon us and take my heart with her.
It was too late to take back my mistake, and I lived with that for the next five years.
Grief became my constant companion, my faithful friend. It followed me everywhere.
The office door opened, allowing Misha and Viktor entry.
I dropped my phone face down on the desk before they saw I’d been reading our old messages to Peyton on the app.
I did that every day. Hour after hour, I scrolled through those messages, our one link to Peyton.
When I wasn’t reading those messages, I was scrolling through her family’s social media pages.
Obsessed was a kind way of describing me.
Her family did not have a broad presence on social media, but they did have old pictures of Peyton, and her sisters looked enough like her that it kept her alive.
It kept me alive. At this point, that was good enough.
Viktor sank into the chair in front of me, Misha bypassing the chair for the liquor cabinet.
“Anyone else?” The words came out guttural and harsh. Probably because it was the only thing he’d said in a week.
“Me.” I resisted the urge to bury my hands in my hair and pull until the pain gave me something else to think about. “We have meetings in an hour.”
“I know.” Misha poured me a glass of whiskey, carried it over, and sat down with the bottle. He hadn’t shaven in days, and dark circles ringed his eyes.
Five years and we still were not sleeping well. Not eating well.
Hell, we didn’t do anything well anymore. We did what we absolutely had to do and nothing else.
I drank the whiskey and held out the glass.
Misha topped it off and sat back with a sigh, closing his eyes.
Within minutes, he was snoring, his head cranked back at an uncomfortable angle.
Viktor took the decanter from Misha’s grasp and handed it to me after taking a generous swig. “What the hell are we going to do, Leo?”
“I don’t know.” I blew out a slow breath and scrubbed both hands over my face. Whiskers rasped, and I realized I hadn’t shaved either. We were all coming apart at the seams, unraveling stitch by stitch.
Honestly, I was surprised we’d made it this long.
“I’m canceling the meeting. We can push it till next week.” Viktor stood and made his way to the door. He paused behind Misha’s chair, his face twisting as the grief we all tried to bury came roaring to the surface. “I’m worried about him.”
“I’m worried about all of us.” I was failing them, and I barely had enough cognitive thought to wish things could be different.
We were ruined. We couldn’t even bring ourselves to hire someone to fill Peyton’s position.
Five fucking years and her desk sat empty, her stuff exactly where she’d left it.
Viktor blew out a breath. “Yeah.”
He barely made it to the door before I’d picked up my phone. I switched from Intivibe to social media, my thumb in constant motion as I scrolled.
An image flashed past, and my heart jumped into my throat. I jabbed my thumb onto the screen and pulled down, bringing the picture back into view and reading the caption. Welcome to the family!
A picture of one of Peyton’s sisters filled my phone screen. She stood in the center of the image, a baby in her arms. A man stood beside her, his arm over her shoulders as they both looked down.
Cute, but not what had stopped me in my tracks.
No. A person in the background held that honor.
In the corner, tucked so deep in the shadows of a tree that I almost missed it, stood another woman, one who looked so remarkably like Peyton that every cell in my body jumpstarted.
I had to be wrong. A trick of my imagination.
After missing her for so long, I’d finally cracked and started seeing her.
I pressed my thumb against the image, then downloaded it to my phone, moving it to a folder so I could zoom in.
I counted people first, stacking what I knew and had learned about Peyton against the number of people in the image. Yep. All her sisters were accounted for. And her mother.
I zoomed in until the image started to blur.
The face was unmistakable. Even from a distance, in shadow, and with everyone else almost blocking her entirely, I knew Peyton too well to be mistaken. I’d know her face anywhere.
I flipped back over to social media, going straight to the page where I’d found the image.
Gone.
My eyes narrowed, and I checked the name at the top of the page. Maybe I’d been so excited I got it wrong. With Misha snoring in a drunken stupor in the chair, I checked every single family member’s profile. The image had been taken down.
Five minutes. That’s how long it had taken them to remove the image.
Which meant one thing.
No. Two things.
One: Peyton was alive.
Two: She’d been hiding from us all this time.