Chapter Sixteen
“I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”
A snort escaped my lips at the insinuation. “I never said you were,” I placated. “I simply wanted to be sure that the pretty brunette at the service desk wouldn’t be a distraction for you.”
Dima blew out his lips in frustration, and I couldn’t help the chuckle I released. Here I was sitting like a fucking creeper in the middle of a blacked-out apartment, stalking my target. It was long past midnight, and the fucker still hadn’t shown his face. We’d come here for Kirill, but he wasn’t the only one I was after.
My backup man was currently pouting outside in the car like a dejected puppy. I made sure to crack a window for him. Maksim had been the holder of Dima’s leash for as long as I could remember. I would say it was something kinky, but while my young associate might flex and bend with gender, Maksim had no such flexibility.
“I know when to take my balls out of the game.”
Wasn’t quite how the American phrase went, but I would let it slide.
For now.
“Then prove it,” I commanded him. “Prove that you can be a reliable asset, brat, and maybe I will think about allowing you more freedom in the future.”
Should have brought fucking Leon or Roman with me.
Problem was that both were easily recognizable as being associated with me.
Dima was my ghost man. My thief in the shadows.
“Got him,” Dima informed me. Hacking into the hotels Wi-Fi had been horrifyingly easy. “He’s heading into the elevator with two security guards.”
My hand clenched on the gun in my lap.
“Security got off on the floor below him.”
Rookie mistake. I smirked darkly. Never leave yourself open without easily accessible backup. I waited patiently, the soft pad of footsteps my reward some minutes later. Rolling my shoulders back, I tilted my head up and prepared. The lock beeped, and the door handle clicked. Moments later, it closed, and the snick of the lock sounded.
Time for business.
“Privet, dvoyurodnaya brat,” I greeted my cousin coldly, the muzzle of my baretta aimed at his chest. Ivan, the man who paraded himself as Jonathan Archer, froze in his tracks. Flipping on the lamp, I expected to see fear creeping into his silver eyes. Instead, his own gun was aimed at my head, a smarmy smirk goading his lips.
Pizdets.
“Matthias.” I wanted to punch that smirk off his face and watch that smug glint in his eye fade to nothing as I choked the life from him.
“Archer.” I nodded my head at him, my eyes never leaving his face. “Or should I call you Ivan?”
“Took you long enough.” Again, the man showed no fear, only expectance. “I thought you would have found me sooner, honestly.”
I sneered.
“Know me so well, do you?”
Ivan grinned broadly, showcasing pearly white teeth and a more youthful face. The graying edges of his hair were gone, and he was clean shaven, making him look years younger than the man he portrayed. Hell, even his eye color was different. Gone were the hazel contacts, replaced by the familiar silver glint.
There were very little traces of Jonathan Archer left. He’d hidden behind his fa?ade so well that I barely recognized the man standing in front of me.
“I know more about you than you think.” He lowered his gun as a show of good faith, tucking it into his waistband.
“Well,” I tipped the muzzle of my gun back and forth, “not surprising with your stalker tendencies.” The man looked like he wanted to smile, but he kept his face somewhat neutral.
“You should tell your man downstairs to come on up for a drink,” Ivan informed me. He gave my gun a quick glance before walking to the bar that sat to one side of me. Dima cursed over the comms line. I winced at the volume. “He’s good.” Ivan smirked. “My men are just better.”
“Indeed,” I grumbled and put my gun away as I barked at Dima to stand by in the lobby. “How long have you known?”
Ivan chuckled darkly. “Since the minute you stepped off the plane.”
I swore.
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t shoot you right now, then.”
That fucking smirk. I wanted to wipe it off his face.
“I want Kirill dead.”
That wasn’t what I was expecting.
“He’s your uncle. Why would you want that?”
Ivan turned toward me, jaw clenched, the muscles in his throat tightening around his pulsing carotid. The man was angry, eyes burning with uncontrolled hatred.
“Antony Tkachenko was my brother.”
I shook my head slightly, gun lowering. Brother. That was impossible. He called me brother before he died. Antony had been a Kasyanov.
Right?
“Impossible,” I murmured and took the glass of scotch he offered.
Ivan scoffed. “I think I would know my own brother.”
I thought back to that fateful night. The one where we fought, and I killed him.
“I’m sorry, brat.”
Those were the words he said to me.
Unless they weren’t meant for me. Maybe they had been meant for Ivan?
“How much do you know about Kirill?” he asked me. Ivan sat across from me in one of the other chairs, making himself comfortable as he sipped on his vodka.
“Seeing as how he is my father,” I sneered at the term, “a lot.”
And out came the smirk again.
“Is he though?”
This mudak was playing with fire.
“You think I don’t know my own father?” I growled. My hand tightened on the glass I was holding. “The pig of a man who got my mother addicted to drugs. The scum of the earth who kicked me out on my ass when I was eleven. The scourge of my life who sent one assassin after another for years until they were too afraid to come after me. That man? I know that man.”
There was sadness and regret in Ivan’s eyes. His gaze was fixed on me. The tension in his shoulders had released, and he seemed at ease. Off guard. I could have killed him then, for everything he had done, and he would have been unprepared.
Except I didn’t want to.
The longer I studied him, the more I noticed the similarities beyond the familial platinum eyes and dark hair. They had been hidden before, purposely altered beneath the carefully crafted face of Jonathan Archer. We bore the same sharp angular jawline and high cheekbones. His voice, when not altered, was deep and gravelly.
At one point, I thought he had been my brother, not my cousin. My first instinct when I saw the mark on his arm flash across the video feed from the Ward stables had been accurate. The revelation that I spent my entire life hating someone who was absolutely nothing to me was startling. The rug had been pulled out from under me. The wool falling from my eyes.
“You said Antony was your brother as well.” Suspicion laced my voice. Things weren’t adding up, but I didn’t raise my gun again. I would keep the peace that had settled between us.
For now.
“Yes,” Ivan affirmed. “He and I were born two years before you. When they first were married. Mom was eighteen and working at a diner in America when he met her. Seduced her. Married her. It was a whirlwind romance,” he said.
“I assume Malik didn’t take too kindly to that.”
Ivan snarled. “I do not believe our senile old grandfather had anything to do with it, at least not completely.”
Now I was puzzled. “Why else would Kirill take her?” None of what he was saying made any sense, but at the same time, it did. The pieces of the puzzle were blurry, but slowly, as I shifted everything I thought I knew aside and focused on the facts he was giving me and the ones I had begun to dig up myself, everything was beginning to fit together.
“Her name was Amalia,” Ivan told me, a wistfulness to his voice as he remembered her. “I was only two when she was stolen in the dead of night with you still in her belly. Antony and I would put our ears to her stomach to listen. It would put a smile on our faces whenever we could feel you shift. She would sing to us our favorite lullaby. Her voice soft and sweet.”
Tears swam in his eyes as he told me the only things he remembered about her. The memories of a two-year-old were so fleeting. Finite.
“Bayu Bayushki,” I chuckled. “The lullaby about a wolf dragging a child from bed for sleeping on the edge. She used to sing that to me as well. I remember the first time I was able to properly understand the words—I was too scared to sleep for days.”
Ivan laughed. “Father used to try and sing it to us, but his voice sounded too much like a dying koshka. Antony would beg him to stop, but he would just hammer on, anyway. Louder, if that was possible.”
The two of us laughed, the jovial sound fading away as sorrow and regret cinched our hearts and souls. I had grown up without the love of a father. My only glimpse of what one was truly supposed to be like coming from the kindness and compassion Tomas showed me many years later. Many years too late.
Ivan and Antony were forced to live without the tender care of a mother. Their memories just wistful dreams. Even in her worst times, when Kirill had her hopped up on drugs, she never stopped being the loving mother I knew when she was sober.
“Her favorite color was green,” I told him, the lump in my throat growing as I dredged up memories I buried long ago. “And not like the forest or the grass. It was lime green. The kind you found on walls of homes built in the seventies.”
Ivan’s eyes lit up as I told him about our mother. Her favorite foods and how she liked to settle down and read to me in the evenings. She was fierce and protective. Loving and kind even in her darkest times.
Gradually, over time, the happiness of my tale melted into anger, then rage. Now that I had all the pieces, I could see the proper flow of time.
But there were a few questions that remained unanswered.
“If Malik wasn’t behind the plan to take our mother?” I questioned, thinking back to everything I knew. “Who did? Kirill? There is no way he was smart enough to pull it off on his own.”
Ivan shook his head softly.
“Have you heard of a man by the name of Pavel Kasyanov?”
I nodded.
“He was the man I grew up believing to be my uncle,” I told him. “Died a few years ago.”
Ivan smiled darkly. “Horrible accident with a knife in his gut.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “Drug deal gone wrong.”
I chuckled. “Couldn’t say he didn’t deserve it.”
“Kirill and Pavel grew up together,” Ivan continued. “Both bastard sons of high-ranking members. Pavel blamed it all on Kirill before I killed him. Said the bastard wanted to be Pakhan. Since he wasn’t a legitimized heir, there was no way he could.”
“Unless he got someone to legitimize him.”
“Pavel and Kirill made sure all the evidence pointed back to Malik,” Ivan kept on, his breathing growing rapid as he recalled how the mother he barely got to know was taken. “Kirill and our father were friends, but according to Pavel, all Kirill wanted was Andrei’s seat of power. So, he started a war. Offered his brother his support as a spy.”
I held up a hand to stop him. “How could he have done that if Malik had banished him to St. Petersburg?”
Ivan raised a brow at me. Of course, he would have falsified everything to cover his tracks. “Kirill and Pavel’s job in St. Petersburg was to gain support. Kirill manipulated everything so that he could be there to make sure our mother never escaped.”
“So, what?” My jaw clenched so hard I could hear my teeth grinding. “He thought he would help Andrei overthrow Malik, and then what? He still wasn’t the heir.”
“Until our father legitimized him as a reward for his service.”
Blyad.
That would make Kirill the next heir, but if he sought to kill Andrei and gain the throne, then why wasn’t he dead?
Ivan knew what I was thinking and voiced his answer before I could verbalize my question. “Until recently, he hasn’t tried to make a move directly on our father. He started with us. The heirs.”
Us. The heirs.
“Why the fa?ade, Ivan?” I looked askance at my brother. “You join with Christian Ward. Blackmail my wife. You’ve spent the last how many years impersonating an FBI agent. For what? To get revenge on me for killing Antony? For letting our mother die? Honestly, I can’t figure out what the hell you’ve been playing at, brother.” I spat the word out. “Why should I trust anything you’re telling me right now?”
Silence simmered in the air between us. Volcanic activity bubbling beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment to explode. There was bitterness between us. A tight rope strung to the point that the threads were fraying. One harsh pull, and it could sever itself forever, and there would be no repairing it.
Ivan’s throat bobbed before he spoke. When he did, his voice was quiet, broken. It was the voice of a man who had lost everything he loved. Something I knew about all too well.
“I hated you at first,” he admitted hoarsely. “Antony disappeared one night, and he never came back. Kirill told me…” Ivan choked, his throat clogged with overwhelming emotion. “He told me that Antony had found you, our little brother, and that he was going to bring you home. When he didn’t return with you, Kirill showed me a picture of you stabbing him.” Standing, he ran a hand through his hair. Ivan paced the small space between our chairs, still holding his drink as he told me his story. “There was so much rage and pain. I couldn’t imagine why you would want to kill your brother.”
“I didn’t do it by choice,” I assured him gently. Ivan came to a sudden halt and hung his head, shame coloring his cheeks.
“I know,” he whispered brokenly. “Over the years, more and more things just were not adding up. Conversations I would overhear. Meetings he would have. Our father gave Kirill so much power for his loyalty, and he never saw how much his brother was abusing it. Still doesn’t. Losing our mother made him mad for revenge, but when the war was over and the bloodshed ended, he was broken. Despondent. The more time went on, the more he withdrew from his duties as Pakhan. Especially after losing Antony.”
“How did Kirill become Pakhan of London?” I wondered. “Wouldn’t he be wanting to sit closer to the seat of power in Russia?”
Ivan snorted. “The one good thing our father’s Sovietnik has done was send that fucker here,” Ivan spat. “Vlad couldn’t prove it, but he was beginning to put things together as well. Our father put an end to the Tkachenko human trafficking ring when he took power. It disgusted him. Suddenly, not long after Kirill started gaining power, there were new rings popping up and women going missing again.”
“Did you ever find out a name?”
“No,” Ivan sighed and sat down in his chair, utterly defeated. “Just an emblem of some kind of lizard or something on the top of some papers.”
Bingo.
“The Chameleon Agency.”
Ivan sat up straighter, the slump in his shoulders straightening.
“You know who they are?”
“We’ve had a run in or two with them over the past year,” I told him. “They take women and put them in auctions all around the globe. Sometimes they sell them directly to high-profile clients. Have you ever heard of The Dollhouse?”
“Rumors and whispers,” he admitted with a shiver. “But nothing else. Some say the organization is older than most countries. That every large-scale assassination attempt in history is thanks to them. Caesar, Lincoln, Rasputin, Alexander, Ghandi, King—the list goes on and on.”
“Pfft.” I rolled my eyes. “That is a bit presumptuous.”
“But not altogether without merit,” Ivan pointed out. “Who knows how long an underground organization like that has gone unnoticed. Been renamed. Do I believe they orchestrated the assassination of Julius Caesar? No. But Lincoln? King? It is a distinct possibility.”
“Both of those figures were assassinated by men,” I rebutted. “From the research we’ve been doing, that isn’t their target for forced recruiting.”
“It isn’t now,” he said. “But women hold more power now than they did in the 1865 and in 1968.”
He did have a point.
“Look,” he sighed. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he closed his eyes for a moment to regroup. “I’m not going to give you the highlight reel of why I’ve done what I have. But I am sorry for some of the things,” he admitted. “I never should have involved Ava, and for that I am sorry, brother.”
Brother.
I had brothers. Vasily, Roman, Maksim, Leon, and Nikolai were my brothers. Even that shithead Dima. They had been for years. But there was something in the way Ivan uttered that word, with reverence and respect, that stirred the shattered parts of my soul.
“Why did you?”
“Because she meant something to you,” he sighed with regret. “Even before you realized it yourself.”