Chapter 6 - Gavril
I stared at the door for a long moment after I locked Lilia in, listening for another imminent freak out. She was quiet, and I stepped away, sensing she needed time alone to regroup.
What the hell came over me at that auction?
Now I had a scared mouse who belonged to the enemy camp to contend with, and I had to order the execution of the men involved with her kidnapping.
It was unreal that they had been able to get away with such a feat under my nose.
It had to be long in the making, well planned over a period of time.
That meant that things were worse than I realized, and I knew things were rotten from the moment I stepped off the plane in Los Angeles. Never starry-eyed about how difficult it would be to clean up this dirty branch of the Collective, I was still optimistic I could whip them into shape.
Didn’t seem like it now. Luigi was only alive because I needed him scared enough of saving his own hide to keep his men in line.
Once I rooted them out and either got them on my side or disposed of them, he could go.
There was nothing I would have loved more than to hold his fat head under the sparkling water of his pool and let him drown.
After what he put the youngest member of the Petrov family through, I was ready to pull him apart piece by piece.
Lilia. Her beauty stunned me. The terror in her luminous blue eyes ripped at my guts, bringing on a rage as strong as if I had to defend my own life.
There was something that radiated from her that made an unprecedented urge to protect well up in me.
As an only child, I had no siblings I ever needed to fight for, and there was nothing even slightly brotherly in what I felt when I stormed that stage.
It was unexplainable, wild, and dark. I would have killed every last man if I had to, and still would if they tried to stand in my way. It was unreasonable, foolish, and could threaten everything I worked for to keep her. And yet, I wasn’t giving her back.
Of all the people to mess with to inflame an already fiery enemy, my idiots had to choose the most innocent of all of them. I had intel on all the Petrovs, and each and every member had documents on them you could scroll through for hours. Lilia’s dossier didn’t take up a single page.
A picture, her age, and what she did for a living. Online editing, for God’s sake, and for a completely clean publishing company. She was as pure as the driven snow, and if I’d been ten minutes later, she’d be in the hands of one of those billionaire freaks.
Fuck, that reminded me I’d need to reimburse the ones I wanted to maintain alliances with. It would have been nice to consign them all to a painful demise, but money was money, and I could make a lot more keeping them sweet. I had plenty of enemies, including Luigi, my own damn second in command.
I wired him a cool million with a note that said payment for delivery of merchandise.
That would piss him off because he stood to make ten to a hundred times more than that from the hungry jackals, but also soothe his ego enough to keep him from doing something truly stupid in his enraged state.
I understood things like diplomacy as well as bringing down the hammer.
Despite making these allowances, I was well aware that there could still be backlash from some of them for taking away their sick fun.
Leaning back in my chair, I squeezed the bridge of my nose, realizing the long headache I’d been battling was gone. How was that possible? It was funny enough to laugh out loud, especially when I recalled what I had blurted out on that stage to get people to take me seriously.
How many of them would actually believe I had somehow become secretly engaged to Lilia Petrov? Not too many. That was just another thing I had to rectify, and the fatigue that had been taking over from all the seemingly insurmountable odds against me faded away.
Taking care of this one particular problem wasn’t going to be a problem at all.