Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Rodion
“Just stop here,” I instruct Z, glancing out the window at the dimly lit street ahead. We’re a block from The Vault and don’t need any witnesses who can link us going to the club at this hour. I’m not sure what we’ll be walking into once we get there. I didn’t wait around for details on the phone.
Her voice was so fragile. I’ve never heard her sound like that before.
Zahkar doesn’t wait for me before he’s out of the car and jogging toward the club. I catch up to him, and I'm grateful he brought enough gym wear in his luggage for me to wear as well. Running in dress shoes would have been more than unpleasant.
There is only one car in the parking lot, and her silhouette fills the driver's seat. Zahkar flings open the door and kneels beside her. “Are you okay?” he barks, panic in his voice. He surveys her body. “Is this your blood?”
She’s covered in it, some dried and flaking, some still wet. Her bottom half is bare, and her top half is covered with a man’s T-shirt. Blood is seeping through it, expanding up the fabric. All that blonde hair is buried beneath crimson clumps.
“You’re injured.” I swallow my dread. It’s a statement.
I attempt to shift Zahkar to get a better visual of her.
“A girl,” she mumbles, lips cracked and trembling. “She was just a girl.”
“Who, love?” Zahkar asks, his hands hovering over her, too afraid to touch her.
Her voice is hoarse, and the bruising on her neck is worse now that she’s not wearing any makeup to cover it. Fresh marks litter her flesh.
I’ll take apart whoever has done this to her limb by limb. Draining them of their screams until hell takes them from this world into the next…and I’ll meet them there too.
“Your arms,” Zahkar chokes, taking her hand from the steering wheel and inspecting the wounds slashed into her skin.
“S-she killed Jeremiah.”
“Who killed him?” I growl.
She’s not saying enough. This is useless. The longer we wait here, the greater the chance of being seen. There’s no explaining away this amount of blood.
“The girl Yuri sent.” Her words are raspy and broken. Tears well in her eyes and drip down to her cheeks creating a path through the blood. Then, she darts her gaze all around, looking and seeing nothing, but terrified nonetheless. “I need to clean this up. Adam will kill me and take her from me.”
A pained howl rips from her chest. It’s deep and from the soul. Somehow, it cuts into my soul too.
“Take who?” Zahkar’s brow creases.
“Pleeaasse help me.” Her face crumbles, and my soul tugs against my skeleton, desperate to rip free to get to hers to soothe her.
“We will. We will,” my brother and I say in unison.
“Let’s get you into the back of the car and I’ll drive back to your place,” I say, eager to get out of this parking lot. “We will get everything sorted.”
“She’ll be back soon,” she mutters, her eyes out of focus. She’s in shock.
Coaxing her from the driver’s seat, Zahkar lifts her into his arms, and practically peels her from the leather seat, leaving behind a bloodied outline of her thighs.
I rush to open the back door and help him duck inside with her.
Jumping into the driver’s seat, I click on the home button on her GPS and begin driving when the directions flash on the screen.
“We should take her to a hospital,” Zahkar growls. “Some of this blood is fresh and warm, Rodion.”
“No,” she yelps, jerking in his lap and attempting to climb over the seats to reach the steering wheel.
What the actual fuck?
“Calm down, love,” I tell her as calmly as I can. “You’ll kill us all.”
Z manages to get her back and settled in his arms.
We’ve patched each other up plenty over the years, so we should be able to help her. If anything needs more attention, we can decide what to do afterward. Right now, we just need to get her the fuck away from here.
“Alyona, you need to tell me where the woman is who did this? Is she still at your place?”
I don’t want to risk taking her back there before we’ve dispatched the woman.
“Dead.” She shakes her head against Z’s chest. “They’re both dead. I couldn’t let her live. She knows.” Small sobs shake her body.
That’s scarier than anything else I’ve seen tonight.
Alyona was forged in our ring. She was made of steel and determination. Strong. A survivor. She killed the woman who attacked her, yet something has her so rattled she’s breaking.
“It will be okay.” Z comforts her, stroking a hand down her congealed hair. But she continues rambling.
“She’s mine,” she chokes out. “She’s my everything and I couldn’t let her tell him about her.”
“Nothing she’s saying is making sense.” Z’s voice is strained, and I imagine him counting his Mississippis in his head.
“Shock can do that to a person,” I assure him. “It will be okay.” I parrot the same words to attempt to comfort him, too.
I pull onto a driveway of a large house with too many fucking windows when you need to be discreet. It’s all one story by the looks of it, but vast. This Jeremiah has—had—money.
The garage door opens when I drive toward it, and I move forward, allowing the garage to encase us inside so we’re out of view.
“Is there anyone else in the house we should be aware of?” I ask, giving the space in front of us a quick scan. We don’t have weapons on us because we are the weapons.
“No.” She rushes off Zahkar’s lap and almost tips out of the car when she jerks the door open. Her bare feet slap the tiled floor leaving little blood splatters, leading us into the house.
I enter warily, mapping out every doorway and window. Keeping an escape route in mind and also to prepare for anyone joining us.
Everything is either white or cream décor. There’s no personality, which isn’t like the queen we know. I wonder how long she’s lived here with him.
“There.” She points her finger at an open doorway leading into a bedroom.
Shifting from foot to foot, she closes her eyes. “It was a fluke.” She laughs without any humor.
“What was?” I ask, stepping over the threshold.
Even the bedroom has a tiled floor. It’s cold and more like something you’d expect in a tropical holiday home. At least it will be easier to clean than carpet.
Jeremiah is face-up on an oversized bed at the center of the room, the covers crumpled at his feet. A gash across his neck stretches from ear to ear and is the obvious cause of death.
Blood spray is all over the fucking place. Alyona and this assassin woman clearly went at it before her defeat.
“The nun girl,” she stammers. “She was in the club and went home with Adam yesterday.”
I trace the fight by the blood patterns and end up in the en-suite bathroom. A young woman is lying in a pool of blood, with too many stab wounds to count. They’re scattering her entire torso. Her nose is bent at a crooked angle. She looks really fucking young. Too young.
I don’t recognize her.
When we decided to go into The Games to get Alyona, we knew there would be risks afterwards, so we researched Yuri’s lapdogs to keep watch for them. This girl wasn’t one of them. And, in the end, no one ever came. So why now after two years?
“Rodion.” Zahkar’s firm tone has me poking my head around the door frame. Alyona is now propped against him, her hand covering her stomach. Fresh blood tips over the edges of her hand.
Dammit.
Racing toward her, I scoop her legs up and cradle her into me, walking her to a leather couch across the corridor from her room.
Placing her down gently still elicits a cry from her lips. “I’m sorry, liybimaya.” My love.
Zahkar’s hurried footfalls sound around the house, collecting everything we’ll need to patch her up.
Lifting her hand away from her stomach, I grasp the fabric of her shirt and peel it up her body, ignoring the fact she’s not wearing panties. There’s a nasty slash just beneath her ribcage that’s pulsing blood with every breath she exhales.
“Here.” Z hastily hands me a soaked cloth.
Dabbing it against her wound, I inspect the rest of the exposed flesh. She’s bruised, and apart from the cuts on her arms, there’s nothing to cause real worry. She’ll be sore for a week or two but will heal.
“We’re going to have to stitch that,” I forewarn them both, gesturing at her abdomen wound.
“Just do it,” she hisses through clenched teeth. “We need to hurry up.”
“A real doctor will do it without leaving a scar.” Z runs a hand down his face, the tick in his jaw fluttering as he drinks in her nakedness. It’s predatory to still want to look at her when she’s injured and helpless. But we’ve never pretended to be anything else.
“I’ll use freaking superglue if one of you doesn’t hurry the hell up,” she snaps, sounding more like her usual self. “I don’t give a shit about scars.”
It’s then I notice a thin silver scar just above her bikini line around five inches wide. I’ll have to remember to ask her what caused it later.
Z absentmindedly touches the lightning bolt scar on his face. It’s much smaller now than when he was a boy. I adore his scars. I’ll adore hers too.
“Glue then?” she huffs when neither of us speak.
“That’s not a bad idea,” I agree, even though Z looks like he’s about to have an aneurysm at the suggestion. “The cut is a clean slice.” I lift the cloth to show him.
“Great,” she pants, wincing when she raises her arm to point. “In the cabinet over there are the arts and crafts stuff.”
“You have an arts and crafts cabinet?” I snort in disbelief.
“I like to add glitter to stuff,” she deadpans.
I smile for the first time since seeing her. Of course she does.
Z fumbles through the boxes inside the cabinet before returning with the glue. “Are you sure about this?”
“Just do it,” Alyona snaps, ever the impatient royal.
To be honest, though, I prefer this version of her over the broken, terrified one.
Pinching the skin together, I clean it as much as I can, and then squeeze the contents of the tube over her wound, flinching when her body shudders from the sting.
“I found a first aid kit and an array of bandages in the bathroom cabinet,” Z informs me, peeling the back from a waterproof bandage and gently applying it over the neatly glued cut. “She’ll need antibiotics just in case of infection.” He pats my back, nodding in approval of my nursing skills.
“We should get you in the shower and then bandage up the wounds on your arms,” I inform her.
“And feet.” Z nods to the soles of her feet, dotted with cuts.
“First, we need to get rid of these bodies.” She drags herself into a sitting position despite both Z and me protesting. “What are you wearing?” Her brow furrows, eyes drinking us in for the first time since we came to meet her.
I look up at Z in his gray sweatpants and black T-shirt and down at myself in the same. Not exactly our usual, high-class attire.
“We were in a hurry,” I grumble in defense.
“Acid won’t work in the types of bathtubs you get over here. It will melt straight through, so we need to cut the bodies up,” Z says too casually, completely ignoring her confusion about our clothes.
“I know that should creep me out,” she mutters, “but the fact that it doesn't, does that make me the bigger freak or him?”
Grinning at her, I shake my head and sit down onto the seat next to her.
“We saw you with bruises the night before this. Is Jeremiah’s violence well known to his brother Adam?”
Swallowing, she looks down, shame washing over her features and heating her cheeks. “He gets possessive. Adam knows that.”
An idea forms in my head. “You can say you got into it with Jeremiah. He’d been drinking and knocked you around and then left in the car. Never came home. You went to bed and woke up. He still wasn’t home.”
“We'll get rid of his body.” Z nods, liking this idea.
I place a hand on her knee and gently squeeze. “We passed a ravine on the way here. I say we load his body into the car and make sure it crashes with a fiery ending into the ravine.”
“It’ll get rid of him and the blood evidence Alyona drenched the car in,” Z says, finishing my thoughts for me.
“Make it look like an accident.” She nods and takes a few seconds to think it through. Then she asks, “And the girl?”
“You said you met her in the club and Adam took her home, right?” I raise a brow in question.
“Yes. She was there to see what you two were up to. Yuri sent her here to spy along with her uncle. She wasn’t here for me.”
“Motherfucker,” Z snarls, seething with anger. “That man knows no boundaries. Does he think we would let him snoop on our business with no consequences?”
“He’s never had to answer for anything he’s done,” Alyona snaps, fuming. “Why would he fear consequences? There are no consequences for him.”
That’s not news. We will deal with Yuri later.
This time he will answer. Vlad has changed since becoming a father.
His loyalties are in protecting their son, and whether he’d like to admit it or not, he knows Yuri poses a serious threat to all those around him.
The piece of shit has already rejected two children for failing to conform to his strict expectations.
What will happen when his grandchildren don’t adhere to the same rules?
If someone can get to Yuri and take him off the board, I think Vlad would secretly be relieved.
“The girl?” Alyona urges, drawing my attention back to the task at hand.
“Adam has prior complaints against him from women that all got dropped–”
“What?” Alyona interrupts me, waving her hand. “You just barely met him. How do you already know that?”
“You can find out a lot in a few hours,” I inform her.
Of course, as soon as I met the Cunningham brothers, I was going to do my research.
Adam owns logistics companies that ship everything and anything in and out of the country.
He invests in legitimate companies in financial trouble, uses them to produce counterfeit pharmaceuticals, consumables, and luxury goods, and then ships that junk through his own company.
On top of that, he moves drugs for local biker gangs.
It took one phone call to Viktor to learn that about him.
The criminal complaints are documented online by a blog called, “Rich boy privilege.”
“Unbelievable.” She groans, dropping her head against the back of the couch. “I didn’t know he had allegations against him. But I can believe it.”
“We put the girl in his trunk,” Z says, speaking my line of thinking.
“Yes. And then ring in an anonymous tip,” I finish with a grin.
“You beautiful bastards.” Alyona laughs in astonishment. “That’s brilliant.”
“Let’s get to work.”