Chapter 2 #2
Footsteps again. Three sets. Two heavy, one that could possibly float.
A key. A swipe. The lock buzzed. The door opened wider this time, the width of a man’s shoulders.
The first guard that entered was the kind that lifted his own body weight at the gym for kicks.
The second had the build of a runner. The third didn’t come inside. He stayed at the threshold.
The lifter barked, “Kneel.”
“Sure,” I said, perfectly agreeable.
He came in close. His pistol hung at his thigh, safety on because they get lazy with safeties when they think the room is theirs. The runner hung back a step, watching my hands instead of my eyes. Good training. The third man said nothing.
The lifter reached for my shoulder. I angled my neck down. I could have given in to the urge to aim for his groin, fold him like a bad suit, and watch the color leave his face. My right knee trembled with the promise of it.
Don’t. Be smarter than that.
His hand touched my shoulder. I moved then.
My left elbow flared into his wrist, displacing the grip, my right palm slid up with the spring and hit his carotid, and my knee went not to his center, but to his thigh, a deaden-not-destroy strike that made his leg forget how to stand.
He dropped, stunned, and I rolled with him, turning my back to the runner to wrap the spring once around his neck and squeeze just enough to send a message.
The runner lunged; I pivoted. The third man at the door drew his weapon but couldn’t fire without shooting his friend, and in that beautiful half-second of hesitation, I shoved the lifter sideways, kicked the aluminum plate up with a swipe of my foot, and winged it toward the camera lens.
It struck with a hiss of static and shattered the lens into pieces.
It wasn’t freedom. Not yet. But it was a crack. And you give me a crack, I’ll carve myself a door.
“Enough,” a voice said from the hall.
Calm. Bored. A bit too posh.
The commander had arrived early after all.
I looked up as he stepped into the frame of the doorway, immaculate in a suit that probably cost more than a small house, eyes cold as the inside of a morgue. He scanned the scene and didn’t bother to hide his contempt or his satisfaction at my current situation.
“Mr. Dragunov,” he said lightly, like we’d just met for drinks. “We need to have a conversation about your family’s understanding of the word agreement.”
I smiled the way a wolf smiles when it’s tired of playing the dog. “We need to have a conversation about your understanding of the word guest.”
His mouth made a shape that wasn’t a smile. “Stand.”
“Make me,” I grinned.
“Oh,” he said softly. “I intend to.”
I stood anyway, not because he told me to, but because I do my best work on my feet.
“Start talking, Mr. Dragunov,” the suit said again, softer now, savoring his position of power.
I tilted my head, let my gaze drift past him as if I were bored with his face and interested in the paint on the far wall.
“Maybe we don’t need to talk,” I mumbled, more to myself than to him.
“Maybe you didn’t get all of us.” I let the words trail off, like I’d meant him not to hear.
“But I’m sure you got Katya too, didn’t you? ”
He didn’t blink, but his shoulders shifted half a centimeter. It was a tiny tell that had big meaning. A smirk played at the edges of my lips, but I quelled it almost immediately.
The suit’s smile didn’t move. “We have what we need,” he replied in a bored tone.
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“I don’t answer questions, Mr. Dragunov; I ask them.”
“You should try it. Builds character.”
His eyes cooled. “What it builds is leverage, Mr. Dragunov. Which you lack.” He let the sentence hang, studied me like a surgeon studies a chart before deciding where to start cutting.
I lowered my gaze to the floor and made a small show of it—chin down, breath through the nose, shoulders loose—like I was practicing surrender.
“Your elder brother,” he said casually, as if tired of humoring a child, “is unreachable.”
I wasn’t surprised. It was simply confirmation of what I already knew.
He went on, because men like him always do when they think they’ve won. “According to our intel, he went out of the country, so if you were hoping for a rescue from him, you’ll be waiting a long while.”
I smoothed my expression before it could betray me. Mikhail was off somewhere in London, meeting with ARCHEON’s director. I hadn’t expected him back yet. He probably didn’t even know Revenant was holding me prisoner at this point.
“And Andrei?” I asked lightly, the tone in my voice put there intentionally to make my enemy underestimate how carefully I was listening. “He likes to fix things. He’s probably charming the whole logistics wing into handing him an access badge as we speak.”
If Andrei was still free, he’d likely try to get me released through diplomacy first, then do something noble and catastrophically dumb if that didn’t work.
I hoped he wouldn’t.
The commander came closer still, just out of arm’s length. He wanted me to lunge so he could punish me for it. I wanted to crush my knee into his dick so badly that it took everything in me not to. I unclenched my hand from the coil and let my fingers hang open.
“Congratulations. You’ve got your hostage then,” I said, testing him.
“Hostages,” he corrected pleasantly. “Plural.”
Heat licked the back of my neck. He wanted me to demand names.
I didn’t. If he had all of us, he’d be angrier; if he had no one but me, he wouldn’t be here.
He was here because he had just enough to preen.
Which meant Katya, almost certainly, and that meant he probably had the Markovs and Kara Lennox too.
But he didn’t have my brothers.
“I’m touched,” I said. “I must be pretty special for you to schedule a visit with little ol’ me then.”
“You matter,” he said, smile widening, “because you are the easiest one to catch. You will talk when we threaten those you love.”
“I talk when I’m bored.”
“We’ll try to entertain.”
“Fine,” I retorted. “Let’s start with the terms.”
“Terms?”
“You said it yourself,” I shrugged. “You claim we broke our agreement. So, let’s draft a new one. I tell you something that interests you; you tell me something I can use. Mutual entertainment. You seem like a man who hates wasting time.”
He looked amused and annoyed, a combination that always ended in men telling me more than they intended. “What could you possibly tell me that I don’t already know?”
I nodded at the camera. “That depends. How much time do you have?”
He took the bait. “Answer my questions,” he teased, “then I’ll tell you where we’re keeping the little traitor.”
I smiled.
So they did have our Katya after all.
I shouldn’t have felt a thrill. Should have felt fear, maybe. Or desperation. But no—Viktor Dragunov didn’t do noble. I did survival. And survival meant keeping my mind sharp, my pulse steady, and my dick out of decisions where it didn’t belong.
Mostly.
The commander stared at me with that smug little smirk, the kind of face I’d grown up punching off of rich boys who thought the world lived to serve them. He didn’t blink as he waited for me to dance for him, to beg. Men like him always waited for a man like me to crack.
I was made of cracks. Old ones, healed over with scar tissue and vodka and spite. None of them were for him. He should know that metal is strongest at the weld.
“Terms,” I repeated, rolling the word over my tongue. “You like rules. Structure. That whole organizational chart fantasy where everyone salutes your genius. So let’s negotiate.”
“You seem to think you’re in a position to demand anything.”
“I’m not demanding,” I said. “I’m offering entertainment. You seem bored. And trust me—if we keep staring at each other like this, I’ll start imagining more creative uses for that tie clip. I don’t think you want that.”
His jaw flexed. Ah, so there was a human under all that starch.
Good.
Bravely, he moved a fraction closer.
“How long do you think this will last?” he asked, voice soft, deadly. “How long before you realize you have no cards left to play?”
I smiled slowly. “That’s the thing about us Dragunovs. We carry the whole deck.”
He opened his mouth, probably to say something self-important, but I cut in smoothly, “You want information? Ask your questions. Not that you’ll like my answers.”
Not that I cared.
He clasped his hands behind his back, pacing a short arc like he owned the space. “Your younger brother, Andrei—where is he going next?”
I snorted. “Who knows. Kid’s a wildcard and a menace. A pretty one, but a menace.”
The commander leaned in, letting his shadow cut across the floor like a blade. “You think your brothers will come for you?”
“I know they’ll come, but not for me.”
His brow rose. “Oh?”
“They’ll come for her.”
He didn’t react, but the air in the room shifted. Thickened.
“Katerina Volkov,” I said. Her name felt like trouble and fire on my tongue. “Revenant’s least obedient asset. My—” I stopped. Rephrased. “Partner.”
His gaze sharpened. “Partner?”
“Not in the HR sense,” I said lightly. “More in the ‘if you harm one more hair on her head, I’ll turn this whole building into a pile of modern art’ sense.”
His stare flicked to the camera. He knew it was destroyed. He knew I’d done it on purpose. And then it flicked back to me.
“Your concern for Ms. Volkov is noted,” he said dryly.
I shrugged. “Concern’s a strong word. She’s a headache. A gorgeous, infuriating, brilliantly dangerous headache. Thinking about her is a hazard to my blood pressure.”
And my cock, but no need to confess that to Captain Repressed right now.
The commander’s nostrils flared. “You’re amusing yourself. Stop.”
“I would,” I returned, “but you’re standing uncomfortably close. And when I’m stressed, I say stupid things. When I’m annoyed, I say dangerous things. And when I’m angry…” I leaned in, matching his quiet threat with one of my own, “I don’t say anything.”
He stiffened. He didn’t step back. Men like him never step back.
But his little eye-flick down the hall betrayed him. He didn’t want this moment escalating.
Because someone else might hear.
Maybe someone he didn’t want to know I’d rattled him.
I filed that away. A pressure point for later.
He cleared his throat. “Whether Ms. Volkov survives depends on your cooperation.”
I swallowed the urge to lunge at him.
Katya, my Katya—Katerina Volkov—alone in some med-wing torture lab downstairs. Drugged. Restrained. Questioned. Bleeding. Smirking at her interrogators because she knew she’d cut their throats if they got too close.
My stomach twisted.
Thinking about her made my hands shake in ways no gun battle ever could.
Thinking about her mouth made my dick stir again—damn her—but thinking about someone else touching her made my vision go red at the edges.
“You want Andrei,” I said. “You want Mikhail. You’ve probably got the Markov triad, and Kara Lennox too. And you want Katya because she knows too much about your little Revenant group, don’t you.”
The commander’s jaw flexed.
Bullseye.
He exhaled once, clipped and irritated. “We have enough.”
“But not the ones who matter.”
His silence was answer enough.
I chuckled under my breath.
He frowned.
“What is so funny?”
I looked up, a grin plastered all over my face.
“I’m just imagining how much chaos Andrei’s going to cause while you idiots are chasing your own tails.
He’s probably already in your server room.
Or your armory. Or your goddamn cafeteria, charming a chef into smuggling him into this place on a soup cart. ”
By the look on his face, he did not like that image.
I lifted my gaze again, honing it on him until the commander finally looked away first.
That mattered.
That told me something I’d suspected from the moment he walked in. He wasn’t here to break me. He was here because someone above him was nervous.
“Tell me where she is,” I said softly.
He stiffened. “No.”
“Then I’ll find her without your help.”
“How would you—”
“You talk too much when you’re annoyed,” I interrupted. “You think about what you’re not allowed to say. And the best part?” I bared my teeth. “You think you have time.”
“And you don’t?” he countered.
“No,” I said. “But my brothers don’t need time.”
Quiet concern flickered behind his eyes.
“Enjoy your confidence while you can,” he murmured. “Your elder brother is far away somewhere. He’s not coming for you. And as for your younger brother…” His lips curved. “We have measures for men like him. He will not get far.”
Wrong.
I leaned in, bringing my mouth a hairsbreadth from his ear. “You should worry less about Andrei getting far,” I whispered. “And more about him getting close.”
His breath stuttered.
Another tell.
Delicious.
He stepped back sharply. “We’re done.”
“Not even close.”
He signaled the guards. The door hissed open.
The moment he walked out, leaving the room colder than before, I let my smile fade.
Pieces were falling into place. Who they had, who they didn’t, who was coming for me, and who was already moving against them.
But Katya was the variable I couldn’t get out of my head.
Katerina Volkov wasn’t built to be anyone’s captive. I knew that she’d be fighting, even now, even if she happened to be injured. She was probably making some interrogator regret waking up this morning. And if they pushed her too far… no, I wasn’t letting it get that far.
I wasn’t giving Mikhail time to bargain or Andrei time to charge in blind.
She needed me thinking clearly and acting fast.
Time to break out.