Chapter 4 #2
Like something frozen and forgotten deep in my chest has started to thaw, cracking through ice I did not realize I had let form.
The sensation is uncomfortable, almost painful, the way blood rushing back into a numb limb brings pins and needles before the relief.
I rub at the spot with my knuckles, frowning at my own body's betrayal, and I catch Rafael watching me from the corner of his eye.
I drop my hand. Reach for my scotch instead. Pretend the burn of alcohol explains the heat spreading through my ribs.
But I know better.
Something is different tonight. Something has been different since the moment I caught Katriana in my arms and felt the delicate weight of her against my chest, since her scent wrapped around my senses and reminded me that I am still capable of wanting something beyond power and profit.
The walls I spent decades building have developed a crack, and I can feel the pressure of everything I have been holding back pushing against the fault line.
I’m done watching from a distance.
The decision settles into my bones with the weight of inevitability, like I have been walking toward this moment my entire life and only just now realized the destination.
"Drake." Rafael's voice cuts through the fog of thoughts clogging my brain, pulling me back to the boardroom and the pile of wishes waiting to be sorted. "You with us?"
I grunt an affirmation and reach for the decanter. The scotch is smooth and expensive, nothing like the cheap whiskey I stole from my mother when she was working. That stuff burned like hell and left tears in my young eyes at the time. Nowadays I’ve learned to love the burn.
"Let's get this over with." Massimo breaks the seal on the first wish and begins reading in his clipped, efficient voice. "Dear Red Letter Syndicate. I wish for my husband's business partner to suffer a tragic accident so that my husband inherits full control of their company."
Kon sucks air through his teeth.
“Agreed,” I murmur to Kon’s shock.
“People are fucking cold-ass fuckers.” Rafael does not even hesitate. "Black pile."
The wish lands in the reject stack, and Massimo reaches for another.
We work through the pile with practiced efficiency, sorting the desperate from the depraved, the legitimate cries for help from the thinly veiled requests for murder.
A woman wants her stalker to disappear. Red pile, assigned to Kon's division.
A man wants his daughter's abuser to face consequences the legal system refused to deliver.
Red pile, Rowan claims that one with a coldness in his eyes that promises the abuser will regret ever being born.
An elderly widow wants help paying for her grandson's cancer treatment. Red pile, and Massimo makes a note to route the wish through one of our charitable fronts so the money cannot be traced.
"These next few are grim," Rowan observes as he fans through a cluster of envelopes. "Three requests for assistance with terminal situations. Two domestic violence cases. And..." He pauses, his ice-colored eyes narrowing slightly. "Hm. This one feels different."
Kon reaches across the table and plucks the envelope from Rowan's fingers with the casual efficiency of a man who has been stealing things since before he could walk. He breaks the seal, unfolds the letter, and reads aloud in his rumbling bass.
"Save my family from the debt that's destroying us. Please. I'll pay any price. Signed Katriana Bellrose."
The words hit me like a fist to the chest. Kon flips the wish around and I immediately recognize the handwriting.
Round letters, slightly cramped, the penmanship of someone who probably spent hours as a child practicing cursive in composition notebooks.
I have seen it exactly once before, three years ago, on a Christmas card she wrote to my mother's memory and left on the mantle when she thought no one was watching.
I am moving before I make the conscious decision to stand.
Three strides carry me around the table, and I jerk the paper from Konstantin's massive hand with enough force that the edge tears slightly.
He looks up at me with raised eyebrows and something like amusement flickering in his dark eyes, but I do not explain or apologize.
I am not a man who wastes words on things that should be obvious.
"This one is mine."
The silence that follows is thick enough to taste. Massimo's pen stops tapping. Rowan's eyes narrow with calculation. Kon takes another pull from his flask and waits.
Rafael is the only one who moves. He leans back in his chair and studies my face with the particular intensity of a man who has known me for twenty years and can read my tells even when I think I am hiding them.
His dark eyes search mine, cataloguing the tension in my jaw, the rigid set of my shoulders, the way I am holding that scrap of paper like it contains the secrets of the universe.
Understanding dawns slow and certain across his features.
He knows Katriana’s name and how I felt about her. Feel, I guess.
Of course he knows. He watched me linger in the shadows around Katriana for three years, and he has never once asked why I never moved in once my brother was out of the picture. I’m not sure I had an answer then, much less now. It felt wrong. But now, she’s made the first move.
Okay, she doesn’t know I’ll be the one answering her wish, but then again…
"Brother." Rafael’s voice is quiet, pitched for my ears alone when he faces me and leans an arm on the table. "You sure about this?"
I meet his gaze without flinching. "I've never been more sure of anything."
He nods once, a gesture that carries the weight of permission and blessing and warning all at once. Then he turns to the others and says, "Drake has claimed the wish. Let's move on."
The conversation resumes around me, but I am already walking toward the door. The wish burns in my pocket like a coal, and I need information. I need to know exactly what kind of trouble she is in and exactly how I am going to fix it.
I need Luca.
The surveillance room sits three floors down, buried in the heart of Redthorne's security infrastructure where the walls are reinforced concrete and the equipment costs more than some countries' defense budgets.
Luca Valentina is exactly where Kon said he would be, sprawled in an ergonomic chair with four different screens casting blue light across his sharp features.
He looks up when I enter, and something in his expression tells me he has been waiting for this moment.
"Took you long enough." He spins the chair to face me and gestures at the primary monitor. "Sit down. You're going to want to see this."
I do not sit. I plant my feet and cross my arms and wait.
Luca knows better than to push, so he starts talking while his fingers fly across the keyboard.
"Katriana Bellrose. Twenty-four years old.
Graduated magna cum laude with a degree in English Literature and a minor in Business Administration.
Should be running a publishing house by now, but instead she's working at a bookstore called Stacked Pages for barely above minimum wage. Why is the question that needs asking."
“Agreed.”
Luca pulls up a photograph that makes my chest constrict.
Katriana is in her work uniform with dark circles under her eyes.
A ghost of a bruise is visible on her cheekbone but it’s not the same one she was trying to hide yesterday.
She’s suffered at the hands of someone multiple times and the idea of someone putting hands on her for anything makes me see red.
“Give me some names, Luca. I’m hungry for blood.”
"Her father was Michael Bellrose. Small-time property developer who got in over his head about years ago and borrowed three hundred thousand dollars from a man named Victor Kedrov."
I fucking knew it. Just hearing that nasty fucking name brings bile up the back of my throat. Luca’s expression matches mine. We know that name and want to end it in the worst way possible.
"Michael died five years ago. Heart attack, supposedly, but the timing was suspicious.
Left behind a wife with depression so severe she can barely function and two daughters.
Katriana, the eldest, has been paying off her father's debt ever since.
" Luca's voice goes flat. "The original loan was three hundred thousand.
Interest and fees have ballooned it to nearly the same amount despite five years of payments. "
I shake my head. "That's impossible."
"It's Victor Kedrov." Luca shrugs. "The man is a predator. He gives loans he knows people can't repay because default is where the real profit lives. He can tell her any sort of number and she has no choice."
I scrub a hand down my face. Murder is not the name of the game here but I want to wrap my hands around that fucker’s throat and personally watch the light of his life fade as the reaper rips his soul from his chest.
Luca pulls up another screen, this one showing building schematics and business registrations.
"But here's where it gets ugly. Victor doesn't just want his money back.
He has establishments throughout the city.
Hostess bars that are fronts for escort services.
Escort services that are fronts for something worse.
Women who can't pay their debts get offered alternative arrangements. "
My blood runs cold. "You think he’s threatened her with this? Trafficking her?"
“Makes sense. Something pushed her to make a wish.”
Luca pulls up surveillance from surrounding buildings and a few banking machines. I look at each of them featuring Kedrov entering Katriana’s building.
“What is this?” I want all the details.
"Kedrov outside Katriana’s building,” Luca confirms. “These were taken this morning. Showed up at her apartment at six a.m.”
“He puts hands on her.”
“How do you know?” Luca's jaw tightens as he asks.
“I bumped into her at the club like I mentioned earlier. What else do you have?”
"Her younger sister. Gemma. Nineteen years old, still in college."
The Red Letter Syndicate stands for something. Our people know we protect them. Kedrov doesn’t live within any sort of moral boundary. He’s the snake everyone should fear.
Katriana has spent the last five years quietly paying this debt. Did Jonah not know? If he did, why didn’t he help? Did she think she could just take care of the problem herself? Or was she with my brother for the money?
I flick away that last assumption. Katriana doesn’t have gold digger energy about her. I won’t even entertain that idea.
The rage that erupts through my veins is white-hot and absolute. It sears away every rational thought, every calculated response, every measured approach I have spent forty-six years perfecting. All that remains is the primal need to protect what is mine and destroy anyone who dares threaten it.
Katriana may not know she belongs to me yet.
But Victor Kedrov is about to learn.
"Get your coat." I pull out my phone and type a message to Rafael with fingers that tremble slightly from the effort of containing my fury. I hit send:
Might start something tonight. Keep your head on a swivel.
Luca stands and shuts off his machines. “Where we going?”
"We're paying Victor a visit."
Luca is already shrugging into his jacket, that familiar gleam of anticipation lighting his dark eyes. He used to be an assassin for Club Genesis before he got smart and joined our side, and there are moments when I remember why he was so very good at his former profession.
"Oh, sounds fun. Haven’t put a body in the ground in a few. What's the play?"
I fold Katriana's wish and slip it into my breast pocket, right next to my heart, where I can feel its weight with every breath.
"I'm going to make him an offer. Then we’ll see what he says." I head for the door, and Luca falls into step beside me. "If he refuses, you're going to help me bury the body."
The elevator carries us down into the Chicago night, and I watch the floor numbers descend with the cold patience of a man who has just discovered exactly how far he is willing to go for a woman who does not know she is already his.