“Maxim?”
I turned, facing the soldier who approached us in the hallway. Nik waited as well, paying attention to another report. The entire house was on alert tonight, and I doubted we’d be relaxing any time soon.
“Miss Black has been escorted back to your apartment,” he reported. “Anastasia asked to return to her room.”
Nik frowned, glancing at me. “Was Grandmother badly hurt?”
I shook my head. “It didn’t seem like it.”
The soldier also shook his head. “No. We’ve tended to her injury and the doctor stepped out of your father’s room to check on her, too. He saw no lingering concerns, and she insisted on having privacy to rest for the remainder of the night.”
That sounded like her. Whenever she felt vulnerable, she wanted space and time to get back to her usual cool self. She was a loner like that—or that intimidated about ever seeming weak.
So long as there weren’t any medical worries, I would leave her to it. I didn’t need her to be a distraction while my brothers and I investigated this matter. And it would take significant time to question everyone, go through all the security footage, and figure out how in the hell this could have happened with the increase of surveillance since Father was poisoned the first time.
“Thank you.” I resumed following the guards who’d led us to the man who’d shot himself, taking the easy way out of an interrogation and torture session. It was a well-known fact that we Ivanovs showed no mercy to those who trespassed or tried to harm us. In that regard, I wasn’t surprised that the man had killed himself to avoid facing our brand of justice. But it pissed me off, nonetheless.
“Damon is downstairs with the other man,” another guard said once Nik and I headed to the stairwell where blood and brain matter were splattered on the wall. The gory mess didn’t bother me. I’d seen worse. I’d caused worse. And I knew that as soon as we gave the men the all-clear, it would be cleaned and spotless once again.
Sloane doesn’t need to see this shit. She was tough, but it was unnecessary to be subjected to this.
“What other man?” Nik and I asked at the same time. With our senses heightened and on edge like this, it was important to keep in mind how quickly details could pop up as the incident unfolded. Clues would be noticed. More things would be found. It was all part of the investigation, and we had plenty of resources and staff to address a thorough review of this incident.
“Saul oversaw his capture just outside the building,” the soldier reported. “It seems there were two of them working together, one to get inside and the other as a lookout.”
Reaching the dead man who’d failed to poison my father, I grimaced and loathed how few clues we’d be able to get off him. He had come with the intention of being unidentified. No obvious signs of who he was. With his face—and head—a mess from his self-inflicted gunshot, there was no chance we’d be able to tell who he was. What looked like a black mask lingered, but that, too, was ripped and distorted from the gunshot.
I wasn’t going to hold my breath for any clues from him. He wouldn’t have broken in here with a wallet or any other identification on him.
But I had to hope the other man would be different.
I nodded once at another soldier who was supervising the scene. Acknowledging him was a courtesy, nothing more, and he was trained enough to handle this without my guidance.
Instead, I headed downstairs with Nik to find our brothers. Saul was pacing outside the largest room in the dungeon. More men were available, but they blended into the background as backup should anything go wrong. It was comical, that all these men would be necessary against the one lone asshole tied to the chair.
He didn’t have a chance in hell to get free.
Damon was the Demon, showing us all how damned good he was at torturing our enemies. Father had never reconsidered delegating Damon to lead the executions and grisliest methods of obtaining intel, and my brother reveled in it. We were all sick bastards at heart, unafraid to react to the world with violence and death, but Damon was something else.
He stood off to the side, seeming to calculate what tool he’d want to use next. So far, it seemed the dents and gaping cuts on the man were all from the hammer in Damon’s hand.
Before he could select a knife or something sharper from the table and wall of tools, he looked up, noticing my arrival. Nik glared at the bloody pulp of a man tied to the chair.
Saul turned too and approached us. “Is Grandmother all right?” he asked Nik. Then, frowning at me, he added, “Sloane?”
They knew that she mattered to me, but now wasn’t the time to wonder if they understood that she’d become more than just a guest. Her act of helping our grandmother was another piece of evidence that she was really getting involved here.
“They’re fine,” I answered as Damon exited the bloody room where enemies were tortured. We had several such spaces for this dark business, but this one was the most useful of them all with the biggest drains in the floor to hose blood and body matter into them before it’d all be ground up and disposed of.
“Anything?” I asked Saul and Damon.
“No,” Damon growled, using a cloth to wipe the blood off his knuckles. “He won’t say a fucking thing.”
Saul shook his head. “I doubt he will.”
“I’ve only gotten started,” Damon argued.
“Yeah. But I can tell.” Saul narrowed his eyes on the man who seemed to struggle to breathe. His chin rested on his chest as he tried to inhale air through the pain of his head that was so beaten.
“How?” I asked, glaring at the asshole. Most people had a breaking point, after all.
“I can just tell,” Saul said. “He’s numb. You can see it in his eyes. He’s not going to tell us shit.” He shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Where was he?” I asked. Over the course of the next couple of days, I would be given many reports about what happened tonight. Even though information would still be coming in, my brothers would be reported to as well and they could funnel the big picture to me.
“He was taken down outside. It sounds like they hacked into the security system and messed up the cameras’ feeds from the west side of the property. Once they had a window, the one rushed up to get inside and the other was lingering back.”
“Probably to secure an escape for the other,” Nik said.
I agreed.
“That’s why it’s always best to work alone,” he muttered.
It was. Not having backup was risky, but it was less to manage in case things went wrong in an operation. With all this rage I bottled in from someone trying to kill Father, though, I could only view what they said as cold facts of war against us.
For a long while, we shared the little we knew. Supervisors came to fill in more as they investigated, but none of it made me happy. The property had been fully searched. We were secure once more. But Nik’s guess didn’t please me.
“Maybe we’ve got a mole or a traitor,” he said.
I shook my head, not wanting to believe it. It was always possible, but we took measures to avoid one of our own turning against us like that.
“I can’t see how they’d get through the security like that, though,” Saul argued, saying what I wanted to. “We have too many independent firewalls and layers to manage that protect the surveillance cameras. Even a good hacker would struggle to skew our footage like that.”
Nik smirked. “Never underestimate what a hacker can and cannot do,” he mumbled.
Since he was a spy, I knew he had to deal with his share of hackers, both the ones he hired for our family and the ones he went after when he was spying on our enemies. As far as I knew, Nik had limited knowledge of how to hack anything, but he probably had more connections with cyberwarfare and cybersecurity than I did.
“Are you thinking of someone specific?” I asked him.
He furrowed his brow and hesitated to reply. “Maybe.”
“Is your hacker someone we could ask to investigate this? Would he be a resource to consider as we try to figure out who the fuck compromised our system?”
He shook his head. “She probably wouldn’t be available.”
“She?” Saul asked.
Nik nodded.
“Let me see what I can get out of this fucker first.” Damon cracked his knuckles as he turned to stare hard at the captured man. “I think he’s an independent agent. A contracted killer. He’s got nothing traceable. No scars, no tattoos, fucking nothing.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. If one of our enemies was trying to gradually pick at us and bring us down, this was a hefty escalation. Hiring an independent contractor meant they wanted to avoid being caught coming after us. And that would make the hunt that much harder.
“I’ll go back up and talk to the security team,” Saul said after Damon went back to the torture chamber.
“Good. Let me know of any developments. I’m going to check on Father again.” It still felt weird to be my brothers’ boss, but I wouldn’t slack in my interim duties now. I hated how this could sound like a power trip because I preferred when I was just one among them, one brother of the group. We worked best with teamwork as brothers, and I hoped again that Father’s recovery wouldn’t be set back at all.
Nik joined me, seeming pensive as the excitement and suspense of the incident faded. Without a word, he accompanied me to Father’s room. The nurse who’d so bravely hit the panic button wasn’t on duty anymore. She had been spared, taken to a guest room to rest and recover. Another nurse was in here now, a male, and he nodded at us upon our entry. Without needing to be told, he backed up and made himself scarce as Nik and I stood over Father’s bed.
He looked peaceful, yet not. Even in his sleep, he had a fierce appearance, but with the absence of his leadership, he seemed out of reach, locked away in this recovery he had to endure because someone had come to inject him with those drugs.
“I just had to see him,” I said after several minutes of quiet.
“Me too. Just to see with my own eyes that he’s all right,” Nik replied just as quietly.
Lying here unbothered, he seemed so protected and untouched by tonight’s danger. In the back of my mind, though, I was fully aware of how close he could’ve come to death—again. Security would need to be increased once more. I would spare no expense until he was back on his feet again and well, until we found our enemy who was coming at us.
“One day, we’ll be old like that,” Nik mused.
I frowned, glancing at him. “He’s not dead.”
“But he looks old.”
I wouldn’t deny that. In his sleep, and maybe because of the sedatives he was on, Father did appear paler and older.
“He’s not dead,” I repeated, unsure whether I was telling him or myself. Obviously, he was still with us, but just barely.
“One day, he will be, though.” Nik shook his head, seeming too stuck in his dark thoughts. “And when the time comes, he’d have so much to be proud of. He brought the family back from the threat of ruin from Beatrice’s affairs. He took the organization to greater wealth with his investment decisions.” Facing me with a somber gaze, he shrugged. “Sometimes, it’s hard to put it all in perspective.”
“To put what in perspective?” I asked, surprised by his deep, pensive mood. Father being poisoned had affected us all, but I had been so busy I hadn’t personally checked on whether my brothers were traumatized at all. They weren’t weak men. But everyone was vulnerable to suffering at times. We’d lost our mother. It would be a hard hit to lose our father, too.
“What I could be proud of when my time comes.”
I frowned, looking back down at my father and hating how Nik’s self-reflection struck a nerve with me. I’d been so stuck in relying on Father to outlive me for many more years that I hadn’t really considered my future or my personal accomplishments. We were one. All of us in this family, we acted as one.
“What would you be proud of?” he asked me without judgment or teasing.
Sloane.
I was already proud of taking her and keeping her in my life. I’d never regret how I’d found her and chosen to protect her as the mother of my future heir, whenever that could happen. I was proud of the chance to take care of her at all.
And I wondered if I could be proud to call her my wife, too. If she would be the reason to push me past my fear and loathing of commitments, because no matter how I wanted to color it or describe it, I was committed to her. I was connected with that strong woman so much that I was impatient to check on her as soon as I could.
