I know before I answer the call that I’m too late.
I wanted to give Sergei the benefit of the doubt. Time to put things right. He has been by my side for as long as I can remember, and I allowed my own sense of loyalty to misjudge his.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!
“Pakhan.” Ivana’s voice travels from the phone to my ear, cold and clinical, beating the blood gushing through my veins into submission. “The asset has been taken.”
She doesn’t need to say anything else.
I grip the phone so tightly I could crush it in my bare hand.
I didn’t want to be here at the casino tonight. I’ve spent the entire evening thinking about going home to find Gianna in my bed. Picturing her hair fanned across the pillows, her full breasts and pink nipples winking at me to be sucked, her legs open wide and inviting me in. But I lingered out of a sense of fucking duty.
Duty to the family rather than duty to the woman I love.
The woman who has switched a light on inside me and painted the world in vibrant colors I never knew existed until now.
Gianna, who has taught me that blood isn’t always thicker.
If Xander fucking Amory so much as touches a hair on her head, I swear to God, I will chop him into tiny pieces myself and send bits of him to every single member of his fucking Sicilian family.
The casino clientele doesn’t register in my line of vision. Something in my expression must warn them to keep out of my way, and they part like the Red Sea, giving me an unobstructed route out of the building.
Outside, Marco is waiting by the car, the passenger door open.
“I’m driving.” I don’t wait for him to object or climb into the passenger seat. The car is speeding out of the lot before the door has even slammed shut behind me.
I don’t check out Marco in the rearview mirror, standing where I left him outside the casino. I need to remain focused. I need to keep this red-hot anger burning inside me until I’ve obliterated the Amory mob from this planet.
I’ll deal with Sergei later. If he sticks around. He’ll know what’s coming to him, and if he has any sense, he won’t wait for Xander Amory to offer him protection, he’ll get his sorry ass out of this country and disappear somewhere in the back of beyond. Even then, I’ll still find him. I’ll hunt him down to the fucking Antarctic if that’s what it takes.
My knuckles are white on the steering wheel.
My jaw is clenched so tightly, I can feel my back teeth grinding.
Good. I’ve been suppressing everything that makes me Pakhan since Gianna got under my skin, but without this simmering fury, I’ll never be able to protect her. I only hope that she can learn to live with this. The real me. Rather than the idealistic image of me that she must have created inside her head.
But first, I have to get her back.
The road belongs to me. I don’t stop for traffic signals or pull over to let the emergency services pass me by. Tonight, every other fucker on the road makes way for me like I’ve got a huge fucking beacon on the roof warning them to move or I’ll shoot.
I don’t even have to think about where I’m going. I’ve avoided it for long enough that the route is imprinted behind my eyelids with indelible ink.
I drive straight into Amory territory, and what do you know, the place is fucking deserted. Almost like they were expecting me.
I stop the car in plain sight in the middle of the industrial land occupied by the Amory Corporation. I climb out of the car and start walking towards the first building, a gun in each hand.
A sense of serenity takes hold. I should’ve done this a long while ago when Xander first started systematically trying to destroy my operation. But maybe I needed Gianna in my life to give me a sense of purpose.
“Come and get me, fuckers!”
I fire a round of bullets into the first warehouse.
When the aftershock settles, there’s nothing but silence. Not a whisper of a leaf in the breeze, no birds rustling their feathers, not even an insect buzzing around my head. It feels as if the ground beneath my feet is holding its breath, but not a soul from Amory Corp makes an appearance.
“No? Have it your way!” My voice echoes around the warehouses and bounces straight back at me.
I shoot up the next building. Keep walking. The third building receives the same treatment.
“Stop being a fucking coward and come and get me! This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Well, here I am!” I spread my arms wide, exposing my body to the retaliating gunfire I’m waiting for.
Still nothing.
“Pakhan?”
I’ve been so in the zone of what I’m going to do to Xander Amory when he shows his zhelty trus face, that I never heard my own people coming up behind me.
Ivana places a hand on my arm, forcing me to lower my weapon.
She isn’t alone. Tamara and Marco are with her, and I don’t need to turn around to understand that I’m surrounded by my loyal hand-picked men.
“Go home.” I keep my eyes fixed on the Amory Corp sign above the closest warehouse. “This is between me and the Sicilian trus.”
“You know we can’t do that.” Ivana’s voice is calm and steady. “We’re in this together, Pakhan.”
Without warning, I fire another round of bullets into the next building.
“Stop, Pakhan.” Tamara this time. “This isn’t how we operate.”
“No?” I don’t look at her. “Tell me, how do we operate then?”
“We’re better than this,” Ivana takes over. “We hit him where it hurts.”
“I’m listening.”
My mind is still focused on finishing the man responsible for taking my woman, but I’m not so blinded by bloodlust that I won’t listen to what she has to say. Ivana is the most calculating of the two sisters, often two or three steps ahead of me in this game of organized crime. The fact that she’s here is all I need to know about her unquestioning loyalty.
“We burn down his territories. Xander Amory is all about money and power. We start here. A warning that we will not lie down and take his shit. Then we move onto the next territory, and the next.” She pauses. “He’ll know who is responsible, so we target some of our own properties, misdirect the blame. I have men in place, Pakhan. I’ve emptied the warehouses, moved our assets into storage.”
While I’ve been spending my time with Gianna, Ivana has once again, gotten ahead of the game and manipulated the chess pieces in our favor.
“Talk to me.”
She explains which of our territories she has prepared to torch. They have already been targeted by Xander in his relentless attacks, making it easy for us to set the blame at his feet. I don’t want to lose more assets, but I have to look at the bigger picture. I can’t see a future that doesn’t include Gianna, and this war with her brother-in-law must end before I can win her back.
“Where is Andrej?”
Ivana shrugs. “He was at the house earlier today. Before—”
“Before they came for the printzessa,” Tamara interjects. “He told her that the wedding was part of the plan to take down Xander Amory. She was a little … distressed.”
My fists clench around the weapons in my hands.
I love my little brother, but his ruthlessness has no boundaries and then it becomes a liability. “I’ll handle Andrej.” There is still the more pressing matter of what to do about Sergei’s betrayal.
“I tried to stop them, Pakhan.” Ivana is all coiled energy waiting to be set free. Together, she and I will be unstoppable with the mood I’m in, and I pity anyone that tries to get in our way. “I shot Sergei.”
I know how difficult this would’ve been for her—Sergei is like a father to her and Tamara—but I also know that they will do whatever it takes to protect me and the people I love.
“Then all we need to do is follow the trail of blood.”
The industrial estate is still silent. Darkness has settled upon the warehouses like a cozy blanket, and I have the unsettling feeling that Xander was expecting us. Like Ivana, he is sacrificing a territory for the bigger picture. But it will not win him Gianna Sedric.
She is mine, she is wearing my grandmama’s diamond and sapphire ring, and I protect what’s mine with my life.
There is more than one way to lure a rat from its hole.
I turn around, raise my weapons above my head and fire. Within moments, my men start moving forward in formation from their hiding places and close in on the Amory buildings. I’m confident that the area has been evacuated of people. They’ve had my warnings. Unlike my nemesis, I’m not here to murder innocent people in cold blood.
Ivana came prepared. Within minutes, the buildings light up like funeral pyres, the angry flickering flames casting an orange glow across our faces. The fires hiss and crackle. The heat is immense; sweat beads on my upper lip and trickles down my face and spine.
But I get zero satisfaction from razing my enemy’s assets to the ground.
While he has Gianna in his protection, there isn’t enough room in the city for the both of us.
“Pakhan?” The flames are reflected in Ivana’s flickering eyes, adding a devilish glow to her serious features. “Do I give the order to proceed?”
I nod once. I trust her when she says that she has moved our assets into storage, but I would destroy everything I own to have Gianna back in my arms.
“Proceed,” she snaps into her radio device.
One word.
That’s all it takes to set the burning wheels in motion, and I follow Marco back to the car, knowing that, by the end of tonight, both my assets and those of my nemesis will be seriously depleted. Dirty gray plumes of smoke bounce across the rooftops and spread out across Chicago like ancient tribal signals. Xander will already know that I am coming for him.
I don’t look behind me as I climb into the passenger seat of the car, and Marco starts the engine.
“Where to?”
“We follow the mole.”
Here’s the thing about moles: they spend their lives digging underground, but they always surface eventually, and when this one does, I’ll be waiting for him. Xander Amory will not put his own neck on the line for Sergei, even if he did orchestrate the attack on my property to kidnap Gianna. Sergei will have served his purpose. He is expendable.
What I don’t understand is why he betrayed me.
What did Xander promise him? Money? An escape route from this way of life? Or does their alliance go way deeper than anyone else realizes?
Marco takes the back routes through the city, avoiding the screaming sirens of the emergency services, to the suburbs where Xander Amory lives with his family.
I should’ve ended the mole’s life sooner, and this is something that I will have to live with. But Xander Amory will not get away with sneaking into my home and taking the woman I love.
No matter what it takes.
