Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 83818 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 419(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83818 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 419(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
I have to bite my lip to stop from crying out myself. Is this what I’ve become? Immune to violence and more concerned with Ekaterina’s carpet than a man’s life?
“Where is he? What is he planning next?”
“I—I don’t know anything!” the man sputters, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth. His eyes are wild with fear, darting from Ollie to me as if hoping I’ll intervene. I look away, unable to meet his gaze because deep down, I know exactly how this is going to end.
“Is he telling the truth, my love?” Ollie asks me.
I have to shake my head. I can’t look in the man’s eyes. “No, of course not,” I whisper.
Ollie’s blade moves with surgical precision, cutting into flesh, severing tendons. The man’s cries turn into desperate sobs.
“Tell me.”
His body jerks against the restraints as if he’s trying to escape the agony, but there is no escape from Ollie.
I force myself to watch the way Ollie’s hands work—steady, controlled—as if he’s done this a thousand times before, and his hands function on sheer muscle memory. The way he twists the knife and lifts it before inserting it again is almost surgically clinical.
This isn’t just about getting answers, it’s about making sure this man suffers as much as possible in the process.
“Ollie,” I whisper. My voice breaks. He doesn’t hear me, or maybe he does, and he just doesn’t care. He’s too far gone, too dedicated to the work in front of him.
The man finally breaks, sobbing out names, places, anything to make it stop. But Ollie doesn’t stop. He doesn’t even slow down. All I can do is stand and watch, sick to my stomach, as the man I love turns into a monster before my eyes.
I try to close my eyes and block it all out—the sickening noise of flesh being destroyed, the slosh of blood, the man’s screams—but I can’t. This is who Ollie is. This is the man I love. And no matter how gently he touches me or how soft his caresses, no matter how lightly he whispers my name, this is the side of him that will always haunt me.
He turns to me and must see the nausea or fear because his demeanor softens for a moment. He wipes his hand, the mask slipping enough to let me see the man beneath the killer. “Are you alright, Renata?” His voice is soft, but his eyes are again hardened steel, a reminder that this violence is an irascible part of who he is.
“Yes,” I whisper.
His face falls. “I thought you were the only one who could detect lies, but even I know that’s not the truth.”
I swallow hard. “I’m fine,” I insist.
With a look of concern, he wipes his hands on a cloth like one might wipe them after an oil change rather than a man who just tortured someone mercilessly. He reaches his hand to me and places it on my shoulder. To my credit, this time, I don’t flinch.
“Go sit down, Renata,” he says softly. “We’re almost finished here.”
He holds the man upright in front of him and asks one more question. “Where is Carlos?” Ollie’s voice is low, deadly calm, every syllable a promise of pain if the answer doesn’t come quickly.
“He’s here,” the man says in a sob. “He’s here. It’s too late.”
He slumps over in the chair dead. Blood thrums in my ears, and ice pulses in my veins. I stare at Ollie, who pulls out his phone and dials Mikhail. They have a hurried, intense conversation in Russian where Ollie relays all the information he’s just extracted from the corpse seated in a chair in the tiled pathway of the room. The carpet is immaculate, not a drop of blood anywhere.
“We have what we need,” Mikhail says. “Lock everyone down.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ollie
He’s here. In America. The Cove. Or worse, right here—in our fucking home.
I stand with my phone still in my hand, the words of the conversation I just had with my brother echoing in my ears.
Lock everyone down.
The order is given. Protocols snap into place like clockwork, but none of it fucking matters because he’s already here.
If I know my brother, he's already bringing Isabella back from the hospital with a doctor. But none of this matters because the one thing I've spent years trying to avoid is now staring me in the face: our enemy has come to us. Everything we've done, everything we've trained for, the safety protocols—it's all gone up in fucking flames. He could be in our home, and it could be too late.
I turn to look at the slumped-over body of the man I killed, wishing I had maybe slowed shit down a little. I wanted more details. His last words ring in my head like a death knell.
He’s here. It’s too late.