Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 79312 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 397(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79312 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 397(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
The driver and the man next to me look at each other in the rearview mirror.
“We are friends of your sister, Vera,” one finally says. “Call her.”
Vera.
When the men don’t respond, I realize he’s talking to me.
“I don’t have my phone.”
“Shit. You lost your bag in the crash?”
I look around me wildly as if it’s somehow going to spawn into the interior of the car. Of course I don’t have my bag.
“Yes.” I don’t tell them Timur threw my cell phone away before they came. It feels foolish to give them more ammunition against him when they already tried to kill him. The world goes in and out of consciousness as if someone’s shutting the lights on and off.
It’s warm in here, a stark contrast to the cold fear that had gripped me earlier. The man who captured me holds me against him with a tenderness that defies his rugged exterior, an unexpected gentleness that catches me off guard. I tell myself to be wary. No one is here to protect me.
My head rests on his shoulder, and instinctively, he wraps a protective arm around me, cocooning me in his embrace. I blink against impending sleep, but the warmth is soothing, a balm to my frayed nerves. I can’t think beyond the threat of sleep lulling me into a reluctant surrender.
I can’t… think.
Yet one word surfaces, intense and surprising in its clarity: safe.
CHAPTER FIVE
Viktor
I’ve got her. She’s with me. I feel like I’m dreaming.
Lydia Ivanova is asleep in my arms.
“I’m going to beat the fucking shit out of you once I’ve got her safe,” I tell Lev. I can’t believe the asshole had the nerve to drug her against my wishes. I haven’t raised my hand to Lev since he was a dumbass teen who thought he was invincible, and I saved his ass from a rival gang he thought he could take. That was years ago.
Lev swallows. “I know.”
She’s mine.
Mine.
“Don’t kill him,” Aleks mutters, his eyes darting from the rearview mirror to mine. “If he didn’t do that, she’d have fought you and probably opened the door or something.”
I growl and look out the window, reluctant to admit he probably did the right thing. I could’ve handled her if she fought me. I might have even liked it.
“I told you I had her. It’s easy enough to restrain her, you fucking asshole.”
She stirs against me, and I lower my voice. “Now how will she trust me knowing we took her and drugged her?”
Lev shakes his head. “Don’t overestimate how important it is to get her safe first, Vik. Look, you’re not thinking straight. Once you—”
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” I snap. I do. He doesn’t understand how many times I’ve thought about this, about her. How goddamn determined I am to make sure that she’s safe, secured, and well protected. “Let me make this clear. None of you so much as fucking breathes on her again.”
“Jesus, Viktor, don’t take your anger at Yudin out on us,” Aleks says.
Rage claws at my chest when I think of what could’ve happened tonight, but it isn’t misplaced. I breathe in to settle my fraught nerves the way Kolya taught me.
Aleksandr’s phone rings, coming through loudly on the speakers. Lydia stirs against me.
“Shut it off,” I snap. “For fuck’s sake.”
“It’s Mikhail,” Aleks argues. There’s an unspoken rule that we answer Mikhail’s calls immediately, without question, no matter the time of day.
“I don’t care.”
Lev and Aleks share a look before Lev takes the call. “Yeah. We’ve got her.” He shakes his head. “No, he got away, but we had a backup crew below the bridge, and we’re confident they’ll get him.”
They have strict instructions to find him and then deliver him promptly to me. No one gets to touch a hair on his head.
They speak in hushed tones until, finally, he ends the call.
“Mikhail wants an update.”
“Text him.”
“Viktor,” Aleks begins, looking at me in the rearview mirror again. “You have to be reasonable.”
I hold his gaze for a few seconds before he snaps back to looking at the road.
“Let’s pretend for a moment this were Harper,” I say in a low voice. “Let’s pretend you just fucking got her away from someone who not only planned on marrying her but fucking using her and then killing her.”
A muscle tenses in Aleks’s jaw. “I get it,” Aleks finally says. “I just want you to be rational.”
“I’ll be rational when Timur fucking Yudin’s no longer breathing and the Ledyanoye Bratstvo is destroyed. I’ll see reason when I put a ring on her finger and secure her safety to me. Until then, I’ll be the most unreasonable son of a bitch you’ve ever fucking met.”
We lapse into silence, only broken by occasional updates from Lev, texting the rest of our brothers. She stirs against my shoulder as I make my plans. Until I get further updates, I have one goal: keep her safe.