Page 135 of Beautiful Beast

“Left me for dead, Erik?”

“Hi, Sergei.”

“I’m coming for my daughter, you know.”

“You’re not getting your hands on either Anya or Nadia ever again. You understand me? Have a nice fucking life, Sergei.” I hang up.

He’s going to be a problem in the future, but that’s not something I need to deal with right now.

I enter the pile of rubble and search for Dante’s body or any traces of it. Blood or pieces of cloth. Flesh or brain matter. Something that tells me Dante is dead.

But there’s nothing.

It’s just a pile of stone and marble and cement and wood. Dante isn’t here.

Motherfucker.

He survived. I feel it in my fucking bones.

He must have made it out at the last moment. I drive down the road to see if he collapsed somewhere and died, but I drive up and down the road a few miles and don’t see him. I even check the woods around my house, but there’s no sign of him. No blood trail. No footprints anywhere.

Dante is alive, which means our war is not over. I failed in killing him, but that just means I’ll have to try again.

For now, Anya is my focus.

I return to the hospital just in time for Dr. Bailey to show. “We got the bullet out and stopped the bleeding. Anya is alive. But she’ll need to stay in the hospital for a few days to make sure there are no complications. Do you want to see her?”

“Yes,” Nadia and I say in unison.

Anya is asleep when we enter her private room. An oxygen tube is in her nose, and an IV is attached to her arm. She looks so peaceful.

Nadia and I stay by her side and wait until her eyes flutter open.

“Anya?” Nadia gasps.

Slowly, Anya looks at her sister for a long time before she looks at me. And even around the oxygen tube in her nose, she smiles.

ANYA

Nadia tells me everything. How Erik carried me out to the car. How they left Dante for dead. How they saved my life.

But Erik is quiet about something.

“What is it?” I ask in a groggy voice.

“Your father is still alive. I’m not sure if that’s good news or bad news, but what I do know is he’s going to make things challenging in the future.”

“We can handle him,” Nadia says. “We have no other choice.”

I look at Erik closer. “There’s something else.”

“How can you tell?”

“I’ve been studying your expressions for a while now. I can tell when you’re not telling me something.”

He clears his throat and inhales deeply before saying, “Dante is still alive. He must have made it out of the house before it exploded. The house is gone. All of it was for nothing.”

A chill spreads through me knowing Dante is still out there, but this is the Bratva and the Mafia. There will always be dangers. It won’t just go away because Erik kills one man.

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