Page 11 of Lethal Alliance

“That is not your job.” I nod curtly at him. “You have done more than enough and suffered more than you should have. If there is anything your family needs—anything at all—come to me.”

I turn away, sick with shame.

It wasmyjob. My job to protect them, my job to see danger before it happened.

But I invited the danger into my home.

I took it into my bed.

The person I was trying the hardest to protectwasthe danger.

But that mistake ends now.

I’ll fix this, no matter who I have to fucking kill to make it right.

Dimitry and four of my men appear at my side. “We were too late,” Dimitry says grimly, holding out his phone. “TheGuapaweighed anchor half an hour ago. The Spanish coast guard are on the line. They need a reason to board.”

“Blyat.”I snatch the phone out of his hand. “You need to board that fucking boat,” I say in Spanish.

It takes ten minutes, a very heated conversation with a disgruntled Spanish minister woken from his sleep, and a sizable donation to an offshore account to get my point across. With every minute, I can feel the girls slipping further from my grasp.

“There’s fuck all we can do here.” I punch the end call button and stare around at the mass of paramedics, police, and crying families. “Leave two men here to watch the police investigation. We need to get to the lab.”

“Pavel has already hacked into the footage,” Dimitry says as we turn to leave. “He’s got the whole tech team on it. They’re tracing everything we can, from theGuapato Alexei Petrovsky.”

“Thatmudakcan’t have gone far. How the fuck did he disappear so fast? We had men right up his ass.”

Dimitry doesn’t answer. He knows it’s a rhetorical question. Alexei was gone before my men got anywhere near him. His meeting with Darya in that corridor was a decoy. The bastard played us, pulled men away from the ballroom at the one time I needed eyes on it.

I dropped the ball.

I don’t need anyone to tell me I fucked up.

The men acted on my orders. Orders I gave because I was watching the wrong goddamn target. I had everyone watching for a man with an eye patch, watching for anyone trying to talk to Darya.

I have nobody to blame for this but myself.

Myself—and Darya fucking Petrovsky.

And if I find her aboard that goddamn boat with her brother...

I close my eyes briefly, horrified at the effort it takes not to throw up everything in my gut.

What then? What thefuckam I supposed to do then?

Because even after all this, after her horrific betrayal, no matter how much I know I have to put a bullet between her eyes, I’m still not sure I’m actually capable of it.

And that weakness scares me almost as much as the thought of my daughters in the hands of a monster.

4

DARYA

At 5 a.m. the terminal begins to fill again. I stretch and yawn as if I haven’t had my eyes open and heart thudding for the past few hours. I exchange pleasantries in Arabic with the women beside me, who beam and chatter away.

I can’t help but wonder how long their smiles would last if they knew I was an unwed mother-to-be. Not to mention one who has a river of blood on her hands.

I feel a sudden, visceral longing for Roman, so savage it takes my breath away. The feeling isn’t logical. It’s just there. Like driving along a highway that hasn’t yet been completed and discovering halfway across a bridge that there is no road ahead. Over the past months, Roman has become the road I travel. My direction, my destination, and my traveling companion. His body has been my lodestone, his soul a beacon for my own. Without him I am profoundly, devastatingly lost.

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