Page 28 of The Mafia King's Baby

I shake my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The notebook.” His voice drops to something deadly calm. “The leather journal with encrypted records that document every corrupt official and criminal transaction Kulikov’s organization has conducted for the past six years. I’m sure it’s here, since he wouldn’t want to keep risking carrying it when you’d make such a perfect dupe.”

The words hit me like ice water. He’s talking about the mysterious journal I found in the bedside table drawer, the one filled with coded information and financial records that disappeared the night someone broke into my house. The evidence that convinced me Aleks wasn’t who he claimed to be. I could tell him it’s gone, but then I’d have to admit to knowing Aleks and lying about it.

I tilt my chin. “Even if I knew what you were talking about, which I don’t, I’ve never seen a notebook like that.”

“Wrong answer.” Lang moves closer, backing me toward the kitchen with predatory patience. “Kulikov wouldn’t leaveevidence that valuable where he couldn’t retrieve it. I’m convinced he hid it somewhere in this house, and you’re going to show me where.”

“I told you, I don’t know anything about?—”

“Stop lying!” The explosion of anger transforms his face into something ugly and dangerous. “You slept with him, didn’t you? Sweet little innkeeper spreading her legs for a Russian criminal because he told you what you wanted to hear.”

The crude accusation makes heat flood my face, but more than embarrassment, I feel rage at his assumption that intimacy equals complicity, that sharing my bed with someone means I’m automatically involved in their criminal activities. “Get out of my house.”

“Not until I get what I came for.” He reaches toward me, and I stumble backward into the kitchen. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, but either way, you’re taking me to that guest room and showing me where Kulikov hid my property.”

“No.”

The refusal comes out stronger than I feel, but it stops him momentarily. We stare at each other across the kitchen island, predator and prey sizing each other up before the next move in a confrontation I never wanted and don’t understand.

“You have no idea what you’re involved in,” Lang says, his voice dropping back to dangerous calm. “Kulikov doesn’t leave witnesses alive when they’ve outlived their usefulness. Help me recover what he stole, and maybe I can protect you from what’s coming.”

“I don’t need protection from anyone except you.”

“You stupid bitch.” The mask slips completely, revealing something vicious and entitled underneath. “You think because you live in this nice suburban neighborhood and pay your taxes that you’re safe from people like us? You think your middle-class morality is going to protect you when Kulikov decides you know too much?”

He moves around the kitchen island with sudden speed, reaching for my arm with obvious intent to force compliance through physical intimidation. But I know better. I know that compliance often leads to escalation rather than safety, that giving predators what they want rarely satisfies them completely.

I dodge his grab and catch him off balance, stepping hard on his foot with enough force to make him swear and stumble backward. The moment of advantage gives me time to put the kitchen table between us, but it won’t provide protection for long against someone clearly willing to use violence to get what he wants.

“You’re going to regret that.” He straightens up, his face twisted with fury that goes beyond professional frustration into something personal and vindictive. “I was going to make this quick and clean, but now you’ve made it complicated.”

His hand moves toward his pistol.

Terror floods my system, but underneath the fear, anger burns bright and clean. This man broke into my house, threatened me with violence, and now, he’s reaching for a gun because I won’t cooperate with his criminal demands. Whatever legitimate authority he might once have possessed, he forfeited it the moment he decided my safety was less important than his goals.

I grab the edge of the kitchen table and shove it toward him with desperate strength, wood scraping against tile as the heavy furniture slides across the floor. Lang throws his hands up to protect himself from the impact, stumbling backward toward the hallway as chairs scatter around him.

I’m about to dart around him and run for the back door when it explodes inward with a crash that makes the earlier breaking of the chain lock on the front door sound like a whisper. Wood splinters and metal hardware flies as someone enters my house with the kind of violent efficiency that speaks of professional training and deadly intent.

Aleks storms into my kitchen like a force of nature, but this isn’t the charming businessman who shared wine and conversation with me a week ago. This is someone harder and more dangerous, who moves with a lethal purpose that makes every survival instinct I possess scream at me to get the hell out of here.

He doesn’t acknowledge my presence or check to see if I’m injured. He focuses his attention entirely on Lang, and there’s something terrifying about his concentration, and in the way he seems to catalog threats and calculate responses in the space between heartbeats.

“Marcus.” His voice carries none of the warmth I remember from our conversations, replaced by something flat and professionally deadly. “You should have stayed in your own territory.”

“Kulikov.” Lang straightens up from where he’d been knocked off balance by the table, his hand still moving toward his weapon. “I wondered when you’d show up to protect your little whore.”

The insult transforms Aleks’s face into something that makes Lang take an involuntary step backward. Whatever restraint had been keeping him controlled disappears entirely, replaced by the kind of focused rage that ends with someone not walking away from the confrontation.

Aleks closes the distance between them with frightening speed, his hand intercepting Lang’s reach for his gun and twisting his wrist with enough force to make him cry out in pain.

What follows isn’t a fight so much as a controlled demolition. Lang might have federal training and field experience, but he’s facing someone who operates in a world where violence is a professional skill rather than a last resort. Aleks moves with brutal efficiency, countering every attempt Lang makes to gain advantage while systematically destroying his ability to continue fighting.

I press myself against the kitchen counter and watch in horrified fascination as two men try to kill each other in my home. Furniture crashes and breaks around them, dishes shatter as they slam into cabinets and walls, and blood spatters across surfaces I’ll never be able to look at the same way again.

Aleks is bleeding from a cut above his left eye, and dark stains spread across his shirt from injuries I can’t identify in the chaos of movement and violence. Lang is much worse, his face already swelling from impacts that sound like bones breaking, his movements becoming increasingly desperate and uncoordinated.

---