Page 19 of The Brutal Arrangement

I knew better.

I was supposed to keep my head down.

I should’ve been minding my own business.

Not borderline befriending a woman entrenched in the Mafia.

Distance was the buffer I had to rely on now. And I sought it more than ever before, darting all the way through the mansion until I pushed open the doors to get outside.

I was trapped. I was suffocating under this instant panic attack. Just the idea of being shipped somewhere and forced to marry someone sickened me.

Slowing for a ragged inhale of the sweet, fresh air outside, I scrambled to understand how in the hell I’d gotten into this situation at all.

8

DAMON

After my attempt at working out—which didn’t give me a chance to vent any of my frustration in the end—I showered and headed out to do all that I could to find my brother.

Saul and Maxim knew just as well as I did that Nik should be the one to marry Katerina. Not me. He was the expert at espionage, at spying and extracting secrets. I was the one to punish those who schemed against the Ivanov Syndicate. But he had always been the one to find them.

“Where the fuck are you, Nik?” I whispered to myself as I drove to meet with John, one of the best spies I’d been relying on in this process of locating my twin. Many soldiers and guards had been delegated to assist me, but John had more or less become my go-to man for updates. He was a supervisor who’d been moving up steadily for years, and I could count on him.

I parked and got out of my car, hating how muddled my mind was about everything going on in my life. My father’s slow recovery. Maxim bringing a sister-in-law into the family. Nik being gone.

And this stupid marriage arrangement.

Of all my issues, that arrangement was the only thing I could fully control. I could agree or reject it. Waiting until Nik was found seemed like the best course of action, but then I also had to wonder if this arrangement of bringing Katerina closer and into the family as a potential enemy could be a way to find Nik faster.

“Anything?” I asked John once he stood and approached me at the restaurant where we’d agreed to meet.

He shook his head. “No.”

“Fuck.” I sat with him, aggravated. “There’s a good chance that he’s staying hidden on purpose.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” John said.

“Still…” I rubbed my jaw and realized I’d been tenser than usual, grinding my teeth too much from all this stress. “Even if he is staying hidden and not trying to get away, that doesn’t change the fact that someone took him in the first place.” And I was impatient to find out who the hell it was. Not necessarily the men who snatched him from that parking lot, but whoever would’ve ordered it to happen.

It had happened so quickly, too. I could remember it all like it was yesterday. Nik drove Maxim and Sloane to their first baby appointment at the doctor’s office, and while Maxim was groveling and making up to her for their issues, that other car pulled up close. Masked men slipped out and snuck Nik away.

Just like that, they got him away when they were distracted, which implied that they’d been watching us closely to pull that off.

Maxim had been so conflicted, wanting to chase down the men who took Nik but also needing to stay with Sloane and protect her. Fortunately, I had been there in a second car as backup. I, and the other Ivanov men, hadn’t waited to shoot at them and chase down my twin, but still, he was taken.

“We’ve gone over the security footage so many times,” John said, shaking his head. “And nothing.”

It was true. We had gotten into every bit of footage from all the businesses on the route where they’d driven away. We’d started a high-speed chase after him that day, and we didn’t lose that SUV once. Despite staying close, they’d brought in another SUV as a decoy, and that was how they’d slipped away.

“Because whoever hired those men knew they weren’t amateurs,” I replied darkly.

I was still pissed that when we pulled over the SUV we thought Nik was in, which was the decoy by that point in traffic, the driver killed himself to avoid being questioned.

“It’s unusual to deal with so few leads,” John said.

“It is, and that further convinces me that independent contractors took him. To transport him to our enemy.” I sighed, wishing things weren’t like this. “He’s got to be alive, though.”

“Because of those daily messages of codes he sends to his program?”

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