Page 67 of Conquer
He sighs and grasps my hands, spinning around to face me in the same motion. I wind up caught in his embrace, forced to crane my neck to meet his gaze. Gone is any ounce of a barrier—he lets me see all of him clearly. The shadows bathe his beautiful features in a mixture of darkness and light. Much like who he is at his core, I suspect. A man capable of the tenderest love imaginable…
And yet equally ruthless, shaped by the hell he grew up in. Is it fair to even expect such a creature to play by the rules of the very world that chewed him up and spit him out?
I can’t decide as his eyes scan mine, hunting for a reaction. I’m not sure what he finds. Dread? Concern? Desperation just to learn more about him?
“I would lie to you,” he tells me as his thumb ghosts my cheek in a reverent caress. “I would. If I knew that it would shape your opinion of me… I would lie merely to keep you. But in the end, it wouldn’t. Trust?” He makes the word sound more foreign to him than any other concept, flicking his tongue along his lower lip just to sample the aftermath. Lowering his mouth to my ear, his arms shift around me, crushing me against him. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? My trust. I could entrust the truth to you. But warn me now if it could change this. Us.”
I inhale sharply, startled by the raw heat in his voice. What the hell could he reveal? And would anything truly change my opinion of him? It could. That’s the scary fucking part—never mind my trust in him, do I trust my heart to have picked the right man to claim it?
It didn’t do so good of a job the last time.
“It could,” I confess, flinching as he stiffens. “But you need to trust me to handle the truth.”
“So ask me,” he commands, his voice concealing the hint of a dare. “I will tell you anything you want to know.”
I swallow hard; the gravity of the offer isn’t lost on me. Tentatively, I decide to start with the obvious, horrible suspicion tossing around my brain ever since Irina first implied it. “Do… Do you hurt people?” I don’t even know how else to phrase it. “Like how you were—”
“No!” He wrenches back from me, his expression pained. “I do not trade in people. Never.”
“Okay,” I murmur, smoothing my fingers along his jaw until he stills, his nostrils flaring at the mere suggestion. “So, what is it you do, then?”
Illegal or not, anything has to be better than human trafficking.
Right?
“You need to understand something about my family…” He moves to the bed, sitting on the edge with his back to me. His shoulders are rigid, his posture taking on the tense, stone-like stiffness that’s become a hallmark of when he reflects on his past. I can’t imagine how painful this is for him to face—and the true magnitude of darkness those memories may hold. “My father belonged to a family well-known in Russia and beyond for their ruthless grip on power. TheKoslovs.”
He says that name the same way he referred to Irina and her exploits while speaking to Milton. With utter disgust and loathing.
“Various branches dabble in their own aspects of crime—some so evil you couldn’t fathom them. As far as Maxim and I are concerned, our father dealt primarily in weapons. Stealing them from various military strongholds or manufacturers and then selling them to the highest bidder on the black market. Whether it be to mercenaries, or crime lords terrorizing parts of Africa, money dictates the sale rather than morality.”
“So, is that what Maxim does?” I ask, advancing toward him. “He sells weapons?”
“And more.” He inclines his head as if gauging for himself just how much more I’m willing to hear. In the end, he says, “His club? He uses it primarily as a front to swindle blackmail and favors from powerful clients or rivals. He doesn’t employ the same tactics my old master did, mind you, but the aim is the same.”
“I might have been able to guess that much eventually,” I admit, thinking of Geoff, the man I met there. He made scoring entry to the club sound comparable to winning the lottery, though he had also implied the shadowy nature of Maxim and his operations. “So what is it you do?”
“Me?” He sighs, and from this angle, I catch how his eyes flicker toward the windows, cold and distant. “I have a stranglehold on one of the premier pharmaceutical manufacturers in the world. When I took control, Eingel was little more than a blip on the map—a small, though pioneering, biotechnical firm. Now, they corner the lion’s share of the market. Insulin. Lab equipment. Research studies regarding various vaccines to illnesses, some of them newly discovered. But one drug that makes up most of our portfolio is one used by paramedics to treat heroin overdoses. It’s a fairly new delivery system, allowing it to be given with the same ease one might use to administer an epinephrine pen.”
“But?” I croak, sensing a horrible caveat looming on the horizon.
He shifts to face me, his expression open and wary. It’s his unease that makes me steel myself against the truth. His seeming resignation to the fact that whatever he’s about to reveal, I won’t accept. And yet he’s taking the risk to trust me with it, all the same.
“The drug is a form of Naloxone, engineered to be effective within seconds of administration. But I ensure its demand more than matches the supply.”
He pauses deliberately, as if forcing me to ask the magic words.
“How?”
“By taking steps to ensure the flow of heroin continues unabated,” he says. “Using my influence to ensure incoming shipments into the city aren’t entirely seized by law enforcement, for one. Supplying dealers through untraceable methods. No matter how fierce a campaign some praise-hungry politician mounts against ‘the war on drugs,’ my interests are never threatened.”
He sounds ice-cold. No bluster. No bravado. One hundred percent honest.
And I feelpunched. Swaying, I grapple for the edge of the mattress and sink onto it. “We can’t mention that to my parents at Christmas dinner,” I croak. I’m surprised when I blink to find moisture building behind my eyes. Out of shock? Fear? Or perhaps just pure sadness for the fact that someone as beautiful, and intelligent can never rise fully above the darkness that bore him.
“Tell me why,” I whisper before the horror can build to an unbearable level. “I want to hear you explain it to me.”
The bed shifts as he stands, his steps heavy. “Maxim was given control of our family’s assets from the time he was ten years old,” he confesses. “I was givennothing.Always, I had to fight and scrape to gain a fraction of what the chosen heir had handed to him on a silver platter. Always. You don’t understand… In our world, power is money. Money islife. If I couldn’t outwit them, garner my own resources to stay ahead, I would have drowned before I realized the water was even above my head. It is a cruel world, and cruel measures are required to survive in it. I refuse to lie down like a good dog. Never again will I be used as a toy in another’s game.”
