Page 14 of The Enemy's Defector
And once more, I did my too-weak-to-speak act, faking my sluggishness and fatigue, as if I were on the fine line between staying awake and conscious or passing out from the pain. It did hurt. It fucking stung and ached to take a beating—again—but it was worth it in the end.
He gave up hitting me when I wasn’t as reactive, no longer flinching or bracing for all his hits just to give him the impression that I was about to pass out. Afterward, he sat near my chair, drinking and talking with someone on the phone on speaker. I’d really pulled off an Oscar-worthy performance of being unconscious for him to allow the conversation to be heard aloud.
“The orders are to move him around, not kick his ass,” the small voice said from the device.
I didn’t recognize it. The accent was too clean to identify where the speaker could’ve been from. It sounded like someone who was multilingual, and that wouldn’t help me.
The man sighed. “I know, but?—”
“But nothing, Hayden. The orders are to move him and that’s it.”
Hayden.I knew that fucking name. It was his surname, and the only reason it could matter to me was all due to Katerina. She’d run the sketchy surveillance footage through facial recognition programs she’d hacked into, and she’d matched one of the men spotted near the Ivanov building on the night of my father’s poisoning with that name.
Now, we’re getting somewhere.
Mr. Hayden, you’re a fucking dead man walking. Congratulations.
Even if I didn’t obtain any other intel from this experience of captivity, I could be victorious in having his name. I’d get out and hunt him down to kill him for his part in trying to assassinate my father, thePakhanof the Ivanov Syndicate.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Hayden replied curtly to whoever he was speaking to. “This ugly fucker’s being moved around all over the place as it is. He’s not going to know where the fuck he is. Or what day it is. No one’s gonna be tracking him after all this.”
I wished I could prove him wrong, that someone saw me being constantly relocated. My guess was that I was being transferred from one holding facility or warehouse to another, but even then, low soldiers and guards would notice a captive being moved.
For a fleeting second, I also wished that I’d never disabled my phone to eliminate tracking.
No. No tracking.If my brothers could send men after me as an official retrieval operation, then they’d show up too soon before I could get all the answers that I felt desperate to find.
Just a little longer.
Endure it and tough this shit out.
It’ll all be worth it.
It had to be worth it. Because those days and weeks of hunting for the enemy who wanted to take out Father had been so frustrating and fruitless, with dead ends and no direction, that I wanted to do whatever I could to figure out the mastermind behind this.
“And really,” Hayden said, using that laughing, cocky tone again, “it’s so fucking easy. It’s only a matter of time before we can get another one of them.”
My blood ran cold. Anger kept me heated up and nearly vibrating with an instant need to kill at what he said, but I refused to show that I was awake and listening. I had to linger under this guise to get all the intel I could.
But the mere thought of this independent contractor going after any member of my family? ‘
No fucking way.
Over my dead body will you harm my family.
I grappled with the guilt that Father had been poisoned. That was a hard mistake for all of us to get over. Just hearing the slight hint of danger aimed at my brothers was enough to turn me into an enraged beast ready to slaughter anyone in my way.
Protecting my family was something that I’d never slack on.
“We could kill this motherfucker and then go get another one?—”
“No, Hayden,” the man on the other end said. “That’s unacceptable. You follow the orders. Do you understand me? You don’t get to go rogue and do your own thing. You are hired to follow one fucking order and that’s the only thing you’ll do, dammit.”
“Calm down. Jesus.” Hayden huffed a weak laugh. “I’m not saying I’m going to kill this bastard or anything. I’ll do whatthey expect. But you can’t deny that this shit is taking forever. We could be doing so many more jobs in the meantime. We’re stalling, moving this asshole around, playing games and shit, but if we just killed him and moved on to the next hit, that’s more money and power to us. Right?”
“Wrong,” the caller continued, instructing Hayden not to deviate from the order they’d taken.
It proved that these guys were independents, but at no time did they tell me what I needed to know. They didn’t reveal who’d hired them to take me.
