Page 6 of The Russian's Innocent Prey
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and tried to push her name out of my head, but it clung there like smoke. Five years. Five fucking years since I’d seen her face, since I’d been close enough to smell her perfume or hear her laugh or watch the way she moved through a room like she owned it.
Five years since I’d kissed her in that back room and felt my control crack like thin ice.
She’d been twenty then. Young and reckless and so goddamn beautiful it had taken everything I had not to press her against that wall and take everything she’d been offering. The memory of her mouth under mine still hit me at the worst possible moments—usually when I was trying to sleep or focus on work or pretend I was the kind of man who could be trusted around his best friend’s little sister.
Twenty-five now. Still too young for me, but no longer the girl who’d danced with fire just to see if she could get burned.
The phone on my desk rang, startling me out of thoughts that had no business being in my head during office hours. I grabbed it without checking the caller ID, grateful for the distraction.
“Antonov.”
“Mr. Lev?” The voice was familiar—Dmitri, one of the guards assigned to my father’s house. But there was something wrong with his tone, something that made my blood turn cold. “You need to come. Now.”
The world tilted sideways.
“What happened?”
“Your father. He’s... there was an attack. We’re taking him to the hospital.”
The phone slipped from my hand, clattering against the desk as I bolted to my feet. Hospital. Attack. The words echoed in my head like gunshots, but they didn’t make sense. My father was untouchable. Had been for thirty years. He didn’t get attacked—he was the one who did the attacking.
I was moving before I consciously decided to, grabbing my jacket and keys with hands that felt like they belonged to someone else. The elevator ride down to the parking garagelasted forever, each floor marked by a soft ding that sounded like a countdown.
The hospital was across town, but I made the drive in fifteen minutes through traffic that should have taken thirty. Red lights were suggestions. Speed limits were for people who didn’t have family bleeding out in emergency rooms.
Family. The word tasted bitter in my mouth because it was such a small word for such a massive lie. My father was all I had left. Had been for twenty-seven years, ever since the fire that took my mother and my twin brother. Since the night that burned the softness out of me and left nothing but scar tissue and steel.
The hospital hit me like a physical blow—that cocktail of antiseptic and fear and death that clung to everything despite the best efforts of industrial-strength air fresheners. I’d smelled it before, too many times, but never when it was my blood on the line.
“Mikhail Antonov,” I told the woman behind the admissions desk, my voice coming out rougher than I’d intended. “Where is he?”
She looked up at me with the kind of practiced sympathy they probably taught in hospital administration classes, and I knew before she opened her mouth that the news wasn’t going to be good.
“Are you family?”
“I’m his son.”
Her expression shifted, became more careful. More professional. “Room 314. Third floor.”
The elevator ride felt like descending into hell, each floor bringing me closer to a truth I wasn’t ready to face. The hallway on the third floor was too bright, fluorescent lights that made everything look washed out and artificial. Room 314 was at theend, and I could hear the machines before I saw them—the steady beep of monitors, the mechanical whisper of a ventilator.
My father looked small in the hospital bed. Smaller than I’d ever seen him, hooked up to more tubes and wires than should fit in one human body. His skin was gray, his breathing shallow, and when he opened his eyes and saw me standing in the doorway, I knew I was looking at a dead man.
“Lev.” His voice was barely a whisper, but it carried the weight of thirty-seven years of history. “Come here.”
I moved to the bed on legs that felt like lead, my mind cataloging the damage with the kind of clinical detachment that had kept me alive in situations like this. Gunshot wounds. Multiple. Close range, judging by the powder burns. Professional work, but sloppy—whoever did this had wanted him to suffer.
“Who?” I asked, pulling a chair close to the bed.
He shook his head, a movement that cost him. “Doesn’t matter. They’re already dead.”
That should have surprised me more than it did. But my father had been in this business longer than I’d been alive, and he hadn’t survived by leaving loose ends.
“Listen to me,” he said, his hand finding mine with surprising strength. “There are things... things I never told you. Should have told you years ago.”
“Save your strength—”
“No.” The word came out sharp enough to cut. “This can’t wait. I’m dying, Lev. We both know it.”
