Page 69 of In Her Blood
Lina.Her face finally came into focus, helping to sharpen the world around them. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but all he saw in her eyes was worry as she knelt in front of him.
His head still throbbed, but he knew the difference between a solid hit and a gunshot. For starters, if he’d taken a shot to the brain, he wouldn’t be conscious. He wasn’t sure why Grisha would have opted to knock him upside the head, but it had to have been Grisha—the bastard was the only one who’d been close enough.
For that matter, it had to have been Grisha’s gun that had damn near deafened him. But that would mean Grisha had murdered the piece of shit he’d been protecting for the last nine fucking years.
Otto raked his gaze over Lina again, just to make extra sure she hadn’t miraculously learned to hide her tells from him. Or that he hadn’t been out of it enough to miss something with his first assessment. But he saw no blood, no sign of injury.Thank fuck.He grabbed her to him and hauled them both to their feet, ignoring the way his head tried to go for another swim with the movement.
“Otto—”
“I’m fine,” he grunted, rolling her bodily behind him as his gaze shifted forward and he took in the rest of the scene.
He hadn’t hallucinated Pyotr’s weirdly unsatisfying death. The bastard was sprawled on the ground, a pool of blood around his head and brain matter decorating the floor in a wide splatter beyond. Pyotr’s demise ought to have been a relief.
But Grisha still stood before them, armed and looking somewhere between bored and agitated. He held Orlov by the arm with the hand not keeping hold of his Glock, as if he were restraining her. Yet it didn’t look like she was putting up a fight. She’d even turned herself bodily away from the sight of her precious lover’s corpse, though tears dripped from her chin. She almost looked as though she was curlingtowardGrisha, even.
“You fucking shot your charge,” Otto said when his eyes clashed with Grisha’s darker stare.
Grisha shrugged. “You’re welcome. Honestly, that boy never thought about anything beyond his own immediate self-interest.” He released Orlov’s arm in favor of settling his hand at her nape. “Still, he served my needs well enough.”
“Y-you didn’t have to k-kill him,” Orlov sobbed.
A sneer curled Grisha’s lips and he dropped his glare to her bowed head. “Yes, Katenka, I did. And do you want to know why? Because that baby in your womb ismine, and absolutely nothing in this world matters more to me than securing the future of my family.” He lifted his hand into her hair, tugging her head up and back and forcing her to meet his stare. “Which means you, my dear, are coming with me, where I will make sure you get everything you could possibly need to ensure the child growing inside you—mychild—is born healthy.”
Orlov gasped. “B-but … you said you couldn’t—”
“I lied.”
Otto ground his teeth to keep from gaping and kept his clenched fists locked at his sides. The shit Grisha was saying was insane, but Otto knew better than to assume the other man was just running his mouth in the heat of the moment. Every movement was calculated. And it was no coincidence Grisha’s gun remained half-pointed at Otto’s chest.
If Otto even started to reach for his weapon, he’d be dead before he finished bending his arm.
But he didn’t need to. Lina had taken advantage of being swept behind him to carefully slip his gun free of his waistband. He hated the idea of her being the one to draw fire, but for the moment, their options were limited. All he could do was hope to intervene quickly enough to keep her alive.
No sooner did the thought cross his mind than Lina shifted herself to poke her head out from behind him the way she tended to do. “Are you fucking serious right now? I thought that was Pyotr’s baby!”
Orlov wrapped her arms around herself. “It is!”
Grisha let out an exasperated sigh. “I know you’re not the brightest crayon in the box, Katenka, but I assure you, I’ve taken every measure to make this happen.” He lowered his hand back to her nape. “Mourn what you think you’ve lost and move on. If Pyotr had been enough for you, you never would have allowed me into your bed to begin with. If you gave two shits about this woman”—he gestured with his gun in Otto and Lina’s direction—“you would have found a way to warn her of Pyotr’s scheming.”
Lina sucked in a ragged breath as Otto watched Orlov avert her gaze to the blood-splattered ground.
“You wanted Pyotr because you believed he, as the male heir, had the power to protect you in this hard world,” Grisha continued, speaking to Orlov but now holding his hard stare outward. This message was for all of them. Whatever he was saying, these were the words he most wanted to make sure they heard.
Orlov squeaked as if she wanted protest.
Grisha kept talking. “But you chose me, because it was me who left you satisfied.” His fingers flexed around her throat. “Congratulations, Katenka. You’ll still get the prestige and protection you craved, only not from a Nikolaev son. You’ll get it from me—Grisha Konstantinovich Morozov.”
The words hit Otto like a roundhouse to the gut, forcing the air from his lungs and half his common sense from his brain. There was no fucking way Grisha was a Morozov. Mikhail had vetted every one of his family’s guards.
“No,” Lina breathed behind him.
Grisha smiled slowly, the expression cold.
Shock washed over Orlov’s face. “You’re … what?”
“Konstantin,” Lina repeated, louder. “As inPakhanKonstantin?” Her free hand latched onto Otto’s arm in a vice grip. “It wasn’t Pyotr. It was you who sent those Morozovs after me last week!”
“Da.” Grisha raised his gun, keeping it aimed at Otto. “And it was so easy to frame him for it, to cast that shred of doubt. I didn’t even have to push to get Pyotr screaming that you were setting him up. All the little dominoes fell all on their own after that.”
