Page 51 of Savage Love

Last night was an accident. A natural thing, nothing anyone had done. But that doesn’t change the way I saw a blood-soaked bed and saw Lidiya all over again, felt that tearing pain in my chest, the memory of her cold hand in mine as fresh as if it were yesterday, and not twelve years ago.

If there is nothing I love, there is nothing that can be taken from me.The words I repeated to myself, over and over in the wake of her loss, an echo of what Vladimir said to me, ring in my head again. I can’t stop what I feel for Elena, not now. It’s entirely possible that I never could. But I can stop myself from allowing it to take over. To blunt my edges and make me helpless to keep her safe again.

And if nothing else, there’s one simple fact, as selfish as it is.

I can’t bear to feel the pain of that kind of loss again. I have long believed that there is very little left in this world that could kill me, as skilled and well-trained as I am.

But that would end me, when no one else has been able to.

—

Jacob is waiting for me when I head back to the Kings’ arsenal to get geared up. He glances up at me as he cleans a pistol, giving me a grin. “Good to see you, lad,” he offers up amicably, setting it back down on the workbench in front of him. “Connor and Liam said you’d be coming along.”

I don’t know Jacob well, but I know him well enough to like him. He was Connor’s right hand in England, when Connor went by a different name and ran a different organization, before Saoirse and her scheming father dragged him back to take up his mantle as the heir apparent to the Boston Kings. Connor had brought his men back with him and kept Jacob in the same role he’d had before, without any argument from Jacob, it seemed.

What I know of him is enough—that he’s a tough and honorable man, someone good to have at your back in a fight. I have no qualms about going into a job side by side with him, and that’s all that matters to me.

“Should be a quick in-and-out,” Jacob offers up as he sets another gun down. “Shipment is on time; everything else is as it should be. If Gonzalez sends his men to fuck with it, as we expect that they will, then we take them down. No talking, no negotiating, boss says. There’s been enough of that with the top guys. Gonzalez knows the consequences of continuing to push. They fuck with us, they find out.”

I nod grimly, ignoring Jacob’s gallows humor. At another time, I might have been willing to engage in the banter—it’s not unusual. I’ve long since lost the fear of these kinds of situations, and I know Jacob is skilled, but there’s always something that can go wrong when bullets start flying. There’s rarely been a man I’ve known who didn’t use a little dark humor to deflect that. But right now, with all of my past memories crowding in and the sight of Elena bloodied and pale too close for comfort, I can’t find any humor in me.

“Look—” Jacob shifts a little, turning to face me with his back to the workbench. “I know this is personal for you. I’m willing to let you take point on it, if you want. Technically I’m the man in charge of this job, but you’ve got a hell of a lot of experience on me, and I know it.”

“We have different skill sets,” I tell him tersely. “You’re good at running with a crew. I’ve worked mostly alone. I’m sure together, we’ll do a fine job.”

“Still. You’ve got a few years on me—not many, but a few—and you worked for that bad-ass Russian organization. Trust me, I’ve heard enough about what you used to do and what you still do for Viktor. My point is—” Jacob runs one hand through his hair, looking slightly uncomfortable. “I trust you to have my back. I’ll have yours. And I know this is personal, so I’m willing to defer to that and your experience, to a point. But–don’t be reckless. I know how something being personal can cloud your judgment.”

I give him a chilly look, and he holds up his hands. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do, man. Just saying—I get it. And I get how this kind of situation can get into your head.”

“Do you?” I don’t bother waiting for a response. Instead, I cross to one of the weapons cabinets. I have my own gun with me, the one I’ve been using going on twenty years and prefer, but I’m well aware that it’s better to have more firepower than not, in these sorts of situations. This is a job with a crew, a job that will have multiple targets, different from the kinds of missions I used to be more accustomed to tackling.

He doesn’t answer, and I don’t ask anything further. Whatever he’s got in his past that might suggest he knows how a job turned personal can go wrong isn’t something I know him well enough to ask about, and I’m not about to offer up my own experience. We both know we’re able to keep each other alive tonight, and that’s all that matters.

The rest of the men sent with us aren’t ones whose names I know. Jacob seems to know them—some of them are men who ran with him and Connor, I think—and I trust that Connor and Liam wouldn’t send us with a team that isn’t capable.

There’s an odd sort of calm that comes before a job like this. The decision to go is made, the team is put together, and the gear is all dispersed. There’s a stretch of time when everyone there knows there’s a chance that things go wrong, and they don’t see whatever tomorrow brings. Some of the men make jokes, some are quiet, as if they’re going over their training in their heads, again and again, trying to be so prepared they can’t be caught unaware. Everyone has a different method.

Mine has always been to simply exist. I’ve been at it so long that it’s all muscle memory, trained not to be surprised, not to flinch, to know when someone is coming and where they’re coming from almost before they do. I don’t need to run through maneuvers and training exercises any longer, and I worked alone for too many years to find comfort in joking with others. As far as I’ve been concerned for a long time, there’s a switch that flips off when it’s time to go—and if I make it out on the other side, then the rest of me comes back online. It’s kept me alive for years, and I see no reason to change what isn’t broken.

Tonight is harder.

Like Jacob said, it’s personal. Diego himself won’t be there, just his lackeys. I won’t get to put an end to any of this tonight, not unless Connor and Liam’s guess is correct, and ruining his plans is enough to make him back off. I don’t think that’ll be enough. He’s gone too far, and backing down because we kept his men from damaging a shipment would make him look weak.

I don’t think he’s going to stop until he’s gotten what he wants, or he’s dead. And that means tonight is just a start.

It’s hard to let my mind fall into that easy blankness that it won’t come out of until the job is done, because of what this means. Another step forward into a fight that’s meant to end with my wife dead or worse, and this time, her sister too. Failure has a higher price tag than just pissing off Vladimir or looking like I’m bad at my job—and either way, no matter how tonight goes, it doesn’t help anything, if my impressions are right.

If we succeed, Diego sees it as a step forward into a war. If we fail, it emboldens him. Either way, he keeps coming.

There are other ways I’ve seen men I worked with keep themselves calm before a job. I’ve heard them talk about the other shit they’ve done, the missions they’ve pulled off, the times they’ve skirted death and danger, and how it felt. I’ve made a practice of doing the opposite, andnotthinking about what I’ve done in the past. A finished job is just that—finished. I’ve never seen any point in looking back on it. It’s never made me feel better about myself to think about all the blood I’ve spilled.

But tonight, as the car winds through the roads and down to the back alley where we’ll leave it, I can’t stop thinking about Lidiya. About how it felt to find her dead. How long I sat there in that room, those blood-spattered curtains blowing in the breeze, looking at the absolute ruin of everything I’d loved.

A worse man would have taken away what they loved, too. They all had something—the four men who killed her. One had a sister. Another had a girlfriend and child of his own. A third had a mother who depended on him. The last one was an older man—old enough to resent a life spent with the Syndicate that hadn’t been entirely his own. He had no one, except an ex, that he still visited from time to time. Someone he’d loved and kept at arm’s length, the way I should have kept Lidiya. Someone he’d lived a half-life with, seeing them in between pockets of time, when neither of them could avoid the other any longer. Someone he could have had so much more with, if not for the Syndicate.

That was how I knew he was the one who convinced the others to go with him, who stoked their resentment that I was getting out until he got those three men to buy in on his plan to murder my wife.

I could have done to them what they did to me. I could have exacted my revenge on people close to them and forced them to live with it. I’ve never thought that it made me a better person that I didn’t—only that it was a choice, and I chose to kill them instead, directly. Quicker, for the other three, although not as quickly as it could have been. For the old man, the one who planned it, I made sure it took long enough that he had time to think about all the years he could have been doing something else, and regret that time. I made sure he had a chance to think about how things could have been different.

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