Page 53 of Secret Baby for the Bratva Boss

“Shhh, good girl,” he says, stepping forward, slowly shifting the sole of his boot onto my neck. “Sleep, now.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Aleks

I can barely see straight, much less think. I know my men are moving around me, their shadows streaking into the darkness of early morning. I know where I am, but I feel like a ghost, barely tethered. Ready to blow away on the next hard wind.

“She is a fool,” says Yuri to me, his eyes gleaming hard and proud. “But this girl of yours…she is no fucking coward.” His anger is not toward me, but perhaps Konstantin, or toward Kat herself, or else long dead Toma, or maybe the man lying dead on the floor before me. Yuri says again, darkly, in Russian: “No fucking coward.” He prods the man’s ribs hard with the toe of his boot, then shifts and disappears into the dark body of the cabin.

It smells of dust and blood in here; the storm that was driving at the farmhouse hasn’t reached this part of the state yet, but it’s coming, I can smell it. On its course, like a Biblical promise.

Gregor’s counterpart lies sprawled in a spill of jagged glass before me. His brutish face is blood-spattered. He wasn’t wearing a vest, that was foolish of him. She shot him right in the chest, probably from right here, on the floor. I look to my right. She came through the window, stole in like a thief in the night. To not have woken them right away, to have still gotten the drop on them…she did it with skill. Like it was something she’d done a thousand times before.

No. No fucking coward.

“There is no one left,” reports Yuri, returning to my side after a moment out in the dark. I hear the first patters of rain, striking down on the soft forest floor through the kitchen window. “It appears there were few here. Two men, and Konstantin. Shekilled this one. But the tracks are clear—they are headed north, probably to cross over the border.”

“No,” I tell him, and I can’t express why or how I feel the clarity then that I do, but I do. “They’re not going to cross over the border.” I’m stupid enough to think I had gotten the upper hand, with that much at least; I was so hopeful. But of course, when I sent her family away, I knew the risks. What will make Kat a more pliable subject for torture?

What did I take from Konstantin?

Yuri’s eyes widen as he follows my train of thought. “You think he is going to the safehouse? Taking her to her family?”

I can’t find it in me to answer him aloud. I simply nod, once.

“I will contact our men there,” says Yuri sharply. “At once. And we will deploy. Come, Aleks. We must go to her.” He touches my arm, almost imploringly, then rushes back out the open glass door.

I am looking at a space in the glass. It’s scattered almost evenly across the entire kitchen floor, everywhere but the spot right at my feet. It’s about the size of her, the length of her shoulders, and the width; a space where she lay when the glass fell. Blood is spattered there, still fresh but beginning to stick at the edges. It’s on the counter, too, a dark spill of it, slopping in dark thin ropes, like molasses, into a pool on the floor. By the shape of the gap in the glass, her body was dragged out of this kitchen. By the feet. Dragged, like trash.

I see red like I never have before; I see red enough to drown in. And I hate her for it, too. I hate her for making me feel like this. I know that I have never given a damn for a thing in this life like I give a damn for her. It’s making me stupid. It’s making me fucking crazy.

And it makes me make a promise to myself, right then and there:

If I get her back, I am never letting her go again.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Kat

I come to slowly, like pulling my head above water after too long below. Even so, I’m still groggy, still at a loss for where I am, as the water-grey light washes over me, as the rich green world beyond the window streams by in a blur.

My head hurts so badly I can barely breathe, and even as my eyes adjust, something about them feels wrong. My vision is chromatic at the edges, almost doubled. My tongue feels swollen to twice its size. In my lap, my fingers are interlaced, and my wrists bound with a hard plastic zip-tie. Tight. I can’t move even slightly, and the hard edge has made one of my wrists bleed.

When I shift my head, I’m shocked to find that it’s not a guard or one of Konstantin’s men maneuvering the sleek black car we’re in, the inside all butter-soft, tooled black leather—but the man himself. Rage rushes through me, then fear, and then, most shocking of all—a little warm glare of satisfaction.

He looks like hell.I can’t suppress a smile. Konstantin is pale, sleepless, his hair disheveled. He doesn’t look neat or handsome or composed; he looks, for all the world, like a man who has already lost.

Only…he hasn’t.He’s made me pay. But I know that he is nowhere near finished.

The fear comes back, pricking a neat deep hole in the bottom of my stomach.I have played right into his hands.My chin wobbles, mostly from the pain and the frustration, but also from sadness. Because I know almost at once that I will never see my son again.

This is how my body ends up in ditch; forgotten on the side of the road. And I have no one to blame but myself.

“You almost got me,” says Konstantin, without looking at me. A shifting sound alerts me to the man in the back seat, who none too casually has a Glock armed and aimed, resting on his knee. “That was very close, little Kat—you really almost did what no one ever has, you almost got the better of me.”

“Aleks got the better of you,” I say softly, the words rolling off the tongue before I can think better of them. I don’t think I would, anyway. “When he killed your coward of a brother.”

Konstantin’s face cracks open in that unhinged, jackal-like smile. I feel my chest relax, just slightly—as he wants. An instant later he leans over the center console, quick as a cat, and throws his elbow into my face.

---