by Rie Warren
I shook two of those little nuggets of healing gold into Feliks’s palm. “And keep taking these from now on.”
Removing the gloves, I was not surprised when Oleg leaned into the room to shove a red biohazard trash bag at me.
I scrubbed my hands and began cleaning up the detritus of the non-surgery, barely taking note of Feliks lifting up to his feet.
One moment, he was nothing but a looming presence beside me.
The next, it was he who surprised the hell out of me.
The knife glinted in my periphery before he slashed it down in an arc to stab me viciously in the thigh. The sudden searing pain made me grab onto the sink and hold on. I couldn’t help but howl at the top of my lungs until Oleg’s hand closed over my mouth, and his fingers pinched my nose closed too.
“Payback is bitch, Alexandra,” he whispered in a tone that cut through even the most grueling anguish.
Dizzied and pained and panicked, I lifted a hand to grapple with his wrist. Feliks had just slashed deep into the muscle of my thigh and now Oleg was suffocating me.
Feliks’s nasty chuckle sent awful premonitions up and down my spine.
As if the duo were of one mind, Feliks ripped the knife from my flesh at the same time Oleg let me breathe again.
And somehow the hurt tripled as I dragged great gusts of breath into my lungs.
“Eye for an eye.” That was Feliks.
In the mirror, through hanks of my hair hanging in my face, I saw him cleaning the blade.
“Could be worse.” The enemy pakhan sneered. “He could have stuck you in the gut, da?”
Da.
Oleg wasn’t just dangerous. He was sick in the head.
He had done grotesque things to innocents without remorse.
With no thought to propriety or either of the men—and damn the consequences too—I shucked my jeans down and off, wincing the whole way.
I did the same dance on my flesh as I had on Feliks’s. I barely held myself upright while I saturated the injury with screamingly painful amounts of disinfectant. I quickly washed out the seeping gash, aware the two fucks watched me in amusement.
Bunching a great big wad of gauze over the long violent laceration, I had enough wherewithal left to wrap my leg . . . tight.
Then I slumped against the wall, about to call a timeout.
I glared at the bastards with the very last ounce of my strength. “Somehow, I reckon you don’t think we’re even yet.”
“How astute you are.” Then Oleg did something I could never have foreseen.
He drew Feliks to him, wrapping his arms around the even bigger male. And this wasn’t a dude-hug. Not a back slap. Not a fist tap.
No . . . this was . . . intimate.
Slowly, Oleg guided Feliks’s eager lips to his, and they kissed like long-lost lovers.
The sight hit me in the gut.
I wasn’t just payback for his Papa and his brother’s death at my father’s hands.
I hadn’t simply stabbed his underboss.
I had attacked and seriously wounded his . . . man in every sense of the word.
“Oh no,” I whispered without even being aware of it.
Oleg broke the lingering kiss then showed me just about every tooth in his mouth when he smiled without feeling. “Da. You see, Alexandra, I derive no pleasure from females. That is why it is so easy for me to hurt them.”
Lashing out, he punched me exactly where his boyfriend had stabbed the freshest wound.
Pain formed a dark mist in my mind, and I welcomed it.
Welcomed it like a long-lost lover of my own until I blacked out.
22
Sasha Part Two
WHEN I’D COME TO from the blackout to end all blackouts, it was daytime. I was in a room with a bald mattress on the floor. The agonizing hurting hurt in my thigh was making really good friends with the slice on my upper arm, the nasty nicks on both sides of my neck, and a wealth of other unpretty injuries.
I was locked in the small room.
Not a surprise.
There was an uncovered window.
Big surprise.
I’d heaved myself off that mattress and limped my way over to the window, which was so sparkly clean I was certain Oleg had done his Windex routine on it whenever he’d moved into the nasty-ass apartment.
I’d tried the locks, attempted to jimmy the jamb with my bare hands. Then I snarled; the frigging thing had been bolted into place. There was no escape anyway because, as I peered out, all I saw was a little blank square of barren backyard. Barren, apart from the unmistakable shapes of soldier-type men out there on patrol.
By the second evening, I understood the situation with sickening clarity. I was like a precious little mouthy punching bag to Oleg. One he would keep alive until he got bored or really, really peeved off.
I was fed and watered like an animal kept in captivity.
He let me use the shower and the toilet, but I suspected only because he was so out-of-control OCD that the idea of seeing me lose control of my bladder probably made his impulses redline.
He also let me stitch myself up, again I imagined so he wouldn’t have to deal with the messy fallout if I didn’t.
It was a real bastard of a thing to hook a needle and thread through my own flesh. What I wouldn’t have given for champagne funneled straight into my mouth at that point. I would even settle for beer. I wouldn’t even say no to warm beer.
For clothing, I still had my underthings and my top. I hacked my jeans down to cutoffs, not to turn heads with Daisy Dukes but so the stab-gash could breathe.
The food delivered to me was hardly edible—cardboard mac n’ cheese, day old cold cardboard pizza, Chinese that was more MSG than yummy—but no way in hell would I offer to try my hand in the kitchen for these sukas.
Then again, I could probably get my hands on a carving knife that way.
At the end of day three of my imprisonment, Oleg entered on his own.
“Where’s your pretty boy?” I asked, meaning Feliks obviously.
Not that the douchebag was pretty. He actually had a face like a concrete block as opposed to Oleg’s runway smooth looks . . . but they did say love was blind.
Oleg, being the pompous asshat he was, carried a chair inside with him, locked us both together, then sat on his avocado green plastic throne.
He tossed me a bottle of water, which I caught one-handed.
“He is right outside with his Kalashnikov.”
The smile he shot me was not one bit cheery and a whole lot deadly.
Still his eyes contained no emotion. Never had. Apart from that moment when he’d tongue-dived into Feliks’s mouth.
“I am going to tell you a story, Alexandra.”
Grrr. He only called me that to get on my last nerve, and it worked every time.
I hid my reaction. I sat up straighter on the bare mattress, clapping my hands. “Goody! I love story time for night-nights.”
He rolled his eyes.
I had hit his nerve.
I halted him before he could start with the fable telling, one hand pressed up. “Hang on. Let me just get real comfy first.”
Making a big show of fluffing my flat-ass pillow, I settled back and crossed one leg over the other even though the pain of doing so made me want to scream mercy.
“All set.” I raised my eyebrows in fake anticipation.
“There once was a man named Leonid Kamenev,” my abductor began. “He saw the American woman Liliana first. And he claimed her first.”
“Hang on.” I huffed in a bored tone. “I already heard this one.”
Oleg continued, spreading his knees and leaning forward. “Then the ugly brawler Yury Zolotov stepped into some business that wasn’t his to deal with.”
“The great pakhan Yury Zolotov, you mean,” I countered.
My would-be-killer set his depthless eyes on me. “The virgin Liliana turned out to be a first-rate whore. She fucked both men.”
When he recl
ined back, he clearly waited for my troubled reaction. The only thing that bothered me was the fact Oleg insulted my mother who had been pure before his father raped her. That anger he wanted to spark off simmered just below the surface, right beside a huge wave of tearful emotions because this asshole’s dad had destroyed half of my family!
I opened my water and drank down a big swallow, containing every molecule of fuck you inside.
Recapping the bottle, I asked, “Is that it?”
“My papa claimed her first.”
Nope. Not even close. I had proof—written proof!—my mother claimed my father as the love of her life.
“My mom never ran out on your dad because they were soooo not together as a couple. I don’t know what kind of bullshit your nutjob dad told you, but he preached you the wrong set of facts. Also, your father murdered a young mother because he couldn’t handle a little rejection? Seriously?” I sighed. “He’s so lame. I wouldn’t go around boasting about that if I were you.”
A vein pulsed in Oleg’s forehead.
Oh yeah. He was starting to trip out.
Not that his meltdown would aid me, but it was fun to watch.
“What else you got?” I sipped more water, wiped my mouth. “Another fairytale of your own devising? FYI though, you should not volunteer at public library story time, mm’kay?”
“Shut up, cunt.” Those skull-dead eyes of his flared.
Aha! There it was. Anger. Rage.
Maksim would lose his fucking mind if he saw me baiting the psychopath so openly.
Good thing he wasn’t here.
My papa had every right to avenge my mama’s murder. I didn’t even care that he’d killed Oleg’s older brother too. His blood-fury must’ve been off the chain.
That should’ve been the end of the vendetta. An eye for an eye. A death for a death, blood for blood. Done.
But no. I was stuck here in a skank house that probably used to be a crack house before Oleg the socio had gotten all Mr. Clean up in here.
His knuckles turned white as he cranked his water bottle between his hands.
He got up to leave, taking the chair with him because—yes—I would break the window wide open if I could regardless of the soldiers on point below.
“This is getting really old, Oleg. I thought you were planning on killing me. What’s the hold up?” I tried to rattle him even more.
He halted and sent me a last glance. “Then who would provide such entertainment?”
The thing about Oleg was he was such a sick fuck he got off on verbally sparring with me as much as brutally battering me. During the course of this third day, he’d visited me every couple of hours, and I had the bruises to show for it. When we weren’t jabbing one another with words and taunts, he was busy trying to break bones.
During the bouts, when I kept my wits about me long enough, he’d either lose interest in whatever cat and mouse game we played, or he’d get that ferocious gleam in his eyes that signaled a time out.
Every time he left me, I figured he was off to stick it to his underboss butt-boy because the mind games made him hard, and he’d made it abundantly clear I wasn’t his type of piece of tail.
Not that I had anything against the LGBTQ community. However, Oleg Kamenev gave the entire human race a bad rap, so he was not a good posterchild for the lifestyle.
Inevitably a session would end with Oleg locking me in the room, untouched in a sexual way. At least I wouldn’t go back to Maksim sullied like that.
So long as I held my ground and my mouthy ways, I usually walked away with just a new welt on my face or a split lip or another punch to the stomach. I hadn’t been stabbed again . . . yet. I considered that a win for me.
Thus it was that I curled over on that ugly mattress, leaving the bald lightbulb overhead beaming down. I hoped nightfall meant I’d earned a longer respite than just an hour or two. My body needed to recharge, and my brain was ready for a long nap.
As I closed my eyes, I pictured Maksim. I remembered him in every incarnation—blazing mad at me, tall and breathtaking in his wedding suit, naked and sweaty and lunging into me until his force and his power made us one.
I thought about how he’d said he would choose me above Papa.
I started to sniffle, but I couldn’t have that, could I?
Nyet. I refocused on something that calmed me. Those last moments before Oleg thrust me into the van with his soldiers dropping like dead weights as Maksim gunned them down from some distance away.
Yeah, perfect memory and a much better nighttime story.
I endured the fourth day, not half as sassy because, to be honest, I was woozy and tired and cranky, and I might’ve had a touch of PMS too.
When I refused to engage in Oleg’s psychological warfare such as trying to guess his real end-of-life plan for me, he huffed off like a petulant child whose favorite toy was broken.
The thing was, he was getting closer to cracking this nut. I mean, I only had so much inner bitch in me before I bored myself.
Another evening fell. I tried that stupid nailed down window again, the cut in my arm and the deep gash on my thigh throbbing as if just to remind me I was still alive.
A key rattled in the door, and my hackles rose like a she-cat whose only aim in life was to protect her small corner of the alleyway.
Which made me think of Kirill’s mutt, Boris . . .
God, I missed them all.
It clawed at me with such deep sorrow to think I would never see any of my family again. I’d never be around to watch Saoirse grow up. I wouldn’t laugh at Jo’s sarcastic jokes. I’d never see the opening of the nightclub Lucia and I had worked so hard on.
And I would never know what Maksim’s true love felt like.
Hustling—on a badly swollen leg and with bruises all over my body—back to the mattress, I smoothed my soooo boooored look into place.
Oleg entered, like I really expected anyone else.
Then Butt Boy the Underboss sidled in after him.
I was so super glad I’d fixed Feliks up properly. Not.
I batted my eyelashes at the pair. “Oh, goody. I was getting lonely in here. What’s it gonna be tonight? Poker? Monopoly? Pin the tail on the asswipe?”
The dead gleam in Oleg’s eyes pulsed with maleficent light, and he drew an empty liquor bottle from behind his back.
“Do we get to glass each other?” I asked with a tinge of excitement.
Butt-munch snarled.
Oleg’s smile sharpened into something crazy bad. “Jimmy taught me an American game teenagers play in these parts . . .”
I zoned out at the mention of Jimmy. Jesus Christ. He liked to mention that idiot at odd times like he was some kind of American hero. I hated to break it to Oleg, but Jimbo had been a born loser. It was only too bad I’d realized it almost too late.
I zoomed back in with my body bristling all over when Oleg said, “We are playing spin the bottle. And, spoiler alert, the bottle will land on you.”
It dawned on me in an instant that Oleg was definitely going to roll out cruel new rules that I was sure I didn’t want to know about.
Laboriously climbing up to stand, I attempted a pout. “But I didn’t think you swung that way, either of you? Me woman. You man-on-man.”
Feliks lashed forward and jerked me clean off my feet.
Landing with a jolting smack, I bit my lip. Oh lord, the pain that zapped from the wound in my thigh jolted all the way across my body.
Oleg slapped the bottle against the flat of his palm with heavy thwacks. “I may not want to stick my cock in you, but this bottle will do the job nicely. I might even fetch another one. Feliks and I can double-team you.”
All breath left my lungs. My body went completely numb. This would be pain I knew I couldn’t hide from.
He was going to degrade me. Defile me. Destroy me.
“Or I can fuck that cunt with the barrel of my gun, and it is loaded.” Lifting his jacket aside, my captor showed off the sturdy pie
ce of weaponry. “You decide.”
This might be my undoing, finally.
“I live to see you embrace true fear, Alexandra.” A smile twitched on Oleg’s lips, the dead eyes only glowing when he and Feliks traded twin we’ve got her now looks.
I held onto that small diminishing smidgen of hope, pinning bright images of Maksim behind my eyelids when I shut them against the most appalling thing that was about to happen to me.
23
Maksim
IF I THOUGHT WAITING for Oleg’s second attack had been maddening, attempting to locate Sasha was a million times worse.
I did not sleep.
I could hardly keep food down.
I cranked my fingers through my hair and rubbed my hand against my aching chest and paced from one side of The Hammer to the other.
I lashed out at my brothers and the soldiers and anyone who thought it was a good idea to say two words to me.
I hunkered near my phone in front of a laptop, checking for texts and refreshing the Bratva’s private email used for business purposes about every five seconds.
I waited for some news, some sighting, hating every second of every day that drew desperate hours between the last time I’d seen Sasha to now when I was losing all hope of ever seeing her again.
Late afternoon on the fourth day, I was still frozen in the same pose. Tapping the refresh button, scrolling down on my texts. Crazed with worry and beyond sympathy or empathy or any fucking pity, I looked broodingly at the half empty bottle of vodka at my elbow.
But I wouldn’t move from my position even to pour a fresh drink.
Kirill and Arkady convened at the far side of the club, probably discussing next stages and possibly wondering if they needed to intervene with me. At least they understood this pain that nailed me in the chest then continued to explode throughout my mind.
Joanna had been taken from Kirill. For all of a few hours though.
Lucia had been stolen from Arkady. He had survived without her for approximately twenty-four hours.
They did not understand what four fucking days without their women was like.