by Christa Wick
Exhaling, she stepped past him, her gaze scanning the ground for her abandoned purse.
"It's already in the van, Miss Rodchenko," Reed said, his hand against Nazarov's back to get the giant moving.
As soon as they stepped outside and Alina disappeared into the vehicle, Nazarov came alive. Twisting, he slammed Reed against the building's brick wall.
"What was that?" he growled. "I don't want a scratch on her!"
"This?" Reed laughed, taking the vial out and delivering a squirt onto his own tongue. "It's a breath freshener."
Reed pressed the vial into Nazarov's hands. "Not to be rude, buddy, but you might want to take a few shots yourself. You haven't exactly been practicing the best hygiene the last few days."
11
Mikhael
Nazarov entered the van to find Alina arguing with Kane as the man attempted to search her purse.
"This is mine," she said, tugging at the strap as he finished unzipping the bag. "I told you there are no trackers in it."
Nazarov's meaty hand swooped down and claimed the purse from both of them. He shoved one fist in and seized a small stack of folded papers. Fanning a few open, he saw drawings done in a child's style. A dinosaur, a volcano, a dolphin jumping waves.
"No, no, no," she said as he let the pictures fall to the floor. Gathering the pages up, she clutched them to her chest. "Stop touching my things."
He grunted, scooped out her phone and watched her face as he passed the device off to Reed. Still holding onto the papers with one hand, she reached after the phone with the other, her face beseeching Reed to give it back.
"Please, they are all I have..."
"I'll be very gentle with the contents," he assured her, his voice dropping low in an attempt to calm the distraught woman.
Pulling out a box of crayons from the bottom of her bag, Nazarov dumped them on the floor and watched them scatter, then he checked the box for anything taped inside.
Feeling that the purse was empty, he looked inside, saw nothing. Turning it upside down and shaking, he heard a small metallic click as something fell out. Leaning forward, he saw the item. At first glance, it looked like junk. Mangled metal oxidized except for a small inward dipping curve on one side where it must have been rubbed frequently to keep the copper showing through.
He could just make out where the bull's horns attached to the head. He looked at Alina to find her hugging her papers, her eyes on her lap and her face screwed tight from the tears she was holding in.
She had been crying earlier, begging and sobbing at the camera to spare him. And she still carried the little figure she had shaped for him so many years ago. But she wouldn't leave Dima, even if staying meant she would soon be dead.
Pocketing the figurine, he pulled out a knife and ripped through the fabric of the bag. His fingers manipulated the lining.
"He took all of your money, your identification?"
She said nothing, just continued staring at the top of her knees.
Nazarov passed the bag to Reed, who rolled down his window and tossed it onto the street.
"No point risking it," he explained before he returned to sifting through Alina's phone.
Reed's fingers slowed as he looked through her photos. He expanded one, Nazarov's viewing angle too narrow to see what the picture contained or why it should hold Reed's interest for so long.
"This boy," he said, pointing the phone's display at Alina. "His name is Bogdan, yes?"
She nodded, her hand reaching for the phone, her fingers engaged in an urgent dance to coax Reed into surrendering the device.
Nazarov snatched it up, expanded the photo and stared at the boy. His head was tilted downward, black hair covering his eyes. The shade was that of all the Rodchenkos he had ever known. Alina, her father, Dima.
White and blue frosting smudged the boy's sharp chin.
"Dmitrey Rodchenko's son," Reed offered, his laptop out and opened once more. "No photos publicly in existence, his location more secret than his father's although presumed to live in the States. Mother unknown, rumored to be from one of the slave houses."
Reed dipped his head so he could look into Alina's flat gaze. "Is Bogdan why you're fighting us?"
Her shoulders scrunched together. Pursed lips trembled and her hands shook as she tried not to crush the drawings in her hand. She looked at Reed, the muscles of her throat visibly tightening.
"Please, it's like the hospital, isn't it? If I don't want help, you cannot force it on me."
Reed retrieved the phone from Nazarov. He swiped through more of the photos. Stopping at the last one, he looked from the photo to Alina before studying Nazarov for a few long seconds. His brow lifted, skeptical, and then he shoved the phone in his jacket pocket.
"What if we kidnap the boy?" Reed asked.
"Hold up," Kane interjected. "We have no reason to believe the boy is in danger. There are scummy parents all over the world. Law doesn't let us kidnap them."
"What fuck should I give over Dima's bastard?" Nazarov grunted, his gaze hard on Alina.
If only she had left with him that day at the library. They'd have children of their own. She wouldn't be risking her life over Dima's brat, a boy that would one day grow up to be as cruel as his father.
"Rodchenko plans on killing a family member to cement his position," Reed argued with his gaze on Kane. "If it isn't his bastard sister—no offense—then all that remains to sacrifice is his bastard son."
Nazarov nodded. Dima had a sickness in him. The pain of others was his entertainment.
"Please," Alina whispered. "You see now why you have to let me go. Bogdan cannot take my place in Dima's plan."
"He will fucking kill you!" Nazarov screamed, his hand shooting out. He tore the papers from her grip and began tearing them up with each new word that came out of his mouth. "First he'll have them beat you. Rape you. Stab you. They will cut off toes and fingers, make your tongue a stump."
When the child's drawings were reduced to confetti, he looked at Reed for confirmation. "You listened to the tape, the one recorded in King's hotel? You heard Dima's instructions?"
With his face drained of all blood, Reed nodded. "Your brother was quite explicit in his instructions, Miss Rodchenko. He wanted it recorded on video so he could watch it later."
"Doesn't matter," Alina mumbled right before she tumbled unconscious to the van's floor. "I died a long time ago."
12
Alina
Alina woke in a shabby room, the flickering yellow ceiling light and the smell of borscht drifting under the door confirming she was still in Russia. Hearing the light play of fingertips over a keyboard, she rolled onto one side and saw the back of the man they called Reed.
Wearing a headset, he spoke into its microphone. "She's awake."
Covering the mouthpiece, he glanced over his shoulder and tossed a nod at the ice chest next to the bed. "Get yourself something to eat and drink."
She didn't care about food or water. Her thoughts were consumed with Bogdan—her son—and Mikhael, though she wished she could forget the big Russian.
Sitting up, she reached for one of the water bottles, discreetly testing its weight in case she needed to smack the American upside his head. At little more than sixteen wobbly ounces, she didn't think it would even momentarily stun him, so she cracked the seal on the cap and took a long drink.
Her voice squeaked like a rusty hinge when she spoke. "How long was I asleep?"
Maybe there was still time to undo the terrible mistake these men had made in trying to help her.
Reed lifted a single finger. She thought for a second he was signaling an hour, but that was too short.
A day was too long.
Realizing he was ordering her to silence, she shifted along the mattress until she could see his computer monitor. Like Bogdan's video games, green and red images moved on one half of the screen. Images from the night vision cameras filled the other half. An iPad was propped up next to him, its display
showing thermal views.
"To your right, ten feet and closing," he said.
"What—what is this?" she demanded, jumping to her feet.
"Sit," he ordered, his voice like a steel dagger sheathed in the softest velvet. "You don't want me to make any mistakes on this. I assure you."
Her ass hit the mattress at the same time her mouth slammed shut. Her gaze scanned each image on the computer and tablet. One of the dots was neither red nor green—it was blue and represented a body far smaller than the rest that showed on the thermal, where another blue dot appeared over his head.
Bogdan—her son was that little blue dot and all the other people in the building, red or green, were armed and ready to kill.
"No, please," she croaked, but the American had blocked her voice out. His ears were attuned only to the communication stream from the headset and any movement she might make to stop him.
One of the red figures dropped and stopped moving. A green one stood almost directly over him. The red man offered one last jerk as a bullet entered his head and then the green man moved on.
Adrenaline flooded her blood. She lunged for the small wastebasket with the condoms and vodka bottles the last tenant had left behind and unloaded the contents of her stomach.
"Please, who is green?"
He didn't answer. Looking at the display again, she drew her own conclusions. The Rodchenko thugs were red because a red dot hovered over the man holding Bogdan. By his height and thin frame, she knew who hid behind her son's body—her half-brother.
Dima faced the door, one arm holding a gun, the other wrapped around Bogdan's neck. He had claimed the boy as his son, but that was a lie. He had never cared for him, only cared how he could use Alina's son to control and hurt her. The boy thought she was his aunt, Dima slowly warping Bogdan's opinion of her, allowing Alina to be in her son's presence only a few hours each month.
Now the coward was using the boy as a human shield.
A figure took up most of the thermal display on the iPad, its brightness and size blocking the reading for Dima and Bogdan.
"Straight from your shoulder, hold..." Reed said, all of his attention on the iPad. "Hold...hold...shoot!"
Alina screamed, the howl drawn out and turning her throat raw. The green figure dashed to the left of the screen. She could see another green figure kick in the door, but Dima was on the ground, unmoving, the blue figure covering him and also motionless.
The shooter entered the room and scooped Bogdan up. The boy started fighting, kicking and punching at the giant who held him. Fresh air filled Alina's lungs at the sight.
"Target acquired, pull back," Reed ordered. "All threats show as neutralized."
She scanned the screens again to see that Reed was right. The Rodchenko men were flat, dead or dying. One of the green men was slung over a team member's back, his vitals showing in a readout at the bottom of the screen.
Hurt but not dying.
13
Alina
As soon as the operation to rescue Bogdan from Dima's safe house successfully concluded, Reed packed up his equipment and hustled Alina out to an old sedan. The American had given her no idea of where they were going, deferring her questions over and over with the promise someone would fill her in when they met up with Kane and Mikhael.
"We have no papers," she said as they drove out of Moscow. "Dima took control of our passports and visas after we cleared customs."
His mouth quirked and he strummed his fingers along the steering wheel. "Not every flight has to go through customs and immigration."
She lapsed into silence and wondered how Mikhael had come to have friends like Reed and Kane—and why he had let her languish all those years in misery when he had such means to rescue her.
The fault was hers—of course. Her entire life, the fault was always hers. She had treated him cruelly at their last meeting in New York. He couldn't know then, or even now, that it was to keep her father's men from killing him.
She might have risked everything that day in the library if only she had known that their one night together had put a baby in her womb. That painful knowledge came two months later.
Her first month of an absent period, she marked up to stress. It had happened before. The second missed period came with an inability to eat breakfast without throwing it up, something one of her father's staff noticed and reported to the old man.
That was the day her misery reached its flash point.
Seeing Reed tense at the wheel, she looked around for suspicious vehicles. When nothing caught her attention, she looked at the road side signs to read which city they were coming up on.
"Was the safe house in Novgorod?"
He nodded. "Rodchenko stashed your son there after Nazarov's solo attempt to kidnap you."
Slowly, she processed the information, focusing first on the memory of one of Dima's brigadiers swooping in like a vulture and grabbing the boy and a few bags as she begged in the hallway to go with them. The man had punched her in the stomach to shut her up, in front of Bogdan, who watched emotionlessly, his life around his so-called father inuring him to violence, even when it was carried out against a woman who cherished every moment she was allowed to spend with him.
Her mind drifted to Mikhael and all the visible marks of what had happened to him after she had forced him yet again to flee from an attempt to rescue her. When her mind turned away from that memory, she realized what else Reed had said.
"What makes you think he's my son?"
His mouth curled up at the side she could see. "Beyond how long it took you to challenge my statement? I looked through the rest of the photos on your phone."
"I see." She didn't, not really. She also didn't know just how much Reed had pieced together. Let him think the boy was hers and Dima's. That was, after all, what Dima had told their father to keep the old man from beating her to death.
Yeah—for one moment only, her half-brother had seemed to play the hero. But he quickly proved no better than a cat choosing to keep its favorite mouse alive.
"You should rest," Reed suggested, one hand fiddling with the sedan's navigation system. "And eat."
Taking his sunglasses off, he handed them to her. "I don't expect any trouble skirting Novgorod, but it's best you put these on and lower your seat. I'll wake you when we get to St. Petersburg."
Accepting his offer, she hooked his gaze for a moment. His face lit with a genuine smile, its tilt apologetic over the stress he had caused her in masterminding her kidnapping and Bogdan's rescue.
"I don't care about me," she said, voice breaking. "Just promise me my son is safe."
"I promise I'll do everything I can to keep him from harm."
Briefly, she touched his arm. It wasn't the pledge she had asked for, but it was the best she could hope for.
14
Alina
Four hours later, in the suite of an American hotel in St. Petersburg, with Reed still her only guard, Alina retreated into the bathroom. The drive, quiet and uneventful, had been anything but restful. These men who had rescued her and her son now controlled her as surely as Dima had.
She didn't know when she might see Bogdan, what the boy had been told, or what would happen next. The boy's birth certificate was a fiction her father had arranged, with Dima as the father and a dead woman as the mother.
DNA would prove her claim, but she needed a lawyer for that. And how could she get a lawyer when she legally owned nothing and would have the remaining members of the Rodchenko crime family and their allies hunting her down?
"Breathe," she warned herself in the bathroom mirror as she ran a washcloth under cold water.
She wrung the cloth out and pressed it to her cheeks, her gaze avoiding the mirror. She didn't need the visual reminder that she looked like shit. Dark circles hollowed out her eyes. Her face, neck and hands had taken on an ashen hue, as if she'd fallen very ill.
Pushing up her sleeves, she saw the same pallid grayness.
She wou
ld terrify Bogdan when he saw her!
Turning the faucet on, Alina let the sink fill with hot water. She stripped her blouse off, only her plain white bra covering her upper torso. She dipped a fresh wash cloth in the steaming water and began to scrub at her neck and face, the vigorous rubbing bringing a little color to her wan cheeks.
She moved on to her hands and arms, the skin unresponsive to the heat or rough scouring. Slapping at the drain lift, she tossed the wash cloth into the sink and turned in search of a towel.
Mikhael stood a few feet outside the open bathroom door. He held a loose square of folded clothing. His face was still a mottled mess of colors and swollen tissue.
Snatching a guest robe off the hook, she quickly shoved her arms in and tied the sash, but not before he had seen the scars that crisscrossed her body front and back.
He swallowed, his bruised and swollen lips parting momentarily before sealing again. Glaring at him, Alina stepped forward and snatched the clothes he had brought her. She spun, headed into the bathroom.
Mikhael hooked the sash where it ran along the back. Feeling the tug, she twisted and tried to stare him into releasing his hold. Grabbing more of the robe, he pulled her close, took the outfit away and placed it on the dresser.
His breathing grew harsh as he pushed one sleeve of the robe up as high as it would go. He rotated her arm, the thin, long scars visible front and back, top and bottom. He turned her so that she faced away from him, her eyes shutting with the humiliation of his inspection.
He tugged the robe down her back as she clutched at the front panels.
"Stop," she rasped, her voice as dry and gritty as used up sandpaper.
"No," he answered softly, turning her yet again and pulling her hands down to her sides so that he could inspect the scarring.