Black Swan

by London Miller

  She moved forward without thinking, doing her best to keep Orion on his feet despite how heavy he actually was. Despite how lean he always seemed to be, there was considerable muscle on him.

  He gripped her hand as if she would simply disappear if he let her go again. “You’re still managing to be a pain in my ass.”

  She smiled. This felt familiar—good. “You can yell at me later.”

  For now, she needed to just get him out of here.

  “You won’t hear the fuck—”

  The Russian didn’t get a chance to finish whatever he thought to say, not before Jackal landed a punch so hard to the man’s jaw, the pain resonated in her own mouth before he hit the ground with a thud, no longer moving.

  No, Karina decided at that moment, she had nothing at all to worry about with him at her side.

  17

  Forward

  If Orion was surprised at all to find them riding in the back of a chauffeured car, he was careful not to show it.

  And though he’d been beaten pretty severely from what she could see, he still hadn’t taken his gaze off Jackal, not that it would have done him much good. Her new guard could undoubtedly kill him without trying though she’d never let that happen.

  They’d only passed their tenth minute in the car before Karina had had enough. “At least say something.”

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “What?”

  “That,” he said with a pointed nod at Jackal, who didn’t react.

  “He’s,” she reminded him, as though Orion couldn’t very well see that he was a man, “Jackal.”

  His gaze whipped to her as if she were the one speaking nonsense. “You’re not serious …”

  “It’s a bit of a long story.”

  “I leave you alone for what’s supposed to be a week, and now you’re …” He gestured to the length of her, seeming at a loss for words.

  “I’ll explain everything,” she promised even as she didn’t know when she would actually get around to that.

  For now, she was merely glad he was safe.

  Everything else could come later.

  Curiously, despite the questions she knew he had, Orion kept them to himself, though she knew the moment when he couldn’t hold them in check any longer.

  Right around the time they arrived at her new home.

  “There were a … few things I didn’t mention about myself,” she said.

  “I need a goddamn drink.”

  Orion hardly waited for the car to come to a stop before he was climbing out. Whether he was in disbelief that she was living here or not, it didn’t stop him from going right up to the front doors even as Kava was starting to walk out.

  The girl’s eyes widened as they landed on Orion before she quickly lurched out of the way to let him pass.

  She’d forgotten how dramatic he could be.

  “Were you able to find everything we’ll need?” Karina asked Kava once she was walking toward her, Jackal keeping pace behind her.

  “Yes, but I didn’t know if you wanted me to set up a room for …” She glanced down the hall where Orion had gone before looking back at her, “Him.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” It wasn’t as if she’d be able to avoid this conversation forever. “Show Jackal to his room. I’ll find you after I have a talk with him.”

  Kava nodded, and only once she’d passed him did Jackal turn to follow her, waiting exactly ten seconds before doing so.

  Karina stopped in the kitchen to fill a plastic bag with ice, then grabbed a clean hand towel to wrap it in.

  It wasn’t hard to find Orion in the downstairs half bathroom, doing his best to clean himself up with the limited supplies she had.

  A first-aid kit sat open on the counter, along with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and peroxide.

  “You should put this on your eye to help with the swelling.”

  He didn’t argue as he took it from her, only wincing slightly as he rested it against his temple.

  But when she moved to open a bandage, whatever careful control he had over himself completely disappeared.

  “You really should keep the ice on your eye,” Karina told him, but Orion had never been one to follow along behind someone blindly.

  Nor did he bite his tongue.

  He tossed the towel-wrapped bag of ice to the side before narrowing his one good eye on her. “What the actual fuck?”

  Another time, she might have laughed and made a joke. That had always been the way between them when they got too caught up with life and didn’t see each other for a while. Their relationship had always been easy that way, but something had hardened about Orion in the past few years.

  And if she were honest with herself, all the soft parts of her had hardened as well.

  “I can—”

  “I thought you were dead,” he said, voice as sharp as a blade.

  He’d been so quiet on the ride from that warehouse, she had almost believed that he wasn’t upset, but she’d clearly underestimated just how angry he actually was.

  “I mean, I get it,” he said, bustling around the bathroom, cleaning himself up as best he could before he ripped the shirt off his back and tossed it aside. “You and that fucking—” He cut himself off there, struggling to find an insult good enough to describe Uilleam.

  Not that she could blame him after Uilleam had had him arrested … not to mention the numerous threats on his life.

  Because he didn’t like to share, he’d said.

  Before, those words had sounded romantic, made her heart rate frantic, but now … they only sounded selfish.

  “Where the fuck is—what’s wrong?”

  It always amazed her how quickly he could go from raging mad to a calm like she had never seen before. It was as if his injuries didn’t factor into his mind whatsoever as he closed the short distance between them.

  For a moment, they stood there—old friends who hadn’t seen each other for ages—taking stock of all the changes the years had brought.

  What did he see when he looked at her?

  Did he still see the girl she had been when they’d first met?

  Did he see loss in her eyes?

  Could he see how much she had suffered?

  Orion reached up with one scarred hand to cup her cheek, his palm warm against her cheek. It was ridiculous how quickly tears flooded her eyes. How it all came rushing back far too quickly, feeling as if it was happening all over again.

  “What happened?” he asked, his voice too soft, too concerned. “Where’d you go?”

  “I—”

  The beginning was always the hardest—forcing herself to say those first few words—but once they hung between them, she couldn’t stop herself.

  And as she spoke, she watched as everything she said reflected in his face. From the downward tilt of his lips to the way his gaze hardened, and when she mentioned Poppy, she felt his flinch.

  She braced herself for his rage—for the multitude of threats that would surely follow after mentioning Grimm and the fact that he worked for Uilleam.

  But before she could open her mouth to say anything, he pulled her forward and wrapped her in his embrace before he buried his hand in her hair and held her against him.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered—two words she felt down to the bottom of her soul.

  Two words that managed to fill her with too much emotion, and before she knew it, everything she had been holding in came flooding out.

  It was as if a dam had broken inside her.

  Orion didn’t speak, just held her through the worst of it, his hold never loosening.

  As she wrapped him in a hug of her own, she couldn’t remember the last time she had cried like this, purging everything that felt like it was eating away at her. And even as her tears tapered off and her shoulders finally relaxed, they remained there.

  “So … you’re rich,” Orion said in that bland way of his that always managed to make her laugh.

  It was enou
gh to pierce some of the tension inside her as she sat at the island, watching him move around her kitchen with easy familiarity. Somehow, in the span of an hour, she’d gone from her comforting him to him attempting to make her a cup of her favorite tea.

  Though she’d insisted she could do it herself, he hadn’t been willing to take no for an answer.

  “I had an inheritance I didn’t touch until recently.”

  Money she’d always swore she would never accept because she knew the strings that came along with it. But now that she had Jackal and was planning to mount a defense against Uilleam before going at him directly … she didn’t have much of a choice.

  “And the accent?” he asked with a gesture to her mouth.

  That sparked a smile. “When in Rome,” she said, adopting the accent he was used to.

  “You can just turn it on and off like that? Jesus, that’s gonna fuck with my head.”

  She didn’t bother explaining that it had taken nearly six months with a dialect coach to get it just right. Some days had been easier than others when she hadn’t needed to give as much effort suppressing the way she really spoke.

  Other days, she slipped up more often than she meant to.

  It amazed her that despite how long they had known each other, this was the first time they had ever been in such an intimate setting for any length of time. Usually, if he did stop by her apartment, it was only ever to give her information she needed that he hadn’t wanted to give over the phone, or making sure she was okay if she hadn’t called in a while.

  He gingerly lowered himself onto the chair beside her, sliding her cup over, the steaming drink smelling of tea leaves and jasmine. He didn’t make any tea for himself and instead grabbed the glass bottle of whiskey he’d taken earlier.

  Twisting the top off, he tossed it aside before tipping the bottle to his lips.

  As the silence stretched between them, she could just hear the sounds of a television playing upstairs from the open door of Kava’s room. She strained her ears to hear it, though it was nearly impossible at her distance, but it was far easier to focus on that than to think about why they were both sitting here like this.

  “Should I even ask whose place this is?” he asked with a faint gesture around the room.

  “It belonged to my mother,” she answered, feeling a sort of relief that she no longer had to edit her speech so carefully. “But after everything that happened … I decided to stay here.”

  He scratched at his whiskered face, mulling that over. “And your mother is …”

  Karina only hesitated a moment. “Katherine, but you might know her as the Red Widow.”

  Everything changed in that instant.

  He went from innocently curious to surprise.

  He looked at her as if he’d never seen her before.

  Oh, she knew that look well—had seen it on far more people than she would have cared to admit over the years.

  Especially back in boarding school when the other girls hadn’t cared that she wore the same clothes as them and took the same classes.

  She was less because her family hadn’t come from money, and the wives of the school’s elite had spread rumors about her mother that had often left her crying alone in the restroom stalls.

  She’d been young then, impressionable even, and she hadn’t known the extent of what her mother did in any capacity.

  That was supposed to come later.

  Instead, all the unsavory details had hit her from every source around her, and she’d felt the weight of their assumptions every moment of every day.

  And by the time the day came that Katherine finally sat down to tell her just what the family business was, she was too blinded by her own thoughts on it to care what she said.

  She wanted no part in it.

  She didn’t want to be someone who others whispered about in scandalous tones.

  In many ways, that had been the reason she had opted to stay away from it and wanted to walk down a different path just to see if she could.

  That certainly hadn’t ended well for her.

  “How the hell didn’t I know that?” Orion asked, his brows bunching together.

  “She’s always been careful about who she gives her name to.”

  And when she did offer, she often gave a different name to every person she met, yet somehow was able to keep up with each lie.

  “Well, shit.”

  His response made her laugh, if only because she’d certainly heard worse from others.

  “So that’s why you’re walking around with whatever the fuck that is?” he asked with an upward gesture of his hand, and it was quite clear who he meant.

  “It’s not polite to refer to him like that, you know.”

  He leaned toward her, his tone flat as he said, “He’s not natural.”

  “Moving on.”

  “What’s the plan?” Orion asked, finishing with the bottle and setting it aside, leveling his gaze on her. “You didn’t come break me out of that Russian shithole for nothing.”

  They both knew that wasn’t quite true, but this time, she did have something to ask of him. “I need someone I can trust beside me.”

  “To go up against the Kingmaker?”

  At that moment, she fully understood the gravity of what she was asking. Because while that title meant nothing to her because she knew the man who bore it intimately, it certainly held weight with others.

  And Orion knew firsthand what could happen if he crossed a man like Uilleam. And she doubted Uilleam would be as forgiving next time.

  “You don’t have to say yes,” she told him earnestly, “but I don’t know if I’ll be able to do this without you.”

  Orion shook out a cigarette from the pack he carried. “You know you don’t even have to ask. I’d do anything for you.”

  She’d never doubted that for a second.

  He lit the end and inhaled deeply, blowing out the stream of smoke a second later. “What are you trying to do?”

  It was one thing to have a thought in mind for what she had planned. It was something else entirely to actually voice it.

  Sure, she’d hedged at what she was planning with Isla, though she’d been careful not to say anything to Katherine just yet until everything was finalized.

  But if she wanted someone beside her, willing to do whatever was necessary, she wanted him to know the truth—to know exactly what he was getting himself into.

  Which was why she walked him into the room where she had everything set up—from pictures of the man in question, to documents about the properties he owned, and everything between. If there was something to know about Uilleam Runehart or his Den, she had it all right here and available.

  Orion tried to hide his surprise, or alarm depending on his thoughts, but there was only so much he could do to conceal his expression as he walked over to the opposite wall where a picture of Uilleam was tacked in place and another of his brother was right below it.

  “And this one?” he asked with a tap of his finger. “I don’t know that one.”

  A glimpse of their very first meeting together played in the back of her mind. “Kit Runehart. Uilleam’s older brother.”

  “For fuck’s sake, there’s more of them?”

  And perhaps more than the two of them, she thought to herself, but she could find no traces of Uilleam’s sister anywhere she looked. It was almost as if the woman didn’t exist at all.

  But Karina also knew that the Runehart family specialized in making themselves scarce, so she didn’t doubt that if Elsie was out there, she would nearly be impossible to find.

  “He’s a former member of the Lotus Society,” she explained, watching him process that information. “And nowadays, I believe he’s something of a facilitator. When he’s not getting involved in his brother’s affairs, that is.”

  “Right, right … and the Lotus Society is what now?”

  Oh.

  Right.

  She forgot that just because he was involve
d in the trade didn’t necessarily mean he knew all the players. There were hundreds and quite possibly thousands of different factions of organized crime. So many that she was sure there were plenty she didn’t know about herself.

  “Assassins, from my understanding.”

  Orion stared at her for a long moment. “So the whole family is psychotic?”

  “Their father wasn’t a very pleasant man,” Karina said, almost to herself. “Sometimes we can’t help the people we become.”

  When she realized his gaze was on her once more, she quickly changed the subject back to the matter at hand. “All the same. It’s important to know who you’re up against.”

  “How’s he play into this?” Orion asked with a nod of his head at the snapshot of Kit.

  “It’s quite a long story, actually,” she said regrettably, knowing herself well enough that if she started talking about this, it would be hours before she stopped.

  “Well,” Orion said with a grunt as he lowered himself to the floor and gestured to her wall. “We have all night.”

  18

  The Albanian Problem

  Men got a certain look on their face when they wanted to kill someone.

  Something about the eyes, he thought. Where there was a dark sort of hunger that never seemed quite quenched.

  It was certainly the first thing Uilleam thought of as he arranged the meeting with the Albanians before arriving here at the hotel to finish last-minute details.

  Skorpion frowned as he kept pace in front of him. “I wouldn’t consider this your best idea.”

  No, he probably wouldn’t, but Skorpion have never been a fan of this sort of work. He preferred what was cut and dry—black and white. This fell somewhere in that gray middle area that couldn’t quite be categorized.

  “I’d have left you out of it, considering your history, but I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?”

  Because he still hadn’t heard a single thing from Grimm, and he was starting to think this wasn’t much of a coincidence.