Dom clasped his hands on the tabletop, switching to Russian. “Someone was at my place the other day. Now, Igor, you know my name, my face, and understand that I have a list of the few who have this privilege. If I find out you have crossed me or Yuri, I will kill you, your family, and anybody else who could carry on the memory of your existence.”
Igor’s face paled. “Yes. I understand.”
The uneasy feeling that had been building, budding, and stretching in Dom’s chest finally snapped. His ears perked up, and he motioned to Pavel and the rest of Yuri’s guards, then pointed to the ceiling. With the room quiet, they could hear the footsteps, dozens of them, circling the church.
He, Yuri, Pavel, and Igor outlined a quick strategy. The other three brandished their weapons while Dom removed a semiautomatic pistol from his blazer and started toward the meeting room’s main entry.
“Where are you going?” Pavel called.
“We can’t all leave the same way and bottleneck ourselves,” Dom said. “I’ll take the main door.”
Someone on the other side of the door kicked it in.
The nozzle of a gun appeared.
Dom waited for the wielder’s face to appear, grabbed their head, and bashed it against the wall of brick near the door. Before they had a chance to recover, he lodged a bullet in their abdomen and neck, and propped them up to use as a shield to navigate his way out of the building.
Shots sounded from above, which would pull some of the gunfire out of his path. Apparently, Yuri’s faith or luck, whichever had kept this sanctuary from being breached the last several years, had run out tonight.
Over the shoulder of his “shield,” Dom hit two additional shooters in the head and torso.
A hairy arm suddenly wrapped around his neck from behind, tight against his windpipe.
Both Dom’s gun and human shield fell to the ground, so he used his forearms to break the hold and ducked a massive fist that would have collapsed his jaw.
Having shoved all his bodyweight into the punch, the man with the hairy arms stumbled forward. Dom used all of his bodyweight to topple him to the ground, pushed Hairy Arms’ head twice into the ground, then finished him the same way he’d done the others. A straight path to hell awaited him for killing at least four men in a sanctuary.
He returned to the corridor, grabbed his gun, and continued to the exit.
The twinkling lights in the sky, a little more plentiful out here than back in Moscow, let him know when he’d left the dark corridor. The minute he stepped outside, a knife went into his bicep. A human tank, this man twice the size of all the others, stepped back and lowered into a fighting stance. It would have been simple to put a bullet in him, having brought a knife to a gunfight. But, from the looks of it, the tank’s “armor” had taken several futile hits already.
Dom put away the gun and slipped off his tie.
The hulk took the motion as an opening and charged.
Dom slid out of the way and wrapped the tie around the man's neck, which was damn near a tree trunk, tugging hard.
Massive arms flailed.
Annoyed, Dom removed the tie, stepped back, and lodged a bullet in the behemoth’s skull. Strangulation would have taken forever, and he didn’t have time for that.
His phone rang.
“Pavel,” he answered.
“Where are you?”
“Northeast corner under the tree.”
The car pulled up just as he reached the street. He got in and, before he thought through what he was doing, he scanned Yuri for injuries.
“Ah, you do care,” Yuri teased.
He leaned back against the seat. “Whatever.”
“Son?” Yuri grabbed his injured arm. “Do you not feel this?”
“Have you seen the scars I already have?”
“A regular man did not make those. Take off the blazer.”
Dom groaned but did as he was told.
Pavel looked out the window, searching the darkness. “There was another car here that didn’t look to be associated with the group who stormed in tonight. A man and woman were inside.”
“Doing what?” Dom asked.
“I think you can probably guess what they were doing. They sped off when I confronted them.”
Amateurs. Gunfire wouldn’t be enough for him to consider leaving the warmth of Eija’s body. Hell, gunfire wouldn’t stop him from kissing her, never mind missing out any opportunity to make her orgasm. She was beautiful when she came. He knew they’d talked about keeping their distance, but he wanted to hear her voice. After a night like this, he craved the sound of her voice.
“Anything on the men’s affiliation?” Yuri asked.
“We’ll have information before sunset tomorrow,” Pavel promised. “Initial speculation is that nobody we met with tonight is involved, but we’re still searching.”
Yuri finished cleaning and bandaging Dom’s wound, then gingerly helped him back into his blazer as if dealing with a three-year-old.
“Are you coming to the penthouse?” Yuri asked.
He wanted to go home, take a shower, and lose himself inside Eija’s body.
“No,” he replied, eyes closed. “I’m not.”
Eija flipped the switch on her night-vision goggles to increase the range. They knew they were in the right place because they’d spotted Mori Masahiko and Musa Umaji enter the church, of all places, and she pretended not to notice feeling grateful they hadn’t spotted Dom go in. Maybe he wasn’t even here.
Behind her, Colin crinkled and crunched.
“This is supposed to be a quiet surveillance op, and you bring potato chips.”
He extended the bag in her direction. “You want some? It’s butter and dill. I’ve never had anything like it before. It’s amazing.”
“No, thank you.” She lowered the goggles and faced forward in the passenger seat. “Okay, so we have Mori, Musa, and possibly Yuri and Dominik. At least. We knew about the Yakuza and the Bratva working together, but I never guessed the Jamaicans would be part of this.”
“Why not?” Colin shrugged and sucked on his fingers. “They’re like corporations. On the outside, they’re competitors, but they know in order to stay afloat, there has to be some sort of interconnectedness or…”
When he added nothing else, she turned to him.
“Colin, right now you look like a child someone intentionally lost in a shopping mall.”
He folded over the top of the potato chip bag, the noise extra pronounced in the small cabin space. Then he pulled a soda from somewhere near his feet, popped the top, and chugged.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Colin eat chips or drink soda. According to him, high school was the last time he’d drank soda, at least regularly, because he’d struggled with his weight and acne. Chips, he didn’t eat because he didn’t mess with empty carbs. When he was stressed, however, all his rules shriveled up and died.
“Colin, what’s wrong? You’re eating like a middle schooler.”
He pulled the can away from his mouth and licked his lips. “It’s April.”
“I figured at least that much. What about April?”
“It’s…well, there’s something I haven’t told you.”
There was plenty she hadn’t told him, and the jury was still out on how and when that would happen. The word “if” suddenly floated through her mind, like a wisp of smoke from a dancing flame she mentally blew away.
“Me and April, we didn’t just sleep together,” he said. “We were together.”
Eija’s mouth fell open. “Really? For how long?”
“Seven months.” Sorrow pooled in his tired eyes. “The more time we spend together while not together, the more I realize how stupid our break-up was. I could have tried harder, E. I could have, but I was so fucking arrogant.”
“Why did you break up?”
“We were getting too close, and that freaked me out. Like…talking about moving in together, close.” He drew a long sip from the
can. “I got cold feet and slept with that one blue-haired intern.”
“Aimée?”
“Was that her name?”
Eija faced him, her kneecap brushing the gearshift. “Jesus, Colin. That’s…pretty bad. You know April’s last serious relationship ended because her ex cheated, right?”
“No, I did not know that. See if you can reach my gun and just…” He tapped his temple. “Make it quick.”
“You want April back. Just tell her you want her back. If she says no, it’s her right, but she could say yes. I thought you two hooked up a few times, but it makes much more sense why she gets all awkward when your name comes up. Why you get all awkward when I bring her up.”
“I’m in love with her.”
She gave his shoulder a squeeze. “I’m sorry.”
“For being in love?”
“Yes. I hear it’s painful.”
He shrugged off her hand. “Anyway, now that I’ve gone all ‘Dear Abby’ on you, you owe me a personal question.”
She granted his wish.
She already knew what it would be, but she granted his wish anyhow.
“Sex is your thing, E,” he began. “You’re confident in yourself, you go for what you want, and you get yours. Without a doubt. But then…Grenada. How does that even happen?”
“I’m not in love with him, if that’s what you’re asking.” Though, these days, she wondered if she was simply at the top of the hill while love waited at the bottom, waiting for someone to give her a swift kick in the behind.
“That’s not what I’m asking. I already know you’re incapable of,” Colin hooked his index finger and tapped his chest, “these kinds of feelings.”
An unexpected sting created ripples in her blood. For a moment, her body went cold, as though the sting had capped every major blood vessel in her system. She’d lost her parents young, so she didn’t remember them. From what her grandparents had shared, they’d loved each other. Her grandparents had loved each other. One serious relationship that ended in her ex being her niece’s father wasn’t enough to drive her to close herself off to love.
At no point had she ever said she had an aversion to love. Her preference had simply been nonexclusive relationships. That, for some reason, appeared to have made her the INTERPOL ho when Colin had run through half of the junior analysts during his first two years on the job…which had somehow made him more attractive. She’d even heard some of the analysts call him “swoon-worthy,” and though she loved him dearly, she’d still gagged.
“Don’t say that,” she whispered, the hurt in her voice stumbling out, of its own volition.
Colin’s face fell. “E, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just…you don’t suffer in love like the rest of us. The closest you came was with that Andrei dude, and I honestly think the only reason you stayed hung up on him afterward is because—”
“Stop.”
“Is because of how he left you,” Colin finished, anyway.
Andrei Falcone had slipped out in the middle of the night. When men did shit like that, they didn’t want to be found. Back then, she hadn’t known he’d left a note. The same night she’d accepted that realization, that he was as good as gone, her grandfather had a stroke, reminding her of the fragility of life and how important it was to spend as much time in the present with the ones she loved.
Colin’s mouth curved into a dim smile. “What’s on your mind, Eija? Talk to me. You can tell me anything. You know that.”
Almost anything.
Eija tilted her head back and thought about how to carefully word her response.
“Colin, I don’t know what to tell you. I just…liked him. I messed up, and I can acknowledge that, but that doesn’t change the fact that I really enjoyed being with him.”
She still did.
Watching grass grow with Dom would bring her joy.
“But then he left,” Colin mumbled.
She nibbled her bottom lip. “Mm-hmm.”
“And it’s been hard to move on. It’s even harder now that you’re essentially one half of the closest family you have remaining.”
Harder now that she saw his face just about every day.
“I think, deep down, you cared for him more than you realized,” he added. “That’s why that night went the way it did.”
She’d tried to hide it, but Colin had seen the hurt. And for it to bite as hard as it had, she wondered if that was the real reason she didn’t want what, had they been different people, would have been so easy to pursue with Dom. Strong women, those who took down criminal organizations and extremist groups, didn’t lament over broken hearts. They didn’t create fantasy worlds in their heads while alone in their apartments in France, dreaming about what could have been.
Life was or wasn’t.
That was all there was to it.
Colin motioned to their equipment, the church. “Well, look at this way. This op, the work you put in this past year…E, you birthed a baby. Even Randy pointed out how hard you’ve worked this past year. And I know it’s in part because of what happened in Grenada, but cut yourself a little slack. Maybe it’s time mama got back out onto the scene.”
She turned back to the church and raised her goggles. “When mama’s baby finally learns how to walk, maybe.”
“Well, it’s only a matter of time before Sokolov—”
“Colin, we’ve got movement.”
His casual demeanor left, and he grabbed his goggles. Emerging from the church was Clodagh Ronan, Mori, Musa, a man she didn’t recognize, and each individual’s entourage.
“Who’s the guy in the gray suit?” she asked.
“Ale Strinati. Sicilian mafia. La Stessa Cosa.”
“La Stessa Cosa? Do we have a task force for them?”
“Yeah, but it’s latent. They’ve been quiet.”
After each crime leader got into their vehicles and sped off, the night remained quiet for about ten minutes more, and then the first gunshot lifted into the air. More than a dozen bodies dressed in black emerged from the darkness, flooding the church, weapons of all different types raised.
“What the fuck?” Colin whispered. “Where’d they come from?”
Eija recognized several of Yuri’s men firing back at the shooters. “I don’t know. Can you pick up any audio?”
“Russian, but it sounds off.”
Eija took the earpiece he outstretched. “It’s dialect. Southern region. I can’t remember from where, which oblast. They’re saying what sounds like ‘inside’ and…‘the prince is here.’”
Cold sweat sprouted on her upper lip.
“Dominik?” Colin asked. “He’s here? He must still be inside. If we wait, E, we might be able to ID him tonight.”
She swallowed, but her esophagus had twisted itself into a bow. “If they’re still looking for him, I don’t think he’s here, Colin.”
“We’ll wait.”
“We don’t have the firepower on us to risk being caught up in this level of mafioso shit.”
Pavel, swift and efficient as usual, picked off men one by one. He led a crew to one side of the church, all of them crowded around a figure. Once the figure, which she’d already guessed was Yuri, was in the car, Pavel made his way back to the chaos. Then, a familiar face emerged from the belly of the cathedral.
Colin raised his goggles in Dom’s direction. “Who—”
Eija grabbed the goggles with one hand, the back of Colin’s head with the other, and brought his mouth to hers.
“E, what are you—”
She slipped her tongue between his lips.
After a moment of stunned surprise, his tongue tangled with hers, sweet from the orange in the soda and his lips sour from the dill in the chips.
“Pull my shirt up,” she whispered.
He hooked his fingers in the hem of her shirt, tugged it up, and when it was over her head, knuckles sounded on the window.
Eija didn’t look up.
With her head cove
red, Pavel wouldn’t make out her hair, and her undershirt hid her skin. It wasn’t like there were a ton of brown-skinned, curly haired folk in Russia.
“Hey, out of here,” Pavel warned.
Colin looked up. “Oh, sorry.”
“Go do that somewhere else.”
She felt Colin nod, and he pulled out of their surveillance spot, backed up to the end of the street, and sped away from the scene.
Eija, heart racing, fixed her shirt.
She felt sick, could scarcely breathe, and her hands shook. But she didn’t feel sick and out of breath and dizzy because she’d just blown their operation, yet again. It was because the last thing she’d seen, right before Pavel had started toward the car, was a large man with an equally large knife headed toward Dom.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “I didn’t know if he’d believe that we were out here in the dark doing anything other than getting hot and heavy.”
Colin rubbed his bottom lip, a slight grin on his face.
“No, no. It’s…uh, it’s fine.”
“Come on, just give it to me straight. ‘Ugh, E, that was like kissing my sister.’”
“It wasn’t…that.” He glanced at her. “But I will say this…the guys who stumble and fall all over themselves over you? I get it now. I totally get it now.”
She swatted his arm.
He burst out laughing.
Chapter 15
Eija opened the door to her apartment, not at all surprised to see Dom standing there. No light shone in his eyes, the usual steely gray replaced by a color that reminded her of a Louisiana bog at midnight. She pictured herself trudging through the muck in search of the man who lived deep within—the Dom she’d known all this time, her Dom, who needed rescue after getting trapped in hanging moss and enchanting willows weeping in the night.
This was him, wasn’t it? Dominik Sokolov. The man who Yuri trusted to take over one of the most organized crime families in the world before he turned the age of thirty-five.
Dom’s suit, though dark, had visible spots of blood dotted throughout. The white shirt underneath had a quarter-sized stain on the chest, and she mentally soothed herself. If the blood had been his, he would have been in obvious pain.
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