Alarm beat a drum in his brain. He couldn’t afford to lose Yuri as an ally. But there was something bigger going on here—and he suddenly knew what it was. He just fucking knew. His pulse zipped into the danger zone. He was typically never in jeopardy of losing his control—but this might be the moment it happened.
“I think maybe she’s hiding something from both of us,” he said, glaring at the woman he’d shared a bed with last night. A woman who’d made him feel something for the first time in a long time.
That should have been his warning, shouldn’t it? That he’d felt something for her when he hadn’t gotten emotionally involved with anyone in twenty-one fucking years? He’d tortured himself with the thought he was tangling his memories of Valentina with his attraction to Kat—but she’d been lying to him all along. There was no Kat.
Her color was still high. “I’m Kat Kasharin. That’s who I am now. Who I was before is irrelevant.”
Mendez punched the table with a fist. Dishes flew up in the air and then clattered back down. It was violent, but not nearly as violent as he needed. He didn’t look at Yuri. He no longer cared that anyone else was in the room. All he cared about was that she was here, looking at him with those eyes that he’d once loved so fucking much it nearly killed him when she’d no longer been in his life.
“Twenty-one damn years,” he growled. “You lied to me. You lied.”
“I had to,” she hissed, and his world fell apart with those words of acknowledgment. “They gave me no choice. You would have been killed, as would I. I did what I was ordered to do, the same as you have done every day of your life in the military. And if you think I have not suffered for it”—her eyes flashed and hot color flooded her entire face. Her lips were white. She shot to her feet and leaned over the table, anger sparking from her like an electrical storm over the ocean. She was magnificent and he wanted her. He also hated her in that moment like he’d never hated anyone—“then fuck you, Johnny Mendez. Because you are not the man I thought you were.”
She whirled and stormed out of the room. But then she whirled back again, thumping her fist to her chest while her eyes glistened with the tears she was trying to hold in. And then she said the words that burned everything he thought he’d known to ash.
“I am Valentina Alexandrovna Rostov. I’m forty-three years old, I’ve lost friends I cared for, a child I would have died for, and the man I loved. I don’t care what you do to me, Yuri Budayev. You cannot make it worse than what I’ve lived with for the past twenty-one years of my life.”
Chapter 30
Kat dashed tears from her eyes as she stalked back to the bedroom she’d shared with Johnny. Goddammit! How had it come to this? It shouldn’t matter to the Tiger who she was, but he was a paranoid arms dealer/doomsday prepper who couldn’t envision anything but treachery in her deception.
Fuck him. Fuck them both!
She reached the room and slammed the door behind her. Then she paced back and forth, sucking down tears and trying to decide what came next. Johnny would not want to work with her now. He’d leave this place alone—and he’d get killed before he finished the mission. She couldn’t let that happen.
She started for the door. She’d go back there and tell him that it didn’t matter how angry he was, she was still going with him. She had to go with him. She knew Sergei, knew his routines. A map of his house and a schematic of the alarm systems wasn’t enough.
She reached for the handle—and the door burst inward. She jumped back.
Johnny stood there, looking nothing like the man who’d busted in last night and locked the door before taking her to the heights of pleasure and holding her in his arms all night long.
No, this Johnny was a nuclear weapon on the verge of detonation. Pissed didn’t begin to describe it.
“For days,” he said. “Days you let me—made me—believe you were someone else. Pretending to be your own sister. Goddammit, Valentina! What were you thinking? How could you be so unfeeling?”
She reeled. “Unfeeling? Are you kidding me? I’ve spent every waking minute with you thinking how I could never have you again, how much I love you, and how it didn’t matter because you could never know—”
He took a menacing step toward her, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. She wasn’t scared of him though. She stood her ground.
“Why couldn’t I know? Who are you to decide for me what I get to know?” His laugh was bitter. “Love? That’s not love. You don’t love me. If you ever did. People who love each other don’t fake their own death and disappear without a trace.”
“Don’t,” she said, her jaw clenched tight. “You don’t get to tell me how I felt—how I feel. I never stopped loving you. I never stopped wanting you—but I did what I was told because they were going to kill you, Johnny. Dmitri wanted you dead. Our superiors were dangerously close to being convinced. But there was a compromise—that compromise was me. If I was out of the picture, they were certain you’d leave Russia. And you did.”
“I was reassigned,” he growled. “I would have stayed forever if I’d known you were alive. I’d have torn this godforsaken country apart stone by stone if it meant I would find you alive somewhere.”
Her heart was a dead, squashed organ lying at her feet. “I didn’t want to go. I wasn’t given a choice. Dmitri told me there was an assignment—when I arrived, there was a car waiting. I was informed on my way to the airport what was happening. Even if I’d wanted to run, I was trapped.”
“It took weeks to get answers. Weeks before anyone bothered to tell me you were dead. Weeks in which I went out of my mind. I loved you, Valentina. Only you—and fucking hell if you weren’t alive the entire time. Alive while I believed you were gone forever.”
She wanted to cry. Dmitri, of course. He would have enjoyed tormenting Johnny. Watching him go out of his mind.
“I didn’t know. They gave me a new name, a new place to live. I was told that the world would think I’d died in an accident. I was never told when or how it happened. It wasn’t important to my new identity.”
He scraped a hand over his scalp. Her throat was a hard knot. He frowned. And then his eyes flashed fire. She knew then that he’d connected the rest of the dots.
“Roman.”
All she could do was nod. Words wouldn’t come. Her poor dead baby boy. And this man, his father, who had never known him. He would never forgive her for this. She understood that. How could he? She didn’t know if she could forgive herself for what had happened. If she’d been there, maybe Roman wouldn’t have been in the car that day. Or if she’d just shot the girl like Sergei ordered, maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all.
She would never know.
“Goddammit, Valentina.” His voice was rougher than she’d ever heard it. Her gaze snapped to his. His dark eyes glittered hotly. He swallowed. Hard. “We had a son and I didn’t know it. We stood by his grave yesterday and you fucking didn’t tell me he was mine.”
She spoke through the glass slicing her throat from the inside. “I asked if you would want to know if you were the father of a dead child. You said you didn’t know the answer.”
He turned and slapped the wall. “I know what I said!” he exploded. “But Jesus Christ, he was ours.”
“I know that! And I told you I had no idea I was pregnant until it was too late. How the hell do you think they controlled me for so long? When I would have run to you and to hell with them? When I would have left Russia and found you again? They took him away and put him with Peter and Ludmilla. They made me into his surrogate mother who only got to visit him when they gave their permission—and none of that changed once I went to work for Sergei. If anything, it got worse. I couldn’t leave.”
“He died eight years ago. What happened then? You left Russia and went to work for Ian Black. But you couldn’t find me? Couldn’t tell me the truth?”
“How was I supposed to find you?” she yelled. “You were a Special Operator working in a shadow organiza
tion, and I couldn’t exactly march into America and start visiting military bases. What would I do? Knock on doors and ask in my Russian accent if they’d heard of you? How soon before I would be arrested and thrown into a cell?”
“But you eventually knew where to find me.”
She could lie, but she wouldn’t. “Yes. Ian mentioned your name about three years ago.”
“And still you didn’t let me know you were alive.”
She lifted her chin high, daring him to chastise her again. “Eighteen years after you’d last seen me. I was supposed to walk back into your life and what? You, the commander of a top secret military unit. And not only that, it had been eighteen damned years—you could be married, have kids—how did I know?”
“You could have asked.”
“My heart couldn’t stand it, Johnny. I’d lost you eighteen years ago. I’d lost Roman too. Why put myself through the pain?”
“I fucking hate you right now.”
“I know.” She looked at his fists. Clenching. Unclenching. The fire in his gaze. The hard jut of his jaw. If she were a man, he’d punch her. They’d have a fight and expend all this hot energy. Maybe, at the end of it, they’d reach an understanding. Men did that kind of thing, but they never gave women the same opportunity.
Anger flooded her, rolling through her like a superpower. “Go ahead,” she told him, nodding at his fists.
His eyes widened for a moment. They were slits when he stared at her again. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You want to hit me. Or choke me. Go ahead. Try.”
He frowned hard. Then he turned and headed for the door. Kat—because she’d been Kat for long enough to think of herself that way no matter what he called her—saw red. How fucking dare he?
“Johnny!”
He stopped. She thought he wouldn’t turn around again, but he did.
“I am a warrior like you. I’m your fucking equal and you will not walk out on me.”
“I’m not hitting you.”
“You would if I were a man.”
His look was filled with disdain. “You aren’t.”
She gave in to sheer instinct, dropping onto her hands and kicking out, knocking his legs from beneath him.
He crashed to the ground in a heap, cussing as he sprawled. Before he could recover, she leapt onto his back and wrapped an arm around his neck, hauling him backward as she wrapped her legs around his torso.
She didn’t think he would fight at first. But he did. He delivered an elbow to her side and she let go of him with an oof. He turned, grabbing for her, but she managed to land an elbow into his face. Then she scrambled up and crouched into a fighting stance. He got up, circling her.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said on a growl.
“You already have, asshole.”
“I barely touched you.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about!” She rushed him. He would have grabbed her, but she sideswiped him and delivered a blow to the back of his neck and another to his ribs.
She could fight more deadly. So could he. But there was a limit to what they would do to each other.
“You’re going to pay for that,” he said, rubbing his neck.
This time when she rushed him, he was ready. He caught her by the throat and slammed her to the wall. The breath left her body with the impact. His hand was big and it closed around her throat. He held her hard against the wall, his eyes flashing anger and something more as he stared down into her eyes.
“You lied to me,” he ground out. “For years.”
She couldn’t speak. He’d closed off her air. Another few moments and she’d pass out. She had to stop fighting. Had to go limp and make him think he’d choked her.
The instant she did so, his grip eased—and she stomped down on his instep while balling her fist and shoving it into his gut at the same time. Her fist connected with the rock-hard abs that protected his core, but it was still a hard enough blow to knock some air from him.
He rocked back, yelling in pain. Adrenaline and rage pumped through her as she whirled from his grip and drew. Johnny drew at the same time. They faced each other across a chasm of rage and hurt, pistols pointed at hearts.
They stood like that for a long minute, breathing hard, eyes locked together. He dropped his arm first. A second later, he holstered the weapon. His gaze was defiant as he pressed a hand to his gut and dragged in air.
“If you aren’t going to shoot me, put that damned thing away.”
“I haven’t decided yet,” she snapped.
Wrong thing to say because he stepped into her, knocking her arm up and out of the way as he disarmed her and ejected the magazine. She was so pissed—and shocked—that she threw a punch at his head. It was messy and only clipped him, but he caught her wrist and wrenched it behind her back.
Then he threw the pistol to the ground and gripped her jaw with his free hand. His eyes searched hers for a hot minute. And then he muttered something before crushing his mouth down on hers.
Shock reverberated through her system. She opened her mouth and kissed him back, desperation and love crashing along the rapids of her bloodstream. A moment later and he shoved her away. He was breathing hard and looking like he could shoot thunderbolts from his eyes.
“You’ve been lying to me since New Orleans. You let yesterday happen, let me make love to you—and you still didn’t tell me who you really are.”
Anger flared deep inside. “Oh come on, Johnny. Stop lying to yourself. You knew the truth deep down. You knew when you saw the tattoo. But you wanted to fuck me. You didn’t care who I was yesterday so long as I was willing. Don’t try to make the guilt trip worse by playing the poor victim who was tricked into my panties.”
“I don’t remember you being such a bitch,” he growled.
“You asshole,” she hissed. She took a hard step toward him. Stopped. Punching him again wouldn’t get her anywhere, so why try? “No matter what you tell yourself, I saved your miserable life. If I’d stayed in Moscow, with you, we’d both be dead and Roman would have never been born. I did what I had to do. And you did what you had to do, including willfully ignoring all the evidence of your eyes yesterday for the sake of your dick.”
Hot anger flashed across his features. “You don’t pull punches, do you?”
“Did I ever?”
“We could have fought them back then. I could have sent you to the US—”
“You couldn’t and you know it! With what resources, Johnny? You weren’t in charge of your own organization. You would have had to beg your superiors in the embassy. There would have been red tape—nothing would have happened quickly. You’d have been murdered on a street somewhere, the victim of a random crime. I’d have been dead soon after.”
His jaw worked. Then he pointed at her. “We’re done here. As soon as we can get topside, I’m going to Moscow to stop Turov. I don’t care what the fuck you do.”
Chapter 31
Mendez strode into Yuri’s gym, walked over to the punching bag, and laid into it. His anger was molten hot. He hated her. He pictured her face on the bag—
No.
No, he couldn’t really do that. He hated what she’d done to them twenty-one years ago, what she’d done to him this past week, but pretending she was the punching bag only soured his stomach.
Instead, he pretended it was Dmitri Leonov, Sergei Turov, and Mark DeWitt rolled into one. Much more satisfying. He threw punches until his knuckles were sore and sweat rolled down the inside of his shirt, soaking his chest and arms. He dragged the shirt up and off, mopping his brow as he did so. His dog tags seemed lonely without the locket there.
Fucking locket. Fucking bitch.
His entire body shook with adrenaline and rage. He hadn’t felt this much out of control since…
Since Valentina had disappeared twenty-one years ago.
Jesus.
He sank onto a bench and dropped his head low, elbows on knees and hands pressed
to either side of his head as he dragged in air and tried to calm the speeding of his heart. He focused on the rubber mat beneath his feet, counted the interlocking edges. When he got to the end, he counted again.
He’d spent years—decades—perfecting his iron self-control. Being the man in charge meant he had to be coolheaded and calm in every circumstance. He’d done it too. He’d walked into meetings with generals who outranked him by miles, congressmen and women, and even the president of the United States, and kept his cool no matter how they tried to rattle him.
But now? Now he had no fucking cool. He was made of flame. His anger was a truck full of nitro driving into an inferno. It was a nuclear weapon emerging from the silo in a blaze of rocket fuel and deadly intentions.
She’d let him think she was dead. She’d been pregnant and he’d never known it. All those tales Kat had told him about her son and the way she’d felt when he’d died—Roman was his son too. And he’d never even seen a picture. Not as a baby, not as a boy, nothing.
His heart hurt. Physically hurt in a way it never had before. Like someone had ripped it from his chest and stomped on it.
The door opened and Yuri walked in. Mendez didn’t want to deal with Yuri right now, but what choice did he have?
“I’m sorry I thought you came to harm my business,” the Tiger said.
Mendez snorted. “Thanks. But how do you know I didn’t? Valentina—Kat—and I could just be good actors.”
Yuri snorted. “If so, you are in the wrong business, my friend. You have the face for Hollywood. Might as well go and pick up an Oscar while you’re at it.”
“What makes you think we’re not trying to fake you out?”
“Emotions. They are stinking up my house with their seriousness. They are all too real.”
Yes, they really were. “I’m not enjoying it either.”
“She lied to you and you were blindsided by it.”
“Understatement of the century, Yuri.”
“Yes, well, I came to tell you that I’m doing what I can to get you a window. I think I can have you out of here by tonight. Both of you,” he added.
HOT Valor (Hostile Operations Team - Book 11) Page 18