Year of the Scorpio: Part Two

by Stacy Gail

  Polo’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

  “I saw that bastard with Knives. I remember how Konstantin went gaga for him the moment he saw him.” I bit my lip hard when it trembled, while the fury inside ballooned as I put piece after piece of the puzzle together. God, I’d been so stupid not to see it all until now. “I’d be willing to bet that if I took another look at that hotel video where Kon was attacked, I’d be able to identify that guy, Ollie.”

  “Ollie.” Polo’s brows came together, his eyes almost black. “Damn. Why does that sound so familiar?”

  “Konstantin met Ollie during that busted-up card game the Scorpeones ran all those months ago, remember? That fact alone makes me suspect that Knives—and not the Scorpeones—is the one been behind everything that’s been going wrong in my life.” To admit it out loud was like swallowing poison, but I had to do it. It wasn’t just my life that was at stake now, or Polo’s. We could handle ourselves well enough when the pressure was on.

  Sass, though…

  No.

  Sass was my sister. My fucking innocent baby sister who led a good life, a clean life. A life I’d always dreamed of having. She needed to know what was out there, if only to keep an eye out for it so she could avoid it like the plague. It was my duty as her sister—seriously, I had a freaking sister!—to get my head out of the sand and do everything possible to protect her.

  “So,” Sass said, and everything inside me dimmed when she looked decidedly unhappy upon discovering her siblings were total psycho losers, “what’s the plan? You can’t just leave things the way they are.”

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head, hating myself. Ten minutes into my role of big sister and already I was failing Sass, because I had no answers. “I don’t know why Knives is targeting me. I don’t even know how to make him stop without any more bloodshed. The people he killed tonight…”

  “Don’t,” Polo said, his voice flat. “Don’t focus on them. They’re gone. Focus on what we need to do to make sure we don’t wind up the same way.”

  I swallowed against an acid-filled knot of grief that lodged in my throat, and nodded. When the man was right, he was right. “I believe it was Knives who was pulling all the strings to make one event cascade into the next. I might even have some idea of what he’s going to target now, after everything I saw and heard tonight.”

  Sass grimaced. “That sounds good and awful all at the same time.”

  “You have no idea.” There was no way anyone could understand how awful it was. As I sat there thinking of everything that needed to be done, I couldn’t stop myself from remembering the good moments with Knives. The most vivid memory I had of my brother was of him holding out his hand to me while a mountain cabin burned around us. I could still feel the loving care in his fingers as they curled around mine, before he led the way out of that hell and into freedom. It was a moment I’d never forget.

  God, how I’d loved him at that moment.

  The hell of it was, I still loved him.

  Maybe I was as crazy as he was.

  Polo made a sharp sound in his throat, and he pushed away from the wall to close the distance between us. “Don’t cry,” he commanded, surprising me. “Don’t you fucking cry, Dash.”

  “I’m not,” I murmured, surprised. Then he reached for my face, making me aware of the wetness as his thumbs wiped at the tracks my tears had made. “Oh. Sorry—”

  “Knives made his choice,” he cut off what was probably a foolish apology for mourning the violent end of the loving relationship I’d had with my brother. “Don’t waste your time looking back on what was. Everything you and Knives meant to each other, everything you shared…he chose to throw it away, so none of that shit matters anymore. What matters is that you’re alive, you hear me? That is my fucking bottom line.”

  Gamely I tried to smile, then gave up when it wobbled. “I wish it could be mine.”

  “It’s the only bottom line that matters. I once told you that Knives had gotten into something that he had no hope of getting out of, and I meant every fucking word of that. When he decided to bring you harm, that was it. Sonofabitch signed his own death warrant.”

  My breath caught like a bone in my throat. The thought of Polo killing my brother filled me with such a sharp mixture of trepidation and sorrow that it was all I could do to not curl up in a little ball. Polo didn’t deserve to be forced into this god-awful position. He and Knives had been as close as brothers only a handful of months ago; certainly closer than Polo’s biological family, who’d betrayed him when he’d been a boy. To know that Polo was suffering yet another betrayal by someone he had allowed himself to trust and even love in his own way hurt my heart just as much as Knives’s betrayal against me.

  None of this was fair, and none of it was right. Polo didn’t deserve the wound it would give his already-tattered soul if he was forced to kill someone he’d once trusted enough to call brother.

  “It doesn’t have to be you.” The words came out in a desperate rush as the reality of the situation pressed down on me. “I don’t want you to be the one who…”

  “Kills Knives?” Apparently Polo had no qualms with saying it out loud, and the harsh way he threw those words out at me cut me to ribbons. “Try to keep up, Dash. I want to kill Knives. In fact, I can’t fucking wait to kill him. It’ll be such a pleasure to take that cocksucker out that I’ll have to be physically restrained from mounting his head over my doorway as a trophy.”

  “You are not losing your shit in front of my wife,” Rude announced grimly, coming to his feet. “And you sure as hell are not talking about killing anyone under this roof—”

  “Trying to go easy on Knives for your sake…that’s what got Jubilee murdered in her own goddamn home, Dash. How much do you wanna bet that poor woman went to her grave believing I’d come riding in to save her like some goddamn hero? How much do you want to fucking bet she trusted me to be there for her, and I fucking wasn’t?”

  “Enough.” Rude pulled Polo away and had him backed up into a wall with a forearm against his neck, while Polo’s words plowed into me like invisible fists. “You get your shit locked down tight, you hear me? You get it locked down tight right the fuck now, or I will lock it down for you.”

  “Yeah?” Polo turned his attention to Rude and smiled so happily it terrified me. “You really think you can do it, Panuzzi?”

  “In front of our women, who should never see what we’ve been trained to do to make a human body drop? Probably not. I’d hold back on your ass so I wouldn’t freak them the fuck out. Question is, would you hold back on me?”

  It took a full second for the tension to drain out of Polo, and out of the room. Both Sass and I had come to our feet, two hopeless lightweights ready to dive in between two Titans. When Polo saw this, he growled out a curse and looked to the ceiling for a long moment before sliding me a turbulent side-eye.

  “I’m not going to war with anyone except Knives and his Bratva. And that’s exactly what it’s going to be—war. Whether or not you find a way to make peace with that fact is up to you, Dash.”

  “I know it’s been a rough morning, and I’m truly sorry we’ve made the worst possible house guests,” I said, leaning against the kitchen island while Sass puttered around the stove. “But you’re going to have to rethink your plan if you believe I’m going to allow you to lock me up in PSI’s war bunker.”

  “It’s a very comfortable safe room designed to look like an upscale hotel suite.” Rudy’s sigh was weary as he snagged a piece of bacon off the platter his wife was busily filling. “Polo put you in my care before he left. He wanted you tucked away somewhere safe so he could do what he has to do without worrying about you.”

  “Do what he has to do,” I repeated with a calm I was nowhere near feeling. Polo had left “for supplies” shortly after his blowup, his expression once again unreadable and his manner as unreachable as the moon. He’d refused to even look at me as he left, and I suspected it was because part of him—however ir
rational it was—held me to blame for Jubilee’s death. He’d held back on Knives because he loved me, after all. That choice had turned out to be a fatal mistake for a woman who, on the last day of her life, had wanted to be a flamingo.

  At that thought, a wave of grief hit me so hard it knocked the air from my lungs.

  Polo was angry with me because of that, obviously. But I wasn’t fooled. As angry as he was with me, he was even more furious with himself. Because of that, nothing would stop him from getting to Knives now.

  Not caution.

  Not rationale.

  Nothing.

  That alone made my blood run cold. Filled with fury, Polo was a force to be reckoned with, but he was one man going up against the army Knives had collected. If Polo went to war without a plan, I’d be attending his funeral all over again, and this time it would be real.

  Somehow the deck had to be stacked in his favor.

  “I guess this sort of thing is normal for you, having grown up in the Vitaliev world.” At the counter, Sass went about assembling mouth-watering creations that involved English muffins as well as the bacon she’d fried off. “Strategy sessions and talk of war and carnage and whatever.”

  “It was never like this. My father—our father,” I corrected myself, still flummoxed by Sass’s story of being an abandoned baby, and my poor papa desperately turning Chicago upside down looking for his youngest kid when he’d learned of her existence, “tried very hard to make sure the violent side of being a Vitaliev never touched his children’s lives. But he was also a realist. He made sure we could handle ourselves if our security broke down and violence managed to find us.”

  “And did it? Ever find you, I mean.” She slid a plate along with some cutlery my way. “Eggs Benedict, kinda. I didn’t have any Canadian bacon, but since I make a killer hollandaise sauce maybe you won’t notice the difference. Hope it tastes okay.”

  I tried not to gape at the gorgeous plate of food she’d whipped up like it was nothing. “I usually eat burned toast and expired yogurt for breakfast.”

  “You don’t cook?”

  “I’m hopeless in the kitchen.” I looked down at the plate in awe, and for the first time in months, I felt the first stirrings of hunger. “This looks delicious. And as for violence ever finding us,” I added, picking up the utensils, “it was rare when it happened, but… yes. That’s actually why I don’t want to be locked up in that bunker thingy where Rudy works. When I was twelve and Knives was fifteen, we were kidnapped and held for six days. Even now I can’t stand to sleep in my clothes or be in a room I can’t get out of.”

  Sass’s brows went up as she handed her husband a plate before settling down to eat across from me. “I can understand that.” She pointed her fork at Rudy. “Remember how well I handled being locked up in that safe room?”

  “That’s why I haven’t done it up to this point.”

  “And that’s why it isn’t going to happen now.” Sass’s face was surprisingly stubborn as she frowned at him. “Think of something else.”

  “What? Send her to the moon so her brother can’t reach her?”

  “Knives doesn’t know that I have him on my radar, right?” A vague idea began to take shape as I took Sass’s advice to think of something else. “He has no clue that I now know he’s put a target on me. He’s been subtle about it, after all. He hasn’t even attempted to take me out as long as I had a strong show of protection around me.”

  “For the record, I don’t like the look on your face,” Rudy said, shaking his head. “Whatever you’re thinking, rethink it.”

  “What I’m thinking…” There were quite a few things on my mind, first and foremost the worry over Polo pulling a John Wayne and tackling an overwhelming problem all on his own. Being a wildcard was one thing; taking on an army without backup was suicide. “I’m thinking that if war is what Knives wants—war with the Scorpeones, war with me, war with Polo, and war with whoever else he’s decided is his enemy—then war is what he should get.”

  “War.” Sass looked like she had frozen in place, stuck in the process of cutting into her food. “I know it’s rude to drop the F-bomb with people you just met, but are you seriously talking about waging fucking war? With your own brother? As in, people-will-die kind of war? Or does the Vitaliev definition of war mean something else that I don’t understand?”

  “I’m sorry.” My heart constricted at her appalled expression, but there was no help for it. “I wish I could tell you that there isn’t going to be a lot of damage and suffering, and maybe even a whole lot worse than suffering. I really do. But lying about this part of the Vitaliev world wouldn’t be right or fair, because lies don’t keep you safe.”

  Sass absorbed that for a while before she lifted a shoulder and dug into her breakfast once more. “Yeah, okay. It’s no big deal. I was just curious.”

  “Opposite-speech mode.” Rudy frowned in concern at Sass before shooting me a less-than-pleased glance. “It’s a weird quirk she has. Whenever she’s feeling churned up about something—like if she’s upset, or pissed off, or she’s freaking out—she always says it’s no big deal. If she finishes it off with I don’t care, look out. It means she’s seconds away from having a meltdown.”

  Sass’s chin came up, her brows arching in such a regal manner I could almost see my father’s face lying just beneath hers. “I do not have meltdowns, Rude. I just express myself strongly.”

  “For what it’s worth, I think it’s awesome your husband can read you so well,” I told her, trying to ignore the pain of knowing I’d managed to wig my little sister out so much I’d kicked her defenses into high gear. “You’ve got a great poker face, but it’s comforting to me that Rudy knows all your little tells. He’ll never let you get away with hiding what you’re feeling, and that’s a good thing.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call it good. He can be a real pain in the ass when he wants to be.” The look she threw him was rife with classic Vitaliev complexity—exasperation, frustration and unconditional adoration. “I remember a time when I used to be able to get away with just about anything. Nowadays I can’t turn around without Rude calling my bluff.”

  He stretched out an arm, looped it around her neck and hauled her in for a kiss. “That’s what I’m here for, Sassy Pants. No way in hell are you gonna hide any shit from me.”

  A reluctant smile tugged at her mouth. “It’s cute how you think you’ve got me figured out, Sugar Britches.”

  “I don’t think I do. I know I’ve got you figured out.”

  “Oh, the arrogance. Is this what happens when people are together for too long?”

  “No such thing as being together for too long, baby. This is what happens when you finally realize you’re no longer alone and you relax enough to let me in.”

  Watching Sass lean into him warmed me from the inside out, when I hadn’t realized I’d grown cold ever since Polo left. Then my stomach knotted all over again at the memory of him storming out, and I quietly pushed my plate away. The worry that he’d gone off to take on my brother and his army all by himself ate away at my insides, demanding that I do something—anything—to make sure he knew he wasn’t alone.

  This is what happens when you realize you’re no longer alone.

  Did Polo realize that?

  After mentally reviewing the last twenty-four hours, I had to be honest.

  No.

  No, he probably did not.

  Considering everything he’d kept from me in order to protect me, it was entirely possible that even when we had been at our closest, Polo had still believed he’d had to go it alone, if only for my sake.

  He was so sweet. So strong. So protective.

  And so wrong.

  “Rudy,” I said, reaching for my phone to hand it over to him. “You know you jacked up my phone, right?”

  “Uh…”

  “I need you to fix it for me. Then I need to know if it’s possible to reserve PSI’s conference room today.”

  He took t
he phone from me even as his eyes narrowed. “If you’re wanting high security for a meeting, I don’t think it’s available. Tomorrow will probably be your best shot. Why?”

  “Polo once mentioned he wanted to bring proof to the Medvedev clan of who killed Konstantin so he could get them on his side to help him with his enemy,” I said instead of answering. “Was Grigor the co-called proof Polo was talking about?”

  Rudy nodded. “Polo was convinced he’d be able to get Pavel Medvedev to move against Knives and his army if he had Grigor on his side.”

  “That’s probably true, but we don’t need Grigor to get the Medvedevs on our side. There’s more proof out there besides my brother’s old bodyguard.”

  Rudy’s eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I’m sure I can convince Pavel Medvedev to make a move against Knives, because I have proof that has nothing to do with Grigor. Polo doesn’t have to do everything all by himself anymore. I can help.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I get that you can’t stay in hiding forever.” Rudy stood in front of me as the elevator doors opened, and he stepped one foot out to visually sweep the entire hallway that led to my apartment. He lifted a hand to wave at another guard who had gone up before us to secure the floor before turning back to scowl at me. “But did you have to walk through the building’s front entrance and leisurely chat with the doorman for two fucking minutes?”

  “Language.” Holding me back by the wrist, Luke Keyes waited until Rudy gave the all-clear signal to hustle me to my front door. “I know you two are all out in the open about being related through marriage and everything, so that’s cool. But Dasha Vitaliev is still a client. A little professionalism would be nice.”