Karina barely withheld a grimace at the thought.
Home.
Sure, she had once considered the country estate they flew toward as home, but now, it was merely a piece of impeccable architecture. Four walls that carried beauty and secrets.
There had only ever been one place that she had, in her twenty-seven years, considered home.
A place she had left a puddle of her own blood in.
A place she hadn’t been back to in so long, she doubted it was still standing. Uilleam always had a habit of destroying the things that hurt him most. It would make sense that the brownstone where they had once lived together would suffer the same fate.
“I’ll have her call you when she wakes up … of course, Mother. Yes, see you soon.” Moments later, the woman pulled her mobile from her ear and ended the call, tossing the slender device onto the seat beside her.
Now that the conversation was over, she turned to better face Karina, the blank expression she had slipping away as only it did when they were alone together. She had always, even when they were little girls playing in their mother’s garden, been able to read her without trying.
“I warned you not to fall in love with him,” she said with a sad shake of her head. “It only ever ends one way.”
“Isla, not right now.”
Karina had known the rules when Mother had first brought her the terms—when she had first seen Uilleam’s picture in a file. She’d known that if she wanted to do what Mother instructed, she couldn’t get attached to the subject.
It was the most basic rule of espionage, and though she and her sister weren’t spies by any means, they had been raised to believe in the same concepts.
In the end, she had broken every rule that had ever been put into place for her.
With relish.
For him.
In the beginning, instead of destroying him, she had fallen in love and walked away from everything she knew because in her mind, nothing was greater than what she had felt for him.
Nothing else mattered but him and her and … what could have been.
“Mother will have questions,” Isla said, gesturing for the flight attendant to pour her, her usual. A fruity cocktail that contrasted with the type of woman she was.
Mother had always told them to order something simple and feminine, a martini or something just as dull. This was Isla’s small act of rebellion.
“If you can’t handle mine, surely you don’t expect you’ll be able to suffer through hers.”
She was right, though Karina didn’t want her to be. It might have felt like a chapter in her life had just closed, but this was another beginning for her.
Because now that she didn’t have Uilleam’s befoulment to keep her going, Mother would be ready to send her on another mission.
Another chance for her to understand her role in the family and do what was expected of her.
She wasn’t looking forward to it.
“Fine,” she said, though her real agitation wasn’t with her sister. It was with herself.
Nearly a decade later, she was still hopelessly in love with a man she needed to get over. They would never again have what they once did.
Before he was the Kingmaker and she Belladonna.
That was as much of a fantasy as her having once believed that their future would be bright and beautiful and everything she’d ever dreamed of before such desires had been forced out of her.
“Ask me whatever you want,” Karina said, plucking Isla’s drink from the attendant’s hand before she ever got the chance to set it down.
Within seconds, she downed the contents, relishing the burn left behind by the vodka.
A drink that was well overdue after the past couple of weeks.
Isla merely smiled. “She’s going to ask why you didn’t kill him. That was the original plan, no?”
Karina sighed, realizing the one drink wouldn’t be enough. “I took what mattered to him most. Trust me, that’s more than enough.”
Death was easy and finite.
But living, knowing that he had allowed someone to get under his skin deep enough to destroy him, was a worse existence.
Karina knew that all too well.
And despite how close she was to her sister, she would never be able to admit that she couldn’t bring herself to kill him, or to callously give someone else the order to do it.
Even the thought was horrifying.
His mercenaries were gone, his business in shambles, and even his home life was broken after she’d revealed to Kit that his mother was still alive by Uilleam’s interference. He had nothing left. She’d seen to it.
“And Poppy?” Isla asked, knowing how one little name made her feel as if she were dying a thousand deaths.
Just the thought of it made her feel as if the picture tucked away in her pocket was burning away the fabric. “What about her?”
“I know you, little sister, and had you told him the truth—all of it—you wouldn’t be sitting with me now.”
Karina was shaking her head before she even meant to, trying to call up an argument that would explain her reasoning, but instead, the truth spilled out of her before she could contain it. “That would have destroyed him.”
As the truth had once destroyed her.
“Then I can’t imagine how the two of you are done with each other,” Isla said as she sat back, staring back at her with Mother’s eyes. “I also told you the truth would set you free, yet you still withheld it.”
Karina wanted to say he didn’t deserve the truth, that he didn’t deserve her, but deep down, she knew that if she told him, it would break him in a way that she or anyone else ever could.
And even as angry as she was with him—after all these years and this last and final battle between them—she still didn’t want to hurt him that way.
She didn’t want to see him utterly broken.
He was her weakness.
“His organization is dismantled,” Karina said, thinking of his mercenaries and the truths she’d used to get them to walk away. If she hadn’t, Mother would have had them all slaughtered, just as she’d have Uilleam if given the chance. “His name is practically useless without them. I didn’t need our truth for that. The job is done.”
Nearly a decade in the making, she had finally finished what Mother had requested her to do.
Take down the heir to the Runehart fortune.
She just hadn’t expected all she’d suffered in her quest to do so.
Isla laughed, the sound light and airy and far too amused. “Do you honestly believe this is the last we’ll see of that man?”
“If he knows what’s good for him.”
But some part of her—the part that had fallen in love with a man with the drive and ambition to take over the world and rule it without anyone truly comprehending the power he had—wasn’t quite so sure Uilleam was beaten.
She knew, even though she wouldn’t admit it aloud, that Uilleam wasn’t finished with her yet.
At that thought, Karina smiled.
But she didn’t look convinced. “If the two of you have shown me anything over the past—how many years has it been?—you’re not going to quit each other.”
And that was the problem.
Her life would be far less complicated if she could.
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About the Author
London Miller is the author of the Volkov Bratva series, as well as Red., the first book in the Den of Mercenaries series. After graduating college, she turned pen to paper, creating riveting fictional worlds where the bad guys are sometimes the good guys.
Currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and two puppies, she spends her nights drinking far too much Mountain Dew while writing.
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Den of Mercenaries: Volume Two Page 77