by Lora Leigh
And he nearly did. Riordan was almost taken from her forever.
“Look at me!” she screamed when he continued to simply stare at the floor. “Damn you. Look at me.”
And still, he stared at the floor.
“Ilya.” Her father’s voice was like a lash of fury. “Please secure Alexi in the back room.… Before he dies by my hand.”
Alexi flinched.
Catching his arm, Ilya jerked him away as the steel door to a secured room opened on the far side of the room.
“Ilya.” Alexi’s voice sounded strangled.
“Silence,” Ilya snapped. “Say nothing to me.”
They disappeared into the room, and the sound of the door sliding closed was the only sound they heard for a long moment.
Then the sound of a single gunshot had a cry tearing from Amara’s throat. She tried to jerk away from Riordan’s grip, her gaze going to her father’s hard face, his dark blue eyes, as he watched her.
“No!” she cried out.
“I did not kill him,” her father stated, his Russian accent heavier than normal in his voice. “He would have never lived out the night. No man in this house that has watched over you would have allowed him to live.”
The steel door opened and Ilya stepped out, a gun held loosely in his hand, his face still and unemotional. Even the tattoo at the side of his face was still for a change.
Amara could only stare at him in shock.
“I lost my family at the hands of the men who followed Igor Resnova,” Ilya stated. “My brother, my baby sister. I will not allow anyone involved in the torture of the child I have protected in their stead all these years to live. No man will strike this family and not know my wrath.”
Her heart was pounding in her chest, racing out of control as she stared at her father and Ilya.
“I’ll have to notify the proper channels, Ivan,” Noah stated then. “But I doubt there will be any problems.”
She swung around to the other man, her lips parted in disbelief.
“Amara.” Riordan drew her back to face him, his voice hard now. “Come on. Let’s let your father and Noah deal with this.”
Let them deal with this?
This was how they dealt with it? This was what she’d wanted to prevent.
“Amara?” Ilya drew her gaze back to him. “Had your child lived and a friend threatened to take him or her from you and you knew justice would never convict him, would you not ensure they were stopped?”
What could she say? She had wanted to kill him herself when she remembered, wanted to die inside because she loved him and couldn’t make herself believe he would do something so horrifying. Even as the memories of what he had done had torn through her, she hadn’t wanted to believe.
“Would you not do anything?” he snapped, causing her to flinch. “Would you not do anything to protect your child no matter the cost or the actions you had to take?”
She couldn’t answer, because she knew she would. She knew she would do anything …
The tears that filled her eyes and began spilling to her cheeks she couldn’t explain, or understand.
Lifting a hand, she turned from them. She was barely aware of Riordan wrapping his arm around her and drawing her away, pulling her from the office, a curse sizzling from his lips.
“Riordan, don’t leave her alone,” her poppa ordered as they reached the door. “Stay with her.”
“Fuck you, Resnova,” he snapped furiously. “Goddamn it.”
He all but carried her from the room, leaving her father and Ilya with Noah and Micah as Tobias and Maxine followed her and Riordan back up the stairs.
They were quiet. No one was saying anything. And she hadn’t expected that. There were no protests, no demands for explanations. Even Riordan was surprisingly quiet despite his anger and what he’d said to her father.
They were too quiet. And that didn’t make sense. It wasn’t like them.
“Your father’s a damn head case,” Riordan growled as he pulled her into the family room and to the couch in front of the fire.
The heat from the flames felt weak, though she knew they weren’t. At any other time she’d be warm there.
“Stop babying me, Riordan,” she breathed out heavily fighting back the tears, well aware that she was letting him baby her.
“I’m not babying you, I’m protecting you.” The offended male tone of his voice had her looking at him doubtfully.
“No one wanted to hire me at the DA’s office,” she told him as she drew in a shaky breath. “No one knows the man I know Poppa to be.” She lowered her head and stared at her hands. “Could he have done it, and could I have lived with it, he would have killed Alexi himself.”
“No Amara, I don’t think he would have,” Riordan said, his voice low. “I don’t think he would have.”
She didn’t argue the point though. She still hadn’t gotten over the fact that Ilya had killed Alexi. Just that fast, with no more emotion than it would take to squash a bug.
They were friends. All their lives—her poppa, Ilya, and Alexi. This didn’t make sense.
She rose to her feet, wandered to the fireplace and stood staring into the flames.
“Why did he wear a mask?” she asked absently frowning into the flames. “He knew I’d recognize his eyes, his voice. Why wear a mask?”
“Why have you abducted at all?” Riordan snapped as Tobias and Maxine stepped into the room to provide additional security.
Something simply wasn’t sitting right, and he was damned if he could figure out what.
He knew Amara couldn’t take much more. The attempts against her, the nightmares, the slowly emerging memories, and now the knowledge that a friend had betrayed her.
“He was there when Igor Resnova tried to take me away from Poppa,” she said, that childhood terror reflecting in her voice. The night the cold, austere grandfather became a monster. “They wore masks then too. Just as they did when they abducted me. Four men, wearing masks, with guns. They shot the bodyguards. They were demanding to know where Grisha and Elizaveta were.”
Amara could see it all now. She’d been packing to go to England where she’d learned her father had sent Riordan. Micah had come to the penthouse. He was supposed to be there the next morning because Riordan had sent for her.
“You didn’t leave me.” The memory was shattering her. “Micah was going to take me to you.”
She stared back at him, the memories flooding her mind now as she fought to make sense of too many things, too many events.
“They came for me the night before I was supposed to leave. They were going to kill Elizaveta and Grisha.” She shook her head. “Why kill them? Why would it be important to get rid of them if they were there?”
“You heard them say they were going to kill them?” he questioned her, his voice harsh. “Be certain Amara. Is that what they said?”
“Get rid of them,” she whispered. “Find them and get rid of them if they were there.”
But her cousins hadn’t been there. They’d been delayed in their return from Russia by their mother. She’d insisted Elizaveta stay to attend a ball with her.
“Once they dragged me from my room, they knocked me out. I awoke in that room with six men standing around me. All masked.”
Just as they had been masked as they beat her, laughed at her.
And familiar to her. Not that she knew them. She had known Alexi’s eyes, his voice, but he too had remained masked, and he’d known the others.
She paced to the other side of the room aware of Riordan watching her closely, his gaze narrowed on her. Whatever he was thinking, or watching for … she turned her back to him and closed her eyes, as she felt him.
She knew she did, just as she’d felt him for the past six months before he’d returned to her. His warmth, the strength he always carried with him, every part of him wrapping around her.
“You feel it, don’t you,” he stated softly. “That’s all that kept me sane after I learned you�
��d been taken, Amara. That sense of you. That assurance that you were alive and waiting for me to rescue you. That was all I had to hold onto.”
And she’d reached out to him. As those fists had slammed into her stomach over and over, and she’d felt the life she’d carried inside her drift away, she’d held onto that sense of him as she’d never held onto anything, or anyone else.
“They wanted to weaken Poppa,” she said then, turning back to him. “If they killed me and you, they would weaken him. How would killing you weaken him?”
Because he’d done something no one else, even Riordan, had managed to do. He’d managed to identify men within Brute Force who were still part of the former Russian mafia Ivan’s father had once controlled.
But Amara didn’t know that. As he watched her, the slender line of her back filled with tension, he felt the pieces slowly coming together.
Whoever had taken Amara had known of their relationship, had known she carried his child, and had known he’d come for her. They’d intended to kill her and him, and ensure that Ivan was hampered in his search for a mole who had been a part of his organization since he’d come to America.
The slow bleeding of resources, information, and targeted accounts had finally caught Ivan’s attention several years before. When he’d seen what was going on, he’d taken the problem to his contact within the Elite Ops.
Ivan had been part of the Elite Ops network for years. Not as an agent, but as an asset who allowed their investigations to reach certain levels within the Russian government that they’d had difficulty entering without him.
“What were you doing besides protecting me?” Amara turned to him and he saw the suspicion in her eyes.
She remembered the nights she’d awakened as he worked on the secured laptop in her sitting room. The contacts he’d meet with as she worked, or during the functions she’d attended.
She’d been getting suspicious though even before the abduction.
“Several things.” He sighed, moving past her to check the French doors that led to the gardens.
They were locked just as securely as they’d been earlier.
“The Brute Force Agency isn’t just personal protection. It’s electronic and cyber security as well. Your father’s had several problems within the organization that my team’s been working on since we arrived.”
Tobias and Maxine were part of those investigations as well.
Suddenly, the sense of being exposed, of Amara’s vulnerability within the estate, began to nag at him. And as he let the information play out in thoughts, he had a hell of a bad feeling that something wasn’t adding up with Alexi.
“What have you found?” He could feel her grief, her fear.
She’d tried so hard to protect her father and Ilya from the fallout, only to face Alexi’s death.
He stilled, his gaze narrowed on the deepening shadows within the snow-shrouded garden. He was all too aware of Ivan’s past and his conflicts in Russia when Amara was but a child. During that final confrontation with her grandfather, her father had depended on only two men.
Ilya and Alexi.
They’d been as close as brothers. Throughout the blood years of the father’s reign over the family, Ivan’s battle to wrest power from him and the slow, methodical dismantling of the criminal enterprise, the three men had worked together without so much as a rumor or hint of what they were truly doing.
Something was very wrong.
Turning quickly from the doors, he moved for Amara, only to draw up short. Rage gathered into a knot in his gut, threatening to explode through his being at the sight that met his eyes.
chapter twenty-four
It wasn’t Alexi.
Riordan stared at the man holding a gun to Amara’s head, and saw the realization in her eyes as well as the terror.
“It’s hard to imagine it was really this easy,” he said, his voice so like Alexi’s that it was easy to understand how Amara had mistaken it. “I’ve been waiting for months for the moment that Ivan or Ilya would put a bullet in his head. It was a very pleasant surprise to have it happen so soon.”
The same odd gray eyes, the same voice, same height, same hair. Alexi’s older brother lacked the empathy and warmth his younger brother’s expression always carried though. Andru lacked a lot of Alexi’s qualities actually.
He hadn’t expected the other man to surprise him so easily though.
“Yes.” Danny sighed with glee as he stared back. “Contacts do amazing things for your eyes. All I had to do was sit back and wait. I knew the little bitch would remember eventually. And I knew it would be Alexi she remembered. Not his brother Andru.”
Andru was going to die, Riordan decided in that moment. Seeing the fear and the memories in Amara’s expression, he knew right then and there that he’d kill Andru.
Danny, the quiet, seemingly content servant that Andru had masqueraded as, had been a damn good ruse. He’d managed to fool all of them. Riordan had suspected whoever they were looking for was a close associate of the family’s, but he’d been looking at security, not the various cousins and relations who worked within the house.
He damn sure hadn’t suspected the unassuming servant who delivered Amara’s tea every evening to be a threat.
“Tell me, Amara?” Andru asked as he caressed her temple with the barrel of his gun. “Did you know your father chose this man for the specific purpose of grandchildren? What was it he told Alexi? Oh yes, the two of you would make strong children. Did you tell him of the grandchild I stole from him?”
The sound that slipped from her lips could have been mistaken for a cry of pain. Andru damn sure mistook it as one. But Riordan saw the flash of rage in her eyes.
Carefully, he allowed the knife he kept tucked beneath his jacket sleeve to drop to his palm. The leather-encased handle was easy to grip, the blade was deadly sharp.
“No. I didn’t,” she answered him, the anger hidden in the softness of the response.
Andru’s arm tightened around her neck, the gun barrel pressing tighter against her temple.
“How do you think you’re going to do this, Andru?” Riordan sneered, shaking his head at the other man’s foolish daring. “The gun’s not silenced. You’ll have not only Ivan and Ilya out here the minute you pull that trigger, but my men as well. You might kill Amara and me, but you can’t kill all of them.”
He’d be damned if he’d let that bastard kill Amara. To disarm him, he first had to find a way to get him to lower that gun from Amara’s head.
Andru smiled at the question. “I don’t have to kill her. I just have to kill you.”
The weapon moved, the barrel turning on him. Amara’s snarl of fury would shock him later, as would the fact that she somehow managed to throw him off balance. His arm slipped from around her neck and she ducked. The knife flew from Riordan’s hand as Amara gripped Andru’s wrist, pushing the weapon away as the sound of a gunshot ripped through the room.
His first thought was Amara.
Jumping for her, he jerked her from the other man and pushed her to the floor as he cleared his weapon from the small of his back and watched Andru drop to the floor.
Blood pooled from his head, half his face blown off, leaving him crumpled on the floor as Riordan’s head jerked to the doorway.
“Alexi?” Amara breathed out in shock. “Oh God. Alexi!”
Standing with Alexi were Ivan and Ilya, their expression inscrutable as Noah and the other agents rushed past them, weapons drawn.
“I’ll kill you,” Riordan snarled as he pulled Amara to her feet and held her firmly against him. “God as my witness…”
“It was not Ivan’s doing,” Alexi stated, his voice tortured, his expression lined with grief. “When Ilya came into the room, he listened to my suspicion and did as I asked to make it appear he had killed me in rage.” Alexi stared at his brother’s body for a long moment before shaking his head. “I knew the only way Amara could have believed it was me there was if it had been Andru.
There could have been no one else.”
He stepped to the body, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, the weapon gripped in one hand firmly.
“I believed him dead,” Alexi said softly. “A man should not have to kill his brother once, let alone a second time in his life. I believed him dead in Russia.” A grief-torn smile curved his lips. “He would have killed her when she was but a child on the order of Ivan’s father. I believed the bullet I put in his chest to have killed him as we escaped the house that night. I ensured this time there would be no escape.”
He’d blown half his brother’s head away.
Holding Amara to his chest, Riordan could feel the shudders tearing through her.
Amara could feel herself shaking, could feel the disbelief, the clash of memories breaking through the veil that had hidden them and surging into her mind. The abduction, the beatings, the rescue.
She held onto Riordan, though her shock at seeing Alexi alive had her desperate to just sit down before her legs gave way.
“I really need a drink,” she whispered. “Desperately.”
Seconds later Micah pushed a glass into her hands as Riordan eased her to the sofa and Alexi threw several logs on the fire.
Ilya, Grisha, and Elizaveta dragged the body from the room, and Tobias and Maxine hurriedly directed several of the servants who came running to clean the blood from the floor.
There would be no report, no law enforcement would be called. Noah would see to it that Andru’s death as well as the assistant DA’s questioning was taken care of and kept silent.
“He was one of the men meeting with Parrick at the restaurant,” Amara stated, watching as the two older servants, men who had been with her father for as long as she could remember, cleaned up the mess Alexi had made of his brother’s head. “The other was also at the farmhouse they took me to.”
“Our initial report on Parrick came in as you left the office,” Noah said, speaking to Riordan as Amara tried to make sense of everything that was happening. “From what we know so far, Parrick was contacted by Andru and one of the men we identified after Amara’s rescue. Andru was going to kill Ivan and Ilya and take over Ivan’s businesses. The young girl who died, Shelly Mitchell, and the attempt against Miss Delaney were merely insurance in case Amara recognized Andru that day.”