Ultimate Vengeance (Wanted Men Book 4)

by Nancy Haviland

  “Okay.” Justin dropped her phone into her purse. “You can start by telling me who Sacha is. Or should I ask who Sarah Brighton is? I knew with an accent like yours that couldn’t be your real name. Had considered it might be your married name. Are the Tarasovs the reason you use it? Come on, Sar—uh, Sacha. Talk to me. The lack of information here is making my brain hurt.”

  She took a tissue out of her purse and blew her nose, trying to buy some time. How much should she say? Justin had given Alekzander his name, which meant they’d know in moments, if they didn’t already, who he was and where to find him. And that meant they would find her. She wasn’t sure how, but she knew Maksim Kirov would get the information he needed, and then that powerful group of men they’d just left would move in and do whatever they damn well pleased and no one would be able to stop them. She couldn’t leave without warning Justin about what might be coming for him. After all, she’d just given Alekzander the impression she and Justin were involved. She shouldn’t have been so immature.

  “What’s your full name?” Justin pressed, his tone encouraging rather than demanding, as Alekzander’s would have been.

  “Sacha Urusski.” She tapped on the dash when he got stuck behind a bus. “Can you pass him, please? You must get me home.”

  He passed and went through a yellow light. “Angela knows that?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed under his breath. “Why Sarah Brighton? Why use an alias?”

  “You just met the reason. He…I…” She bit her lip, not about to tell him why she’d chosen Brighton as her last name. That was private. And what was it inside her that was trying to prevent her from speaking of that cheating womanizer behind his back?

  “He and you, what? And, correct me if I’m wrong, but going by that caveman display I just witnessed, I’ll assume the ‘he’ you’re referring to is Alek Tarasov.”

  As her heart infuriatingly wrenched in her chest and the naïve girl buried somewhere inside her sighed with longing, Sacha twisted the two rings she wore on the middle finger of her right hand. “I do not want to involve you in this, Justin. There is no point since I will be leaving New York tonight. You and Angela have been wonderful friends, and I appreciate having had you in my life even if it was only for this short time. Please, be aware that Alekzander and his family might come to you and ask about me. I would be so grateful if you did not tell them anything you know.”

  “That’s a given, and you leaving isn’t on the table. At least not until you tell me why the hell you and your daughter are running from them. I’m forming a few ideas, but maybe you can pinpoint the correct one for me. Money, information, you know something they don’t want shared? I swear you can trust me with your story, Sar—Sacha. I’ll take it to the grave.” He made a face. “Unless you want me to take it to the authorities. Sorry. That killed my drama, but I am an attorney.”

  She blinked as that registered. An attorney could help her if Alekzander found out what she’d done. Family law wasn’t Justin’s specialty, but he must know someone who could give her some advice she’d never be able to pay for.

  The only problem was, Alekzander and his family would not go through legal channels to get what they wanted.

  Unless she forced them to.

  She placed a hand on her roiling stomach. If enough people knew her situation, the Tarasovs couldn’t steamroll their way in and…

  She wilted in her seat. Yes, they could. She’d soon come to learn what her father had said was true; the Tarasov Bratva had a long, invasive reach. She’d seen evidence of it with her own two eyes. Contrary to what many thought, a family like Alekzander’s wasn’t made up of thugs wielding machine guns and smoking cigars. They were businessmen. Granted they weren’t afraid to use distasteful methods to get their way, but they didn’t go around randomly murdering and pillaging to earn their riches.

  She’d seen Vasily Tarasov in meetings with men Alekzander would later say were congressmen or the chairman of a bank known around the world. She remembered one such gathering hosted in their luxurious house in Old Westbury. She’d been cornered by two men, an arrogant Arab and a distinguished Frenchman. One had been in oil, the other in the insurance industry. Both had held private meetings with Vasily that evening, and all had appeared extremely happy afterward.

  She also recalled both of those men being slightly aggressive. Disconcerted by that, Sacha had caught Alekzander’s eye. He’d left his group mid-sentence. With impeccable manners, but with frost crackling in his icy stare, he’d slipped his arm around her waist, letting his hand rest with blatant intimacy on her hip. After some casual conversation, he’d called over two women he’d assured would happily entertain the men then excused himself and Sacha. He hadn’t left her alone again the rest of the evening.

  “Alekzander and I were once together,” she said. Because he wasn’t a chatty woman, she and Justin had never sat and shared their pasts over tea and pastries the way Sacha and Angela had done. But now that he’d been with her when her present and past had collided, she figured she should give him something. “We lived together. I left him when he cheated on me.” Justin made a quiet sound of disgust, but she didn’t look up from where she was once again spinning her parents’ wedding bands. “I will not bore you with the details, but in the end, I left without telling him I was pregnant.” No satisfaction came from her habit of slipping the common expression into her speech as it usually did. She tried extra hard to learn as much American slang as possible because it was always so embarrassing when she took things literally.

  The car lurched forward when Justin hit the brakes too hard. “Wait a minute. Alek Tarasov is Lekzi’s father? And he doesn’t know?”

  The quiet disbelief in his voice caused her head to pound, but rather than defend herself, she just nodded.

  “No wonder she popped into my head the second I saw his eyes. Holy fuck. This isn’t good.”

  No. It was not good. She sat very still and prayed she wouldn’t vomit all over the expensive interior of the car as images flashed like snapshots through her mind. Alekzander looking up at her amid random chatter and sounds of forks hitting plates. Alekzander smiling as he shrugged out of the leather holster he wore across his tattooed chest, his mouth finding hers as he whispered how much he loved her. Alekzander behind his desk, he and that woman looking over as Sacha interrupted the sex they were having; proof he’d viciously lied about their love.

  Sacha then saw herself stealing away in the middle of the night from the hotel room she’d landed in after her world had imploded, and seven and a half months later, standing before the mirror in the tiny bathroom of her new apartment, her belly round, her face wet with tears because she’d been suffering over the decision she’d made. The kindness she’d received from the doctors who delivered her beautiful baby girl a week later sifted through her memory. As did the judgemental clerk’s knowing look when Sacha had requested the space listing her daughter’s father be left blank. Have a nice day, whore, the woman might as well have said as Sacha left the office clutching her beautiful treasure, her head bowed with a shame countless women before her had worn.

  Humiliation stomped on the ruins that had once been her pride. “I must leave so that he cannot find me and take my daughter. He will come. I know he will. Did you hear what he said to his uncle? He will not let me get away again. Why would he say such a thing when it was him who drew away from us by choosing to be with someone else?” Tears singed the back of her eyelids at the size of his ego. She’d once thought it was confidence, and it had been so attractive to her because that was something she’d always lacked.

  Her throat ached with the need to cry but she didn’t allow it. Alekzander didn’t deserve these feelings; the overpowering anger, the staggering sense of loss, the pain.

  The love. God, she loved him.

  He may have destroyed her with his infidelity, but he hadn’t destroyed the love she’d told him would be his forever. Only, now, that soft, fragile feeling was twisted a
nd broken. Warped beyond all recognition. But still it lived. As did it’s opposite.

  “I hate him.” Her voice was quiet but adamant. “And I will not allow him to ruin my life again by taking the only thing that brings me happiness. She is mine, and he cannot have her. Not any part of her.”

  “Sacha. Cheating isn’t grounds for keeping a parent from their child.”

  The guilt she’d been suffering from the moment she’d felt Lekzi kick proved she already knew that. “I do not care. Morally, it should be.” It didn’t bother her in the least that she sounded as if she were a sulky child because she knew she ceased being one the moment she walked out of the TarMor building that night.

  By keeping her daughter a secret, she’d started a dangerous adult game with a man one should know better than to play with. But Sacha would play. And she would win. Because the alternative wasn’t something she could live with.

  If she was left to live at all.

  THREE

  A fucking attorney, Alek thought, swallowing a groan as he kicked a skiff of snow off the toe of his Ferragamo and followed his uncle to a bare patch of sidewalk in front of the restaurant.

  Sacha, Sacha. Who have you brought into our lives, angel?

  God, it felt good to think her name. He’d blocked it for so long because of the pain it brought with it.

  “Maks. Come on. Anything?” he asked impatiently.

  “I’m working from a goddamn toy here, my brother.” The tapping on the small screen went on without pause when another of theirs ghosted by Dmitri to enter the group.

  Micha Zaretsky, Maks’s right hand spoke to him in a low voice but didn’t try to hide what he was saying. “The kid wants to know if you’re okay. He’s starting to sweat.”

  Maks raised his head and blinked away a who-me? before a slow grin stretched across his face. He was touched by the concern coming from his fiancé’s twelve-year-old son who he’d recently saved from what could have been a tragic situation involving the brother of a Mexican drug lord. Thankfully, Eberto Morales hadn’t had the opportunity to do much physical damage to Andrew, but mentally, the kid was shaken up. It was too bad Eleanor, the other twelve-year-old who had been in Morales’s care, hadn’t fared so well. From what they were learning, the bastard hadn’t held back when he’d slapped his daughter around. The cowed little thing was now safe and secure in the new unit that was Maksim’s family, but, again, mental scars were evident. Probably why they all blended so well, Alek thought. Because Maks, who was now putting a call through, presumably to Andrew’s cell phone, had enough trauma in his past to permanently damage ten men.

  “Russia?”

  The inquiry came through the speaker on Maks’s phone because he was once again scrolling through information on the small screen. Andrew’s voice was at that in-between stage; now low, yet not childishly high anymore.

  “Hey, kid.”

  “You okay? Uh, mom was wondering.”

  Maks stopped scrolling and exchanged an amused look with Vasily. “Yeah, we’re all good. You finished dessert?’

  “What dessert?”

  Maks’s face fell. “Shit.” He glared at Micha. “The fucking cake I forgot in the fridge at home. We’ll destroy it when we get there. What’s your mother doing?”

  “Talking with Elli about a boy,” Andrew whispered.

  Alek could have sworn Maks paled. “You fucking with me, kid?”

  “Yeah.” Andrew laughed. “They’re talking to Eva about names for the baby.”

  Maks rolled his eyes. “Lucky you’re not in front of me. I’d kick your ass. Tell them to pack up. You okay keeping an eye on them?”

  “Sure. Uh, sorry if I bothered you, Russia. I just…you know, wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “No worries, kid. You bother me whenever the fuck you want. We’re cool.”

  “Sweet. Are you close?”

  “Right outside the door. Just me and the boys.”

  “Okay. Later.”

  As he hung up, there was a tenderness in his expression that one didn’t often see. Alek could only speak for himself when he said the role of family man wasn’t one he’d ever expected Maks to play. And play so well. Going by the satisfied glint in Vasily’s eye, he, too, liked the new development. And rightly so since he was the one who’d found Maks in an underground prison of sorts and brought him back to the States when the irreverent giant was nothing but a big, menacing teenager.

  “Fuckin’ kid gets me every time,” Maks murmured as his finger began swiping. He pulled the info back down once he reached the bottom. “Okay. I’ll give you the basics now, and a shit ton of details once I get home and on my invasive little beauty.”

  An affection way of describing what Alek and the boys had coined Computer Central.

  “Justin Benjamin Sheppard; age thirty-four. History of private schools, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law. Currently a high-profile defense attorney working out of a mega-firm in Manhattan that his grandfather started in the seventies. Justin is now one of the Sheppards on the door. Was offered and turned down a position to serve as Special Counsel to the United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development—who just so happens to be his fucking godfather.” He gave Alek a sidelong look and an irritating wink. “You into appreciating some irony right now?” He blinked innocently when he got a glare. “Too soon?”

  “All you need to focus on is that he’s considered high-profile.” Vasily paid no attention to Maks’s bullshit. “No one touches the attorney.”

  “Anything on Sacha?” If Maks said an engagement had been announced, Alek would have no choice but to go against his uncle’s decree and do more than touch the attorney.

  “Not yet. I’ll have her address when I get a report from OnStar detailing anywhere Sheppard’s Roadster has been—good taste in more than just women.”

  That earned the moron a glare from both Alek and Vasily. Micha was chuckling as he melted away. Dmitri didn’t appear to be listening to them.

  Vasily did up his coat and glanced at his phone when it started ringing. He silenced the call to give Alek his full attention in that way he’d done since Alek was a boy. “Tell me how you see this playing out.”

  “Really, you don’t want to know.”

  “Humor me.”

  He was tempted to lie. Because if Vasily didn’t know what Alek had planned, he couldn’t prevent it from happening. “I’ll knock on her door tomorrow morning—” He looked at Maks. “Tell me you’ll have her location by then.”

  “I’ll have her location by then.”

  He nodded. “She’ll open for me; I’ll wreck Sheppard if he’s there, and take her. I’ll lock her up at your house in Old Westbury—because Eva and the girls would ruin everything if I did so at ours. I’ll make her regret allowing another man anywhere near her, then keep her all to myself for the rest of our lives. At some point, I’ll come up for air, and when I do, I’ll finish it by crushing Sheppard’s career and tearing down his old man’s firm.”

  “Word.”

  Like two juveniles, he and Maks both put out their fists at the same time and knocked them together. Vasily watched with a bemused look on his face before turning to Dmitri.

  “Was I ever like this?”

  “Not even when you were twenty,” came the dry response that evidenced how many years he’d been at the Pakhan’s back.

  “Did any of that sound reasonable in your head before you voiced it?” his uncle asked him.

  “Right now,” Alek stipulated, “absolutely. Is it? Of course not.”

  Vasily checked and silenced his phone again. He sighed and looked at the restaurant where Gabriel and Vincente were holding things down but must be getting antsy. “You’re not going to want to hear what I’m about to say, but I feel I have to say it anyway.”

  Alek nodded and listened to what he hoped wouldn’t be reason.

  “You said you’d like Sacha to regret becoming involved with another man. She shouldn’t. You ended your relationsh
ip with her, and that’s on you. If she chose to move on, that’s something you’re going to have to accept. She and Justin Sheppard are two single people dating, and that has nothing to do with you. If you want to try to win her back, I’m behind you, but you will not punish her for living the life you left her to live.”

  Reason it was.

  “So basically,’ Maks said as he shoved his phone into his pocket. “You’re telling him he can show up in the morning and wave at her through the fucking window.” He came in closer and gave Vasily a questioning look. “Do you have any idea how he must be feel—? Hang on a second.” He straightened and looked at Alek. “How the fuck are you so calm right now?”

  Alek rattled the change in his pockets and shrugged. He kept his shoulders up as the chill of the night began to register. How could he explain that the urgency had left him? The panic he’d been living with for over a year had fled the moment he’d looked into Sacha’s eyes. He’d been afraid he was going to have to live without her. That fear was gone. The only thing giving him trouble now was Sheppard and the revulsion Alek had seen in Sacha’s eyes when she’d looked at him.

  “I’m going to see her tomorrow.” His lip pulled up at the corner, and he shrugged again, feeling a high that had nothing to do with the brandy he’d imbibed earlier. “If I learn she and Sheppard aren’t buddies, I’ll rage.” He brought a hand up when his uncle opened his mouth. “But I’ll try not to fight for her by killing the guy. Rather, I’ll fight for her by engaging in the dirtiest fucking battle any of you has ever seen. A legit battle. In the end, satisfaction will come when the attorney is forced to stand there and watch Sacha wrap that curvy body around me because I’ve proven she’s mine.” He slapped his hands on his uncle’s shoulders and felt optimism for the first time since learning his cousin’s family had been taken by the Baikovs, which was the moment Alek’s downslide had begun. “But with any luck, things will go my way and it won’t come to that.”