Mitya’s eyebrow shot up. “You’re changing history, Sevastyan, and I’m not sure why. You might have the right to ask questions, but think back. Who stood in front of you? Who took beatings for you? Later, when you were a teen, you watched my back, that’s true, but we did it for each other.”
Sevastyan shoved both hands through his hair in agitation. Over the years, he’d come to accept that his role was always to be in the background. He found he preferred it that way, but the rage in him built and built. The more the others heaped their cruel brutal beatings and forced him to fight, the more his leopard learned in the battles to protect his human. Sevastyan learned to fight as well, to become proficient in all weapons until he was a killing machine just as his leopard was. He was exactly what Rolan and Lazar had shaped him into.
“I tried to counter what they did to you, but I was in a different lair, Sevastyan, not around you as much as I would have liked,” Mitya pointed out. “You often heard things before I did. More than once you took my back, and I thought it was because of our relationship, that you knew, like I did, that we only had each other.”
Sevastyan didn’t think that deserved an answer. “You had plenty of opportunities to acknowledge the relationship, but you didn’t. Not once. In fact, you avoided me for the most part. You seemed to have an aversion to me unless you needed someone to fight with you or go out on a drug raid.”
Mitya shrugged. “You were the best. The fastest. The deadliest. You still are. I don’t know another shifter capable of taking you down. In a battle, I’m going to choose to have the best with me every time. That made perfect sense and no one would question my choice or my reason for choosing to have you with me. And I didn’t want you left behind alone in either lair.”
“What does that mean?”
“What do you think it means?” Mitya sounded annoyed, the way he often did. “No one could be better than Lazar. You were a kid, Sevastyan. A big kid, maybe, all muscle, but you were still a kid. Already you had a reputation, and it was growing too fast. How do you think he was going to react to hearing about some kid being the best? The deadliest? The fastest? You were already getting a reputation as someone the women liked being with. They didn’t run screaming from you. They smiled and flirted with you. That was going to get you killed in a very ugly way. And if he ever found out you were the one running Rolan’s lair, his business, besting Lazar, he would have emptied a gun in your belly and then let his leopard devour you.”
Sevastyan knew that was all the truth. Lazar had an ego that wouldn’t stop. Sevastyan hadn’t helped Rolan succeed in running the lair so efficiently to please Rolan or make money; it was to best Lazar. To know he was undercutting him at every turn. Taking away his business slowly.
Sevastyan studied Lazar’s territory and all of his imports and exports. He knew where he kept his weapons and drugs. He knew the pipelines and the routes he used for trafficking. Systematically he began to interrupt them. He was careful and used only those men he could trust. He stashed any contraband in places no one would think to look and then stayed quiet while Lazar and his men went crazy looking everywhere. Their leopards were let loose to track, but Sevastyan used scent blockers and he mixed up scents to throw the leopards off.
“I protected you the only way I could, making sure to take you on every raid if he wasn’t with me,” Mitya said, “and leaving you behind if he was.”
“You left, Mitya, when Fyodor did, after he killed his father and wiped out his lair, but you never said one word to me. You never sent for me, or asked me to go with you. You left me there to face both of them alone.”
Sevastyan’s tone was mild. His dominant voice. The one he used that was low, almost soft, that played over nerve endings, but carried his absolute will. He didn’t sound as if he might leap across the room in a full-out attack, but Shturm was waiting, prowling, pushing so close when Sevastyan closed his fist his nails dug into his palms like claws.
“I got out with my life and nothing else. There was no time to get word to you or anyone else. Lazar heard Patva was dead and he raced to the lair to see for himself. I got out while I could. The rumors were flying about Fyodor, Gorya and Timur. I hoped you got out and when you finally joined me, I welcomed you.”
“But you never once acknowledged me.”
“Lazar wasn’t dead. Rolan wasn’t dead. As long as either was alive, I wasn’t going to give them more reason to want you dead. You’re a killing machine, Sevastyan. You’re intelligent and you can do things I can’t. I spent most of my life protecting you whether or not you want to acknowledge or believe that. You’re all the family I had until Ania. I wasn’t going to allow Lazar to take you away from me. I knew the moment Lazar thought you were important to me he would move heaven and earth to kill you. The same with Rolan. So, I never gave that to them.”
“Or to me. You could have acknowledged to me that you knew I was your brother and that it mattered to you. They weren’t here and I was. It mattered to me, Mitya.”
“True. I could have. Or you could have. But you didn’t. Instead, you chose to be head of security. I wasn’t about to give you an excuse to leave. And you would have. If I had let Fyodor and the others know you were my brother, you would have left.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re an arrogant bastard, Sevastyan, mean as a snake, worse even than I am. You know it and so do I. Half the time you’re just looking for a fight. You’re intelligent and your brain needs to stay active. You have to have sex all the time in order not to rip someone to pieces and it has to be your way. Everything has to be your way. You take control of everything around you. Do you really believe that had I come out and acknowledged you as my brother that you wouldn’t have manufactured an excuse and left? You would have. You don’t want to be on equal terms with me. You don’t want anyone to look at you and see you.”
Maybe everything Mitya said was the truth, but that didn’t stop Sevastyan from wanting to rip his face off. Or have the satisfaction of punching his fist right through his mouth and feel the familiar crunch of teeth breaking.
“You still should have made that acknowledgment, Mitya,” Sevastyan said, not knowing why it was so important Mitya understand that someone had to see him. Just one damn person.
Mitya regarded him for a long time in silence and then he finally shook his head. “You don’t get it, Sevastyan. I’ve acknowledged you from the moment I found out your mother was pregnant with you. I acknowledged you when I took care of you and he hurt our mothers. I have always acknowledged you. I’ve always known you were my brother. I’ve always looked out for you, whether you thought so or not. I might not be the best at showing it, or saying it, but you’re my brother and no one is going to harm you while I’m around. Why the hell do you think I made such an ass of myself around Flambé?”
The pressure in Sevastyan’s chest was like a great stone pressing down on him. Mitya had no more of an idea of how to have a relationship than he did. They were the most dysfunctional family there was.
“Does Ania know?”
“That you’re my brother, not my cousin?” Mitya scowled at him. “I don’t hide anything from Ania that I don’t have to. Especially when it comes to my family. Of course she knows. She loves you, even if you’re as fucked-up as hell and you order us all around.”
Sevastyan’s phone buzzed and he pulled it free of his pocket just as strobes flashed a warning through the office. He glanced down at the warning text on his phone. “Take Ania and get to the safe room. I’ll keep you informed. The cameras should be working so you should have live feed, both visual and audio. Don’t come out for any reason. I’ve got this.”
He turned away and then stopped, not turning back. “Something happens to me, you take care of her. Flambé. You make certain she’s safe and happy, Mitya. Give me your word.”
“You have it, Sevastyan.”
15
S
EVASTYAN texted one-handed to alert Kirill and Matvei that Rolan’s first wave of attackers were making their move. He wanted them inside the house and to double-check that the house was locked down with Flambé inside. He texted Flambé next.
Trouble starting here, baby. Rolan is bringing it. Stay inside and be safe.
He waited, his heart beating hard. He shouldn’t have left her behind.
Am inside our room. Will be fine. You be safe, Sevastyan.
At least she’d given him that much. He hurried to the control room where two relatively new employees manned the screens. Both were Evangeline’s brothers. Ambroise Tregre served in the Navy and was an up-and-coming artist. He seemed a dreamer, a man Sevastyan would have thought useless when it came to security, but Tregre never forgot a single detail once he saw something. He had a photographic memory. More, he was astonishing with computers.
Christophe Tregre, after a stint in the service, had trained with an elite unit of Drake’s in the Borneo rain forest but returned to ensure his younger brother and sister were safe from his treacherous father and uncle. He then began training in the security force under Timur. He had excellent fighting skills, but not as much experience as Sevastyan would like. He was Fyodor’s brother-in-law, which meant he was sacred. Family. Sevastyan wasn’t going to put him at risk if he could help it. Christophe was a strategist, a good one. So, he was in the control room.
Sevastyan leaned over his shoulder. “What are we looking at? Rolan wouldn’t throw his best men at us yet. He’s testing us.”
“He’s testing us with some pretty heavy numbers,” Christophe replied. “He’s got five teams coming in. The way they’re moving, they look like shifters to me. Where would he manage to get that many?”
“Mercenaries. Rolan has money. He can pay top dollar.” Sevastyan should know, he’d helped to earn it. He kept his eyes glued to the screens. One team was moving in the trees, running along the branches, still in human form, but Christophe was right, they were too sure-footed in the trees carrying their weapons to be anything but shifters. “He must have been in Houston to pick them up off ships coming in. These men aren’t from around here. He’s recruited them from other places.”
Sevastyan studied the shifters moving in the trees. They ran along the branches almost without looking. These men had honed their skills in the rain forests. He texted Kyanite Boston, a man who had spent several years with Drake Donovan in the rain forest rescuing kidnapping victims. Kyanite came immediately, slipping into the control room silently, coming to stand to the side of him to look at the same screen.
“You recognize any of them?”
In the dark, it might be considered impossible, but leopards recognized one another and often shifters did as well, just by movement. By body language. They might be a good distance away, but Sevastyan could see these men were professionals. It wouldn’t be long before most of them were dead, but he wanted to know where they came from. Where Rolan was recruiting.
Kyanite nodded slowly. “Worked with two of them when I was down in Panama. They kept to themselves. Good trackers, both of them. The other three are from Borneo. They were from a lair several miles from the one Drake grew up in. Sorry to see them here, but not too surprised.”
Rolan knew about the shifters training in the rain forests. The internet made advertising so easy these days. Shifters wanted work. Action. They were predators and living in cities didn’t appeal to most of them. They were born to hunt so quite a few preferred mercenary work.
Sevastyan turned his attention to the team coming from the main road straight to the front of the house. Team two was coming on foot, spreading out, five men, using the low shrubbery for cover as they approached the house. That looked like the easiest entry point, when it was actually the most dangerous of all.
He’d designed the renovations himself when Mitya had moved in. The roof lines on the house and garages were completely made over, giving him places for his snipers to have higher ground but also cover when they needed it. He’d set his snipers at various locations and they were just waiting for his word to take out the first wave of Rolan’s men.
Team three came in from Sevastyan’s property, using a fast-moving truck without lights and then abandoning that before running to converge with the others, making their way on the ground through the thicker woods Flambé’s father had planted years earlier.
Team four came in from the opposite side, running also to cover the distance. They had the battlegrounds to cover, where Sevastyan trained his men daily in simulated wars, in hand-to-hand combat, in taking apart bombs. He left nothing to chance with Mitya’s security, and that included keeping the leopards in fighting condition. The open fields were there for a reason. There were gently rolling hills, downed trees and shallow caves dug out so his men could train for every possibility. Sevastyan and his men knew every inch of those acres where they trained.
The last team had the responsibility of covering the others, hanging back to be in position to break into the house and kill Sevastyan and Mitya when the others made their entry. Sevastyan shook his head. Rolan had always insisted he could plan his battles. He’d always sucked at it. Even at fourteen and fifteen, Sevastyan had listened and then changed everything the moment he’d left Rolan with the others to actually go into combat. The men had learned to listen to him instead of Rolan. It was what had kept them alive.
“Do you have sights on team five and team one?” Sevastyan asked. He narrowed his gaze, looking closer at the screen, trying to peer behind those members of team five in the trees. Was something moving?
“That’s affirmative,” Logan Shields responded. “Give us the go.”
“It’s a go,” Sevastyan confirmed. He didn’t look to see if his snipers took out their ten intended victims. He looked beyond the five mercenaries dropping like stones in the trees to the shadows suddenly going still behind them. Something was definitely there, but he couldn’t make it out. Suddenly, he was uneasy.
“Christophe, can you bring up the images in the trees team five was in? Right behind them, following them on the branches. Ambroise, you’re very quiet over there. Did you see anything?”
“I don’t see anything,” Christophe said, leaning forward, forcing the screen image larger and larger until it was nothing but gray pixels. He turned in his seat to look at Sevastyan. “All five team members went down hard. Those were kill shots.”
Sevastyan ignored that. He knew his snipers had scored kill shots. That wasn’t the point. The point was, someone besides Rolan had put together this assault on Mitya’s home and team five weren’t the only ones in those trees.
“Bring up team one again now. The earlier screens of them.” He’d been looking at the men. Seeing what they wanted him to see. Seeing what he expected to see. Thinking he was the smartest damn man in the room. Those men were a sacrifice, pawns to test his defenses. He’d known that, but he hadn’t known they would already be utilizing what they learned. They knew the snipers were on the roof of the house, but now they knew they were on the garages.
“Hurry, Christophe. Ambroise, answer me. What the fuck am I missing? What’s out there? What’s behind these men coming at us?”
“Leopards,” Ambroise whispered. “An entire army of leopards and they’re coming right at us fast.”
* * *
* * *
FLAMBÉ paced back and forth, restless, trying desperately to figure out what to do. She had made up her mind to leave the moment Shanty and her three children arrived. She would ensure the woman was in the program and then she’d make use of her own underground for the domestic violence shifter victims. She’d have to shut it down as soon as she entered it. No one else could ever know about it or use it again.
Sevastyan and Shturm were far too dangerous. Far too intelligent. And she was way too susceptible to the man. Flamme had proved herself to be too susceptible to the leopard. If she
actually decided to make a run for it, she couldn’t look back because she’d change her mind.
Every muscle in her body hurt. She knew why. She hadn’t had sex with Sevastyan. She’d ignored him and in doing so, ignored her own needs. The buildup of hormones between Flamme and her was getting scary. Her skin felt hot to the touch. She felt as if she were burning from the inside out.
Suppressing her leopard was getting much more difficult. When she was alone, she allowed her to come close to the surface, but it hurt, and every single time the pain only got worse. Flambé thought that, with time, she’d get used to the feel of her surfacing, but that hadn’t happened. Her nerve endings seemed much more inflamed. The sensations burned through her body like a blowtorch, taking her breath, robbing her of her ability to think. She couldn’t bear the feel of fabric against her skin, so she stripped, tearing at her clothes and flinging them aside, grateful that no one could get into the master bedroom.
Naked, she paced faster, desperate to outrun the horrible way her skin burned and itched. Strands of hair fell, snaking down from the messy knot she’d hastily twisted on top of her head, snaking down across her bare back and sliding across her buttocks. She had to bite back a scream as a thousand tongues licked at her skin, points of white-hot flames flicking at her on the end of each of them. Tears tracked down her face as she caught at the ponytail and desperately tried to re-loop, pulling the thick strands back up off her skin.
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