It was interesting that Segorski was already back with Dresden. Ella figured the Russian would be gloating about his ricin and formulating plans to maim and destroy innocents.
“I’m back,” she acknowledged in a neutral tone, hitting the high bar and pouring herself a shot of Jack Daniel’s. It had been Jude’s whiskey of choice. Ella did whatever she could to hold him close.
She tossed back the shot, letting the burn hit her gut before she turned and rested against the large, oak high bar. She raised an eyebrow at Dresden, waiting.
“Come,” he urged. “Sit and eat with us.”
Ella snorted, unladylike and loud in the silence of the giant dining room. “Eat dinner with murderers and terrorists? I’ll pass.” She turned and poured another shot, placing a single ice cube in the crystal highball glass before adding two fingers of whiskey over the top.
Dresden laughed as she knew he would. He’d once told her he preferred her feisty rather than meek and obsequious. Of course the only reason she’d been obedient had been because he’d allowed Vasily Savidge to break her into tiny pieces.
She tossed back the second shot and waited for it to numb her.
Vasily Savidge couldn’t hurt her anymore, ever again. He’d perished under the onslaught of two bullets—one courtesy of King McNally, the other thanks to Loretta Bernstein. Where was that woman, anyway? Ella knew she’d survived the CIA’s blitzkrieg of Dresden’s Beirut property. She’d left as Endgame hustled Allie Redding out. Loretta had been hurt but not bad enough to prevent her from running and holing up somewhere Ella hadn’t been able to locate yet.
And she would locate the woman. She had some explaining to do. She also had intel Ella needed.
“Ella, come sit and eat with us.” Ahhh, there was the Dresden Ella knew and hated. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
She had to play the game if she wanted to win.
Ella took a seat at the opposite end of the table. Segorski mumbled something, Abrafo Nadege laughed, and Dresden merely watched her, chin in his hand, finger slowly rubbing over his lips.
Horace Dresden. Ella had been labeled a traitor, but the man across from her had defined the word. Born thirty-six years ago and raised in New York City, he’d graduated cum laude from Columbia, then gone on to join the Navy. He’d made his way through BUD/S training and become a decorated soldier.
Then something had happened approximately four years ago that set him on a very different path. Ella was after that something. It was the key to his destruction. When the Piper had first contacted her to work a mission within a mission, she’d been hesitant. Then he’d told her about Dresden’s past, and she’d known that somewhere inside that past was the way to destroy the man who’d turned on his brothers and his country. Hell, he’d turned on the entire world.
And his rise in the murky world of arms dealing had been meteoric. Within two years of going AWOL from a joint task-force team on a mission in the Kunar Province, he’d been at the top of the arms-dealer shit pile. He’d raided weapons depots belonging to the United States and Russia and become a billionaire, taking out competition swiftly and efficiently. By the time the world’s powers had realized there was a new player on the international arms-dealing stage, it had been too late. Dresden had been too powerful.
All of this was bad enough. But one of the most curious things about Dresden’s past was exactly who some of the members of that joint task-force team had been—Kingston McNally, Rook Granger, and Jonah Knight.
Men who had since dedicated themselves to the eradication of Horace Dresden.
“She will bow to me before it’s all said and done,” Anton Segorski said from his perch beside Dresden.
Dresden lifted a brow to that. “Ella bows to no one. Even Vasily had difficulty breaking her.”
Was that pride in his voice? Ella wanted to vomit.
“Are you missing Vasily, Dresden?” Abrafo Nadege queried softly. For such a large, brutish-looking man, he spoke with a refined air, voice hell-deep and cultured. To be expected, considering he’d been schooled in London. “I know he was your right hand.”
“Vasily’s loss was…unexpected,” Dresden admitted. “Right, Ella?”
Ella chuckled, the sound strident in the cavernous room, as she watched a server fill her glass with red wine. “It happened too fast. I would have preferred he suffer a bit before having his head filled with holes.” She shrugged, lifted the wine, and mimicked taking a healthy swallow. She’d had two shots. It wouldn’t do to dull her senses around these killers.
Dresden threw back his head and guffawed. Finally, he ceased, dabbed his eyes, and lifted his own wine and sipped. “Ella, you never fail to impress me. I’ve broken you, killed your friends, and still that fire you always try to hide makes an appearance.”
“I can break her again,” Segorski bit out.
Dresden struck then, standing so swiftly his chair flew out from behind him. He was on Segorski in the blink of an eye, pulling the man’s head back so far Ella wondered if his neck would snap. Dresden held a butter knife to the Russian’s throat.
“Maybe you haven’t been listening to me, friend. Ella will never be yours,” Dresden hissed in the man’s ear, pressing the butter knife into his throat so hard he began to bleed.
The Russian didn’t move, and Dresden didn’t either.
Ella sipped at her water casually. She allowed her eyes to drift to Nadege, who stared at her, his cold, hard gaze trying to ferret out her secrets. She lifted her glass to him before running a finger along her throat in a slitting motion,
