Face reddening with fury, he jumps to his feet, sending his chair crashing to the floor, and I follow his example, ready to pound his thick skull into the table. Fuck self-control. Bloodlust sings in my veins, dark and toxic, spurred by anger and the harsh sting of betrayal.
Mina is Mink.
She lied to me, played me for a fool.
And my brother, ublyudok that he is, is still mad I didn’t fucking share.
My fist is already balling up, about to fly toward his face, when Lucas Kent bursts in, his square-jawed face tense and his T-shirt drenched with sweat.
“It’s Sara,” he says, panting like he’s sprinted all the way across the compound. “Peter, you need to come with me right away.”
Sokolov is already moving, the mere mention of his wife enough to make him forget everything under the sun. A moment later, he and Kent are gone, and with them, some of the fury that had blinded me.
Taking a breath to calm myself, I sit back down, and Ilya does the same, even as Anton and Esguerra eye us like we’re a pipe bomb ready to explode. But they don’t have to worry. I’m back to being in control.
My brother is not the enemy here.
She is.
And when I get my hands on her pretty little neck, she’ll pay for every bit of her deception.
7
Mina
I wake up to a splitting pain in my skull and a dull ache in my ribs. My mouth tastes like stale copper, and my arms are numb, my wrists painfully restrained above my head as I lie stretched out on some hard surface. It’s hot and humid, and I can smell my own sweat mixed with old wood and mustiness. For a moment, I can’t make sense of any of it, but then my memory returns, flooding my body with adrenaline. It takes all my training to remain still, with my eyes closed and my breathing unchanged, as images of what happened invade my mind.
Attacked.
Captured.
I was heading to a bartending gig in Budapest when four men surrounded me in a dark alley, their eyes as cold as the weapons in their hands. I managed to disarm one and injure another, but there were too many of them.
Even strong and healthy, I was no match for all of them.
My memories after that are a blur. They either drugged me or knocked me out. I vaguely recall a sense of motion—a car, most likely—followed by a loud roar that reminded me of a plane’s engines. Did they fly me somewhere?
If so, why?
Fear presses in, the metallic tang of it bitter in my mouth, but I push it aside, forcing myself to concentrate. Think, Mina. Focus and think. I rake through the blurry recollections, looking for anything that might explain this situation.
Who would want to capture me and why?
A conversation comes to me, dim and hazy, as if from a dream. Amid the roar of the engines, men were talking—a mixture of English, Russian, and Spanish, if I’m not mistaken. What was it they said? There was some mention of someone named Esguerra, and also something about a captain or a general…
Oh, fuck.
My stomach tightens as it comes to me, the realization of what this is about. I should’ve known the clusterfuck in Chicago would blow back on me.
It’s the one time in my life I didn’t listen to my instincts.
The one time I took a job that didn’t sit right with me.
The sound of footsteps yanks me out of my thoughts.
Someone’s coming toward me.
My heartbeat jacks up, but I don’t let it show, doing my best to appear passed out. The newcomer is not fooled. He stops next to me—somehow, I know it’s a he—and sinks to his haunches, watching me with malevolent amusement. I feel the weight of that stare, sense the darkness in it, and an uncanny sense of familiarity washes over me as the subtle, masculine scent of sandalwood and pepper teases my nostrils. He laughs then, the sound low and cruel, and as his fingers tenderly graze my lips, a chill roughens my skin at the impossible realization.
“If it isn’t my little Mina,” Yan says in Hungarian, his smooth, deep voice straight out of my darkest dreams. “Or should I call you Mink?”
8
Mina
Lungs seizing with a mixture of shock and perverse excitement, I stare at the man I’ve tried—and failed—to forget over the past fifteen months. He’s as dangerously attractive as I remember, his hard features as symmetric as if they’d been carved by a sculptor and his blue button-up shirt perfectly tailored to his muscled frame. His mouth—the same talented mouth that had lapped at my sex with startling hunger—is curved in a cold smile, and his green eyes are filled with the promise of hell.
Fuck. He is connected to all this.
The possibility had occurred to me when Walton Henderson III, a former US general, reached out to me with the assignment. He wanted me to interfere during the arrest of a Russian assassin in the Chicago suburbs, a man who went by the name of Peter Garin.
The goal was to make sure Garin didn’t get taken alive.
The assignment sounded simple and straightforward, but the Russian assassin bit gave me pause. I wondered if the men who’d kidnapped me that night were somehow involved—if it could have anything to do with Yan and Ilya. But the picture of the target looked nothing like the twins, and after some deliberation, I took the job.
Henderson made my skin crawl, but he paid well and Hanna’s bills were due.
There was no way Garin was connected to Yan and Ilya, I told myself as I flew to Chicago with the US passport Henderson gave me. Russia is a huge country, one where criminals of all sorts abound. That my target shared a nationality and a dark calling with the man I’d slept with was a coincidence, nothing more.
Later on, when the clusterfuck happened and my target’s face and
