Dad steps up to the goon to start asking questions while the rest of us hang back.
“Who do you work for?” Dad asks.
The guy looks past Dad with his good eye and remains quiet.
“I’ll give you one more chance to answer my questions for an easy and quick death,” Dad says, switching to Russian.
The idiot scoffs.
Dad removes his jacket and hands it off to Lake. “Who do you work for?” he asks again, while rolling up his shirtsleeves. When he still gets no answer, he pulls out a gun and shoots the guy in the foot.
I shoot a glance over to make sure Lev is okay. His family isn’t involved in crime like this. Dad grew up watching his father run a large-scale crime syndicate in St. Petersburg. He’s not messing around.
For the next twenty minutes, I watch Dad systematically wear this guy down until he’s told us the family he works for and what the exact plan was. They were going to meet up with a cargo ship in Rhode Island and travel to the Baltic Sea that way. These guys work for a Latvian family that traffics women and children exclusively. They are the lowest of criminals.
Dad walks away from him and starts straightening himself up. The guy looks at me and decides to push all the wrong buttons.
“We were going to break all your women in. Take your fiancé and sister two at a time, break their spirits before selling them at auction like livestock.”
Levi’s fist connects with his face, and a tooth flies out. His foot connects with the guy’s nose, the crunch of bone audible.
“It would have been fun to break such a whore. It’s all I could think of when I grabbed your fiancé’s tits. They were a nice-” His words are cut off when I pull my gun and shoot him dead center in the forehead. None of us needed to hear anymore of that trash.
“Can you clean this up?” Dad asks Lake. “Or do we need to call in our cleaners?”
“I’ve got it.” Lake answers as he sends a text off.
I turn as I exit the building. Lev’s calling my name for the first time in days grabs immediate my attention. My head snaps to the side as his fist connects with my jaw.
Now is as good a time as any for this.
I let him punch with another right hook, feeling the pain bloom around my eye. I’m so sick that I revel in the pain. He punches me a third time in the stomach, and I double over. When I catch my breath and look up at him, I can see his chest still heaving and fists still clenched.
“The first three were free, the next will cost you,” I say as I wipe blood from the corner of my eye.
He comes at me with a jab from the left, which I block before landing one of my own punches to his face. We go punch for punch, kick for kick, until we’re rolling around on the grass grappling with each other. I don’t know how long we fight with my dad and Lake looking on, making sure we don’t cross any irredeemable boundaries with each other as we exercise our anger out.
Lev has me by size and weight, so when he pins me under him on the ground, I know I’m done. I might be a better fighter, but I also know when to quit. I put my hands up in surrender, and he stops just before another punch was about to land on my face.
I watch the fight leave his body as he deflates and flops onto his back beside me. We’re both covered in blood and going to look like hell tomorrow. He starts laughing.
“Ives and Hoodrat are going to be so pissed when they see us,” he keeps laughing.
“Especially when they realize we did this to each other,” I join in laughing. “I think you cracked a few of my ribs.”
“Good. You deserve it,” he says sobering. “It’s not even that I blame you for what happened to the girls. You love them as much as I do. It’s that you never fucking share what’s going on in your life. I didn’t know how serious the threats had gotten.” He sits up and hauls me up beside him. “We’re fucking family, so stop keeping us in the dark.” His gaze is dark and intense as he stares me down.
“Understood.” I hold my hand out for his, and he pulls me into a hug.
3
LILITH
On the list of things I most despise, being smothered by the overprotective cavemen in my life is at the top. Which is why I’m currently glaring daggers at Griff while he ignores me and continues working in the kitchen. He hasn’t made eye contact, but I know he can feel me staring him down because he’s fighting a grin.
I stand up and walk over to him. “You know, you used to be my favorite,” I say as I fight a wince from the pain of my stitches.
“I’m still your favorite,” he says without looking up from his computer screen.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking through some acquisitions research. I’m trying to convince the family to buy some more newspapers in smaller markets across the country.”
“Isn’t print dead?” I ask knowing full well this is a hill he’ll fight and die on.
“Nice try at baiting, but you’ll have to do much better if you want to fight,” he looks at me over his laptop. “Con and Lev are on their way back. They texted a while ago.”
Good. I want to know what they learned, so we can plan our next steps. The guys have been freezing me out of everything since I was injured, but that’s not how we operate. I’m an equal to them in all this. Ivy and Claire are too, in fact. None of us are the type to tolerate misogynistic, bullshit, overprotective behavior. Ivy saved herself and Claire,
