His eyes sweep the room, taking in faces and associating them with names. For Yelisey, danger lurks everywhere. The man stays on constant high alert. Another of his more valuable traits. At my approach, he spins to fall into step beside me and, along with tonight’s bodyguard, Geoffrey, leads me to the black SUV already waiting at the valet.
I climb inside with Yelisey beside me as Geoffrey walks around to take his place at the wheel. There is a glass window between us and the driver’s compartment, and Yelisey pushes the button to secure it into place.
He hands me a drink, whiskey in a glass tumbler, as we take off. “There are developments you should be aware of.”
I’m not worried, even though it’s bothered Yelisey enough to bring it up. I pay him to worry for me.
“Oh?” Though I look at him, he doesn’t return the favor. Fuck. Not a good sign.
“It’s Natasha.”
Oh. Fuck indeed.
Natasha. The one name guaranteed to cause a growl in my stomach. The shlyukha who waited until the dark of night to leave me three years ago.
“Where is she?” The words grind out of my throat, because finding her and wringing neck is all I’ve thought about since the morning I woke to find her wedding ring on the bureau by our bed.
“I’m sorry. She’s …” His pause is long enough that I sit forward.
“Spit it out, Yelisey,” I order. I brace myself. Anything that takes Yelisey this long to say isn’t anything I want to hear. Not that I want her back. I just want her to know that I know where to find her.
“She was in a car accident, Kostya. She’s dead.”
Dead.
My Natasha. The woman I loved since childhood. The woman I married. The woman who left me.
Dead.
I hear a crunch and look down to see that I’ve squeezed the whiskey tumbler in my hand so hard that it burst into shards. There is blood dripping down my fingertips. It’s my blood, I note distantly, but I don’t feel a thing. Not one fucking thing.
I can feel Yelisey’s eyes on me, too. If he were a different kind of man, his jaw might have dropped at the sudden and unexpected display of anger, the kind of raw rage I rarely show in the presence of my men. But he is not a different kind of man; he is Yelisey, top lieutenant of the Zinon Bratva, so he merely stares at me and lets his eyes do the talking.
The glass shards twinkle at my feet. They catch the light from the passing buildings as we drive further into the night. I stare at them and watch the blood drip, drip, drip from the neat slices in my palm where the glass cut me.
I feel something stirring in my gut. A maelstrom. A hurricane, a fucking typhoon of emotions so densely swirling that, even if I were so inclined, I’d never be able to untangle them. But I don’t want to untangle them. I just went them fucking gone.
So I open my mouth and roar. I roar into the silence of the vehicle and hear my own wordless rage reflected back into my ears. It’s a black hole of a roar and I know that Yelisey wants to say something, and perhaps Geoffrey does, too, but both of them know better than to question me.
My Natasha is dead, and all I can do is fucking scream into the night like the goddamn Grim Reaper as my palms drip blood and broken glass crunches as I stomp and stomp and pulverize it beneath my feet.
Shouldn’t I be sad? Withdrawn? I’m roaring like I was stabbed in the heart, but it doesn’t feel like a man roaring for his lost wife. It feels like the sound of a man who just suffered a mortal wound.
Had she not been a master manipulator, a fucking sociopath who blinded me with her affection then crippled me with her mind games, I might have mourned, not raged. But the time for that kind of vulnerability is long past.
There is only anger in my heart now. I have not truly loved Natasha for a long time. She left me and took that part of my soul with her.
Good fucking riddance.
Only when I can’t roar anymore and the ringing of my voice has long since quieted down does Yelisey speak up again. When he does, he is quiet, muted, direct. The blood on my hands has dried now, like a red trail of tears.
“One of the housemaids mentioned a call from the LAPD police. I didn’t want to call back blind, so I checked with our contacts in the FBI.” He clears his throat and pours his own drink. “She was living here under a fake name, Natasha Volstok.” He nods to my watch.
I force a thin smile. My throat is sore. Volstok. The brand of the watch she gave me. Another petty, cruel mind game, played by a petty, cruel woman.
Perhaps it is better that she is dead before I got my hands on her. Better for her, at least.
But Yelisey has more to say. Even though he isn’t saying it. We, too, have known each other since childhood and his apprehension is as physical as the presence of another person. But I can’t do anything to rush him, so I sit quietly. He’ll talk when he’s ready.
A few moments pass as we drive on into the night. He clears his throat eventually and adds, “In the news articles our contact sent over, there is mention of a child. A three-year-old girl.”
My heart leaps into my throat. That’s certainly one way to capture my attention. “A child?”
He nods.
“Three years old,” I echo.
“Yes, Kostya. Three years old.” Yelisey finishes off his drink in a loud gulp.
We both are thinking the same thing: three years old would almost certainly make the child mine.
I don’t know what the fuck to say to that. If a roar was all I could
