For now.
I hand him a new flute of champagne from the dozens on the bar and hang on when he tries to take it from me. I fix him with a cold stare. “This will be your last glass and then you will leave.”
“Wha—”
I keep my voice low, calm, but unyielding. “You will leave, or your family will find pieces of you on every beach on the West Coast. Am I understood, or would you like a more hands-on demonstration?” My voice is quiet enough for only his ears, but the anger vibrates through every accented syllable.
I’ve always found the fear my voice inspires in these people to be funny. Too many evil Russians in the American cinematic diet, I would guess. But the truth of the matter is far simpler: I could do exactly what I am threatening. I know it, and he knows that I know it. His pupils dilate and his breath wheezes out his nose.
He fears me.
Good.
He nods slowly, sets his glass on the bar behind me, and stumbles to the door. I don’t know who he is, but he certainly knows who I am. And that’s enough.
I check my watch, a classic Volstok Amphibia given to me by my ex-wife on our wedding day. Yelisey Rusnak, my advisor, is already at the door, earpiece in, connected to a microphone in my lapel.
“Get the car,” I growl under my breath to him. I’ve had enough. I want to leave before any more of these overbred scum try to drag their grubby fingers across my suit.
I see him in the distance and we make eye contact. He nods once. I walk toward him. Only a bit smaller than my six feet four inches, Yelisey is as imposing as any man I know. Women find him irresistible, and I find him indispensable. But only one of those two parties knows the real Yelisey, and I hired him for his ferocity more than his knack for separating housewives from their panties.
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
