I spin towards Senator McNair, who is fighting with his captor now, and when he realizes I’m focused on him, he ducks down, giving me time and opportunity to put a bullet between the eyes of the guard holding him. The man stumbles back against the wall and then slides down it, eyes blank and glassy.
But another shot rings out, and Bella’s dad folds over and falls to his knees. Bella screams, and I spin around and fire blindly at the middle-aged man. Two shots hit him, and he goes down, dropping his gun on the way. I kick the gun into the corner and then turn to face the young guard. His eyes are wide, face pale, and he’s holding his gun like it’s a life raft and he’s sinking in the ocean.
I point my gun at his chest and tilt my head to the side. “How about instead of money, I let you have your life?”
“Draw your weapon,” my father cries. “Fight them.”
The guard looks at my father and then, without further hesitation, drops his weapon, steps over his fallen friends, and walks out the door. As soon as the office door shuts behind him, Bella drops to her knees beside her dad and my own father begins to spin a new story.
“Yet another challenge you’ve conquered,” he says, clapping his hands slowly. “I’m proud.”
“Fuck you,” I say, spitting at his desk. “You would have sat there and watched me be shot and killed before your eyes without a drop of doubt. Don’t lie to me.”
“Does it matter how I felt then?” he asks. “I prefer to live in the present.”
“When ‘then’ is one minute ago, I’d say it matters,” I say.
My father shakes his head. “No, it doesn’t. I feel differently now. I’m ready to offer you a position in The Society. Clearly, you would make a worthy partner, and I would be stronger with you by my side.”
“You’d be stronger with your entire family by your side,” I say. “The way it was before. Or, at least, the way I thought it was. But you have always been by yourself. You made that choice. You chose to break away from the family and start your own organization. You chose to betray us and then kill us off when we became a burden. You’re the reason you’re in this position. You could have been the strongest man in the city—maybe the country. But instead, you took the risk to strike out on your own, and it didn’t pay off.”
His mask slips for a moment. He glares at me before he’s able to find his smile. “Yuri, enough of this. You have had your fun with the bitch, but she isn’t worth giving up the power you can have. Fucking her is not worth the wealth you stand to inherit. You can pay for pussy. And besides that, what else can she give you? Are you really going to throw everything away because your moral compass is too literal to see shades of gray? Because that seems foolish to me, and I’ve never taken you to be a fool. So, the choice is yours, son. You can have wealth and power or you can have the girl. Who are you going to choose: your family or a bitch?”
I’m vibrating with rage, but I take a deep breath and look him in the eye. “My family.”
Then I shoot him in the chest.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Yuri
I’m sitting at the same table I sat at the first night Bella and I stayed in the hotel. She was wearing the red dress I bought for her with no panties underneath, and we danced. She hated me, but I already loved her. My feelings for her had already begun to change me, had already softened me in ways that would never be able to be undone. And for that, I was grateful.
“A lot has changed since the last time we were here.” Mike Thomas was also at the hotel that night, and now he’s here again.
“A lot has,” I agree. “But not everything. You’re still with the CIA.”
“And you’re still with The Petrov family,” he says, taking a sip of his drink. “Though I hear you’re leading them now.”
I shrug. “I’m sure you hear a lot of things. Isn’t that your job?”
“More or less.” He looks around the room, his eyes catching on a red-headed waitress carrying a tray of food to a table of foreign businessmen in the corner. She’s pretty, but I’ve seen better. Much better. When he looks back at me, he’s all business. “Do you have the thumb drive?”
I fish the small technology out of my pocket and hand it to him, glad to be rid of it. “This is everything we have. I like you okay, Mike, but I won’t take kindly if you call on me for help again. After this, we’re done.”
He drops the drive in the inside pocket of his suit jacket and holds his hands up in front of his chest in a small show of surrender. “Done. You’ve handed over everything you had on Ivan and everything Ivan promised me about The Society, so I have no further use for you.”
It has been two weeks since he died, and I still don’t know how deep my father’s deception ran. Was it just the family and The Society? Were there more? The desire to know pulled me into his office day after day for the first week. I’d stay there until early in the morning, only leaving when Bella would ask me to go with her to visit her dad at the hospital. He hated me and still does, but she insisted visiting him would change his mind. So, I went. But if I wasn’t at the hospital, I was rifling through my father’s papers, looking for every clue I missed over all the years we worked together.
On some level,
