HER RUSSIAN SURRENDER (11 page)

He nodded his head, indicating where Nikolai should go, and when Nikolai was in place, Sergei released the maintenance man from inside his arm.

“You may run now,” he told the smaller male.

The man, perhaps believing his fate had unexpectedly changed, that Sergei Rustanov had only meant to scare him and hadn’t truly intended to kill him in front of his child, ran.

He ran as fast as he could, given that his hands were taped together in front of him. More proof that this man was either stupid or did not truly know Sergei Rustanov.

Sergei watched him run for a bit before calmly pulling a Glock 19 from his jacket holster and shooting a hole in the back of the man’s head. The maintenance man dropped dead less than twenty feet from where Sergei and Nikolai stood.

“You see,” he told Nikolai with a grin as the sound of the gunshot reverberated though the night sky. “In this case, it is okay to be sloppy.”

Thirty Years Later

“IT IS ONE IN THE MORNING,” Alexei said in lieu of a greeting when he answered his phone.

“I would not call,” Nikolai answered in Russian. “But I threw a party tonight. Do you still have the maid service in Miami?”

“Lexie, is everything all right?” a tired voice asked in the background.

“It is nothing, Eva,” Alexei answered. “An associate, calling about an important business matter.”

Not a direct lie, Nikolai noted. For men who had been raised like he and his cousins, calls like these were a matter of business. But not the exact truth either.

Nikolai listened to the sounds of rustling on the other side of the phone. He imagined Alexei getting out of the bed he shared with his wife, and going to another part of the house to finish the call out of earshot.

“I do still work with that service,” Alexei answered. “But it’s based in Chicago now.”

So Alexei’s hit man had moved to Chicago, it seemed.

“It is fine. Chicago is closer to my party,” Nikolai answered.

“Also, the service no longer caters. Family obligations.”

That gave Nikolai some pause. He’d only met Tetsuro Nakamura once, when he’d handed him the audio recording of Sergei’s death. But the emotionless Asian man hadn’t struck him as the type of guy who would ever had “family obligations.”

But then, Nikolai had never planned to have children himself and look at him now. Making arrangements to clean up this mess before he went home to his nephew… and his nephew’s current guardian, the girlfriend of a police officer.

In this case, though, whether Nakamura was still willing to kill was neither here nor there.

“That is not problem. The party was already thrown,” Nikolai answered. “But it was very messy. I need your maid service.”

“How long did this party last?”

Nikolai surveyed the basement room, a less than classy affair, with carpet on both the floors and the walls. Not like his own home, which he had designed as one big fuck you to Sergei, who’d been from one of the richest crime families in Russia but had forced his girlfriend and child to live in a small, grey two-bedroom apartment.

That small apartment was luxury accommodations compared to this room, located below a strip club called Jiggles. Every piece of furniture looked to have been either hauled from a sidewalk or bought at a discount store’s clearance sale. So cheap, it was no wonder it had only taken Nikolai fifteen minutes of “questioning” the guy who’d been sent to take out Pavel before he’d sung like a bird and gave him an address.

The drug outfit that had killed his brother was fairly new with a boss who’d come to Indiana with just a few East Coast connections and a family of thick-necked brothers and cousins. According to the hit man Nikolai had interrogated, they only had the one strip club and apparently not enough money or taste to redecorate.

Either way, it wasn’t something they’d have to worry about now. The man who’d attempted to kill a defenseless woman and child earlier that evening was dead on the carpeted floor, along with his boss and other family members, after having been used as a human shield when Nikolai had kicked in the door and come into the room shooting. The only thing the hideout had to recommend it was that, thanks to all the tacky carpeting and music blasting from the club above, the short gunfight went completely unnoticed.

But there was still the not-so-small matter of clean up. Nikolai counted eight bodies in all, and in this case, he had admittedly been a little sloppy. All of the men had been killed quietly and efficiently, but there was a strip club full of people upstairs and no way for him to sneak out fully undetected.

“Eight hours,” he answered his cousin.

“The party went on for eight hours,” Alexei repeated. “You are not serious.”

“Eight hours,” Nikolai repeated, “And there are many people here who weren’t invited. This is not my house, so I need the maid service as a courtesy to the owner.”

Nikolai could almost hear his cousin frowning as he said, “I will now ask you why you did not invite me to help you with set up. I would have flown back if I had known you were planning a party.”

“There wasn’t time,” Nikolai answered. “Someone tried to invite my nephew to this party on the same night, so I had to throw the party myself. Quickly.”

They’d only texted briefly about Fedya’s newly discovered son after Nikolai left the police station, but Alexei cursed upon hearing the coded news of the attempt on Pavel’s life.

“I understand. Hold on…”

Some shuffling and then Nikolai could hear Alexei having a muffled conversation with someone else—probably on another phone reserved for the messier aspects of his business dealings. The conversation was conducted with rapid efficiency on Alexei’s part, until he broke off to ask Nikolai for an address.

Nikolai coded his answer as best he could given he lived in a city Alexei had only visited occasionally, most recently just a few days ago to assist Nikolai with some business dealings. But Nikolai’s vague description clearly got the job done because after a few more rapid exchanges, Alexei came back with, “The maid service says they can clean up your party. Lock the door behind you when you leave. The service will take care of the rest.”

“Thank you,” Nikolai said, meaning it. There were few people he trusted in this world and his cousin was among that very small number.

“Do not thank me. We are family. Of course I will do this for you,” Alexei answered. “And I would have thrown the same party if it had been either of my children.”

Of course he would have.

To everyone’s surprise, Alexei, who’d garnered a reputation as a ruthless businessman prior to his marriage to a spitfire from Texas, had turned out to be a dedicated and loving father. He truly seemed to enjoy his role as a parent, even more so than his role as an international oligarch. The few times Nikolai had observed him with his family, he’d been doting with just enough firmness to command his son’s respect. As of late, though, he seemed be going even further into softy territory now that his wife had given birth to a little girl they’d named Layla. Nikolai had yet to meet the newest member of Alexei’s family in person, but he’d been forced to listen to Alexei refer to her by the most syrupy Russian pet names, and it was obvious the baby already had Alexei completely wrapped around her finger.

His love for his family didn’t make him any less commanding, though. Nikolai did as his cousin said, locking the basement door and piling the cheap furniture in front of it in order to barricade the room from the inside, so no employees with keys could stumble in on the grisly scene. Luckily there was a basement window, one he could crawl out of with the aid of a plywood chair.

He thought of his own nephew being forced to crawl at out of a small window earlier that night and felt no remorse for what he’d done to his would be killers. But he also felt no sense of relief after he made it back to his car. Because now it was time to go home and face what he could already tell would be a much bigger challenge than killing eight men.

He’d never had any interactions with children. Had never wanted them—how could he after the way he’d grown up? But now he had a ward, one he’d have to raise in Fedya’s stead. And his ward had brought a woman into his house. The same one he’d been thinking about near obsessively ever since the first party he’d thrown as owner of the Polar. But she belonged to another.

He didn’t know what bothered him more at this point. That he now had a child to raise, or that Sam, the woman in the green dress, would be sleeping under his roof and he wouldn’t be able to touch her.

14

I
t was very late by the time Nikolai made it home and he didn’t expect anyone to be waiting for him when he walked in the front door. But soon after stepping across the threshold and flipping on the lights in the foyer, the useless dog came trotting up to him, tongue hanging out.

Despite having just met him a few hours ago, the dog seemed happy to see him.

Nikolai glared at his unwelcome guest and tried to step around her, but the dog got in front of him again. And when he tried to dodge, the dog only followed him, nudging him with her square face before dropping to the floor and showing him her belly.

Nikolai didn’t have much experience with dogs, but even he could understand the message this one was trying to convey. The price for getting by unimpeded by her large body was a belly rub.

Maybe because he was tired and weary to his very bones, Nikolai bent down and gave her two short slapping pats on her pink belly. But perhaps the dog wasn’t as dumb and useless as he’d previously thought, because she once again flipped over as he stood back up, negotiating her head into his palm so he was forced to pet her again. Then came more head nudges, the greedy dog all but placing the back of her ears underneath his fingertips.

Nikolai scratched her behind the ears because—well, he didn’t know why exactly. At first he did it to get her out of the way, but then a calmness stole over him. The more he scratched, the more the events of tonight loosened their angry hold over him. And the more the dog rubbed her large head against his palms, the more human he felt. Not like a ruthless killer, but like a man who’d done what he’d had to do to keep his nephew safe. The only thing he had left of his brother.

A strange pain settled in his chest at the thought of Fedya, and he saw his brother, once again lying on that slab. Those Russian drug dealers had disposed of him like a piece of trash, and they would have done the same to Pavel, if he hadn’t—

Don’t think about it
, he told himself.

“Go to bed, dog,” he said to the dark grey canine, who he had half a mind to rename Useless. “No more petting. Get out of my way.”

The dog must have understood he was no longer in the mood to indulge her, because she slunk away into the dark living room as if she knew she’d gotten all the petting from Nikolai she was going to receive that night.

The dog’s unexpected greeting had lightened his mood, but only for a little bit. He was completely numb again by the time he stepped into his glass and marble shower. And as he watched the blood of the Russians slide off his body and down the tub’s drain, he could sense his father’s ghost like a heavy cloud hanging over the bathroom. Nikolai’s inability to feel any emotion but grim satisfaction regarding what he’d done that night called forth his ghost as sure as if Sergei were still alive. Alive and still showing up at his mother’s apartment commanding Nikolai to come with him, as he had often throughout Nikolai’s teen years. The last time he’d come had been only a couple of nights before his mother’s death, for what Nikolai had known would be a very messy business if he needed more than one gun to handle it.

To Sergei’s credit, he’d never come back after his mother died.

As Nikolai got out of the shower and dried himself off, he could also feel his dead mother’s eyes on him. Scared for him. But too scared to say anything to his father.

Nikolai’s bones ached with both the memories and exertion of killing eight men with only a silenced gun, a wire string, and his bare hands—which wasn’t as easy as it looked in the movies. Sergei had kept himself in excellent shape all the way up until his sudden death, and the reason for his dedication to staying fit was evident in the soreness Nikolai felt now despite his superior size and muscles.

After his shower, Nikolai threw on a pair of briefs—the only thing he ever wore to bed, wanting nothing more than to go to sleep. It was late. Very late. And he had to work the next morning.

But he couldn’t make himself get into bed. There was a specific need tugging on him, as sure as a finger pulling on a toy’s drawstring. Instead of going to the bed, he threw on a heavy cotton robe with the Polar’s angry bear mascot emblazoned across the back of it.

He needed to see the boy and the woman now sleeping under his roof. Make sure they were safe. It was a stupid compulsion. Stupid and unnecessary. There were no Russians left alive to get past his security system. Every threat against the boy was now dead in the basement of a strip club, awaiting the arrival of Tetsuro Nakamura.

But nonetheless…

Only two of the top floor bedroom doors were closed and he walked down the hall to the larger room on the left, as quietly as he could.

His thought had been to check on the woman first, and then the boy, but to his surprise, he found the boy in the larger room, looking like a Russian prince in all the red, gold, and ivory opulence as he snored softly. He didn’t appear to have a care in the world, and for a moment the numbness inside Nikolai’s chest was pierced by a strange ache.

He would protect this boy, he vowed as his heart iced back over. No matter what it took. He wouldn’t let him turn out like Fedya.

With irritation he thought of the woman who’d insisted on coming here with Pavel, The judgmental look she had given him when he’d told Pavel not to cry. Fedya had been weak like that, coddled by his mother and mostly ignored by Sergei—which was close to a kindness on the enforcer’s part. Nikolai could remember Fedya sniveling into Natasha’s side much the same way. So Nikolai had corrected him. And Samantha McKinley had reacted to his words like he hit the boy, like he was worse than the men those women came to her shelter to escape. Like he was the exact opposite of her cop boyfriend.