Weather the Storm (Security Specialists International #3) (12 page)

And she had almost died—from an infection. She couldn’t even remember much about the time she convalesced. Her uncles had finally found a doctor in Switzerland, a relative of her Italian father, who treated her in his home for the infection and the other injuries she’d suffered during her captivity.

Vanko scowled as he regloved and tore open the sterile packaging from his next instrument of torture. “The papers and news broadcasts never gave many details of the abduction, not even the name of the man who’d taken you and killed—”

His words trailed off. He probably thought to spare her the recollection. But he couldn’t do that, no one could. She still had nightmares of her parents being killed in front of her and of the time in her captor’s hands.

“Tell me. How were you wounded?” Vanko fixed his steely gaze on her face.

She inhaled his scent and met his fierce-looking eyes; it gave her strength knowing he would catch her if she fell. It was a good feeling.

“That is…if you wish to…” He was angry—on her behalf—and worried, sensitive to her pain, not only the current physical pain, but the emotional pain from her past trauma. “Elana?” He stripped off the glove he’d just put on to cup the nape of her neck and massage the knotted muscles at the top of her spine. “Fuck me. You’re crying. Forget—”

“No. You need to know.” She grabbed his too distracting hand and rubbed it over her cheek before releasing it. “You know I was taken off the streets of Moscow, and my parents were—”

“I know the details of your abduction and what happened to your parents. You don’t need to relive that particular horror for me.” His tone was gentle, despite the grimness of his sculpted features. He regloved, and his hands were steady as he delicately tweezed the wound of fibers.

Ignoring the sensation of the tweezers probing the gash above her hip, Elana licked her lips and resumed staring at the ugly painting. “Um, I guess the whole world knew the beginning…and the manufactured ending.”

She’d spoken to counselors
ad
nauseam
about what had happened during the three days of her captivity. She couldn’t give Vanko the details now, maybe not ever. It was all she could do not to scream in rage and pain at even revisiting the edge of the memories she’d buried in the deepest corners of her mind.

“Um, to make a long story short”—she coughed as her throat threatened to close off—“after I escaped, one of my captor’s men recaptured me just as my uncles arrived on the scene. The man used me as cover. I was shot in the back during the crossfire.”

She sucked in a breath and let it hiss out between her teeth as the tweezers slipped a bit. Vanko muttered a foul curse, whether at himself or the man who’d used her as a shield, she couldn’t tell.

“I’m sorry,
dushka
. I’ll be more careful.” Vanko returned to his task, and his absorption seemed complete.

His touch, but for that one slip, was light and caused her only the occasional sharp pain. His use of the Russian word for “sweetie” gave her butterflies in her stomach.

“Your uncles…” Vanko grunted. “They’ll kill me for seeing you in your bra, you know.”

He was trying to distract her from what he was doing to her wound. It didn’t work, but she appreciated the effort. And he was correct—her uncles were extremely overprotective, after all they’d claimed she was “dead” and then hidden her in the United States. But she had a sneaking suspicion they’d like Vanko, since he was a lot like them…a good man fighting evil in the world.

“We won’t tell them,” she whispered. “They like to forget I’m a grown woman.”

Vanko grumbled under his breath as he probed her wound track. “Your uncles are good men. I never worked with them, but have heard of them as I moved up the ranks at Interpol. I recall you were a dancer at the time of the abduction, yes?”

Another change of subject. She bit her lip as he dug deeper than previously.

“Yes,” she gasped, “a ballerina with the Russian Ballet, the same as my mother had been. Sergei…” The man’s name seemed to stick in her throat. She coughed, jarring her wound, and then whimpered.

Vanko stopped probing until she regained control. “Sergei who?”

“Demidas. He saw me dance and decided he wanted to possess me.”

“Sergei Demidas is the one who took you?”

“Yes.”

Vanko’s whole demeanor changed. Where before he’d been calm and under control, now it was as if some inner beast fought with the civilized Vanko for control. His eyes darkened. His hands fisted. Every muscle in his body was taut. He looked like a man preparing to kill.

She shrank into the bedding, frightened by the swift change which had overtaken him.

“He’s a sick fuck. A diseased animal who should’ve been put down years ago.” He snarled and swore virulently under his breath. But when he tipped up her chin, he did so with gentle fingers belying his obvious rage. “I know this bastard well. I worked undercover at Interpol. You were lucky you were rescued.”

Yes, she was. Demidas had shown her what he’d done to his other women to get her cooperation. He’d wanted her cooperation. She’d refused to give it, and so the torture had begun…no, she wouldn’t think of it. It was in the past. She’d survived.

Vanko shook his head as if he attempted to rid himself of his anger and his own bad memories. Once again in control, he leaned closer and brushed a sweet, but all-too-brief, kiss over her lips. “He’ll never get to you again. I vow this on my soul.”

Elana licked her lips and tasted him. He was all spice and heat. His taste, like his scent, was…right. She shivered and forced her reaction to his mouth touching hers to the back of her mind to be examined in depth later…much later.

She continued with her story. “There was no luck in the rescue itself. I escaped on my own. Then I called one of my uncles, who in turn called his brothers. They and other Interpol agents came to get me. Demidas escaped in the chaotic aftermath.”

“And now you’re afraid Demidas will see the news video and send someone for you.”

“No. I’m terrified he’ll come for me himself. He told me as much when he was, um…” She couldn’t relive that experience, not when she was in pain and exhausted.

“He…um…told me he’d find me…even after death. He was obsessed…crazy.” She shuddered. “I’ll never be safe until Demidas is dead.”

“I’ll kill him for you.” Vanko spoke the words as if it would be as simple as going to the corner store to pick up a quart of milk. “If I don’t succeed, SSI will follow through. Sergei Demidas is an abomination. The world will be better off without him.” A muscle in Vanko’s jaw clenched and unclenched. She could almost hear his teeth grind.

Elana shook her head. “It’s not your job…I don’t want you to risk…”

He brushed another butterfly-light kiss over her lips. “Hush,
dushka
. It’s every honorable man’s job to eliminate true evil in the world.”

Vanko lifted her torso slightly and traced the back of her shoulder where the old scar lay. “Was the wound to your shoulder your only injury from that time?” His voice was low and rumbling. His anger was under control, but barely.

The answer to his question was the can of memory worms she hadn’t wanted to open to the light of day, and especially not now, when Vanko’s wrath was already roused and he was working himself up to risk his life to kill Demidas.

“Elana, don’t even think of lying to me.” He held her shoulders gently and rested his forehead against hers. “I can read your Interpol file, if I need to.”

No!
She didn’t want him to do that. Her file had all the filthy details, her medical records, and pictures of her body afterward. It would be better if she filtered the information for him.

“I was raped…”
abused, tortured
,
scarred, and for a time, crippled
, “…but I’ve put all that in the past.”

Yeah, right, sure
.

She’d had surgeries for the physical damage of Demidas’s torture and extensive counseling for the emotional and mental damage. But her experience had continued to isolate her from normal, healthy sexual relationships with men even years later. And of the men she’d managed to date, only a few made it to bed with her. And those that had…had never come back for more. She tended to freeze…to just lie there. No real man wanted a block of ice in his bed, or, at least, that was what she’d been told by her disappointed sex partners.

Elana stared into the Vanko’s gray-green gaze and found anguish. He suffered for her—with her. When had any man—other than her uncles—ever done that before?

Never.

Would Vanko be the man to free her soul from the web of fears she’d harbored all these years? To teach her to live fully?

“
Milyonok
―
” she blurted before she could stop herself.
Sweet guy
, and when had she started to think of him in that light? “―let the law take care of Demidas. I’m fine and will be even better when you finish taking care of my injury.”

Vanko shuddered and visibly gathered himself. He smiled, a slight lifting of the corners of his lips. “You think I’m sweet,
dushka
?”

But his smile was a lie, because his eyes still glittered with the fires of hell…he raged on her behalf. She was humbled.

“Yeah, like a cinnamon honey bun,” she teased.

Vanko snorted with amusement, and his anger of mere seconds ago had disappeared from his expression as if it had never been. But somehow Elana knew it wasn’t gone, just buried as if he didn’t want anything ugly to touch her, not even dark emotions felt on her behalf.

Vanko lowered her to the bed and released her shoulders.

She relaxed into the softness of the pillows and turned her head to follow his actions. “Are you almost done with my wound?”

“Milakha.”
He stroked a finger down her arm. “I need to check for foreign material in the wound track on your back. Then I’ll be done and can give you some more pain medication and an antibiotic.”

“Okay.” He’d called her
sweet darling girl.
She should object to all the endearments, but she liked them. She liked him…a lot. And besides, they were merely words. Men casually used pet names all the time. Vanko probably didn’t even realize he used them.

Just keep fooling yourself, Ellie girl.
This man isn’t like most men.

After re-gloving, Vanko turned her gently onto her left side, exposing her lower right back. At the first touch of the tweezers, her world burst into flames of anguish traveling up and down her body. Her abnormally fast metabolism had struck again. The pain meds and local anesthetic were history.

She cried out. Her insides turned to molten jelly, and spots and flashes of light streaked across her eyes as she fell into an infinite darkness where nothing could reach her.

Elana had finally slipped into unconsciousness.

“Thank God.” Vanko couldn’t stand the thought of causing her any more pain—on any level, especially by dragging up the past. He remembered watching the funerals on Russian television. It had been big news when the Italian ambassador to Russia, his lovely Russian wife, and their sixteen-year-old daughter were all killed. But the news had given no details of how or why the tragedies had occurred.

Demidas!

The man was more akin to a filthy animal than a human being. His debased fingers were involved in criminal activity from the streets of Moscow, Odessa, and Kiev, to the gulags in Siberia, and all the way to the top levels of the current Russian government.

Vanko stroked a finger lightly over Elana’s pale cheek and down to her delicate jawline. He growled under his breath at the thought of her delicate beauty under Demidas’s cruel hands. The bastard had just shot to the top of Vanko’s to-be-killed list, right next to the mercenaries who’d shot at her on the Mall and the treasonous asshole in DIA.

After injecting some more topical anesthetic around the wound opening, Vanko finished tweezing cloth fibers and then irrigated the entry point to the wound track. Then he pulled a small package from the medical bag. This item wasn’t a standard feature in any military field medical kit and had been added at Ren’s request. Vanko had been informed about its existence when he’d made his calls while retrieving the pack.

He opened the sterile package and removed a one millimeter in size, titanium-encased object. It was a miniature, high-powered GPS that Tweeter and Keely would be able to track using government satellites. The head of DIA had authorized its use. The General wanted Elana, the only one who could absolutely identify the slippery-to-this-point traitor, protected that badly.

Of course, Vanko didn’t plan on straying far from Elana’s side until after he delivered her safely to Sanctuary, but shit happened, as Ren had so bluntly reminded him. Cases had gone south enough times in Vanko’s life as a covert operative that he couldn’t disagree.

A pressure injector had been included to shoot the bead under Elana’s skin, but Vanko had decided to place it in the shallow end of her wound track and use the wound sealant to hold it in place. Later it could easily be removed.

After placing the tracker bead in the gash where the bullet had first struck her, he then applied the wound sealant to keep out other foreign material and to hold the tracker in place. After a liberal smear of antibiotic ointment, a sterile gauze bandage, and a shot of antibiotic, he was done.

Vanko propped Elana on her good left side with pillows supporting along her back and front, then covered her up with the bedclothes. She uttered a sigh and curled around the pillows against her stomach, just like a kitten.

After repacking the unused medical supplies and bagging the bloody detritus from treating her wound, Vanko sat on the edge of the bed. He stroked a finger along the elegant length of Elana’s neck and then checked her pulse at her carotid. It was within normal range. She was resting easily, and he let out a relieved breath. He’d let her rest until their ride to the safe house arrived.

After Vanko had reported to Ren during his trip outside, he’d contacted Grigori Turgenev, the Russian ambassador to the United States. He’d called in a favor the man had promised many years ago, during Vanko’s time with Interpol. Vanko had rescued Grigori’s daughter from a sex trafficker—not Demidas, but one very much like him. Grigori was now more than happy to repay the debt by providing shelter to Vanko and Vanko’s woman. The ambassador was sending the embassy limo, along with a military guard, to pick them up.