“No. They’re assembling and planning. It’s an all-out tactical assault.”
This was good information. Blaze had to keep him talking. “Tactical? Is the team ex-military?”
“She hired someone to hit you, and I don’t fucking know or fucking care who.”
“What kinds of weapons?”
“I don’t know.”
“Timing?”
“I don’t know!”
A thousand tactical plans spun in Blaze’s head like stars, but it all depended on whether Logan was warning them about MVB or merely stating a fact. “You’re betraying her by telling us this, Logan.”
“I’m nottellingyou. I’mpissed asfuckat you. Dr. Bell doesn’t trust me worth shit now, and it’s all because ofyouandher.Once again, Sarah came flouncing into my life andfucked it up.”
So this wasn’t a warning, just a courtesy call so he and Sarah could get their affairs in order and make peace with the Deity. “You can’t blameher,Logan. Your father remarried after your mother died, andthenSarah was born. She’s an innocent.”
“Innocent, my ass. They threw me out.”
“Your father did that, and maybe your stepmother, I don’t know. But Sarah was seven years old when it happened. She didn’t have anything to do with it. You need to let it go.”
Logan launched the fury that had built inside him his whole life, a black, swirling darkness Blaze had sensed as far back as when they were thirteen and lying on opposite walls of their narrow dorm room.
Logan started,“How fucking dare you?”
A torrent of hate for the world and his natal family poured from the phone speaker, an unceasing spew of vile agony and festering wounds.
“My father hated me because I was clinging piece of shit from his former life he couldn’t shake, and because my mother’s family was wrapped up with Sokolov bratvas, and becausehisfather likedme,even if my grandfather was evil old vampire who killed my mother—”
“Hewhat?”Blaze asked.
“He had herkilled.Whacked, as Italians call it. Because my father made contact with authorities. And when he killed her, the White Russians went to the mattresses with the Sokolov bratva. The war lasted two decades until Sokolovs were wiped out last year.”
“But—but you were tight with your grandfather,” Blaze said, the phone heating in his hand, shock reverberating in his head. “You stayed with him during school vacations. You took us to his apartment above Central Park with you.”
“I had nowhere else to go!”Logan yelled in his ear, and the farmhouse around Blaze sharpened like the walls were knives. “I was akid,and I had nowhere else to go. He wasonlyrelative who would take me in.”
“The Malefactor killed your mother, Logan. He indentured you and your friends with those loans because he knew we were going places and wanted us under his thumb when we did. He was a monster.”
“So what if he was monster? And if I had to become a monster to survive with him, I did, andI am,and I don’t give a flyingfuckabout what you think of me.This is who I am.It’s who I’ve always been.”
“You’re an adult now,” Blaze told him, summoning his speech for veterans who’d joined the military at eighteen and walked into a war. “You’re a grown man. You can make your own decisions. You don’t owe loyalty to the dead.”
Even though Blaze did.
“Yeah, Ifuckingdo owe loyalty!” Logan’s guttural voice yelled from the phone. “I’m boss of the Obshchak, the Security Group for the bratva. I’m second in line after Mary Varvara, our Vor,andI can’t leave.”
“Yes, you can,” Blaze told him. “We’ll help you.”
“Iwon’tleave,” Logan said. “This is my life. The Malefactor and Mary Varvara and White Russian bratva took me in and gave me a home. They are myonlyfamily who hasn’t thrown me out, and I willneverbetray them.”
“Wewere your family, Twist, Micah, and me. We never betrayed you, but you betrayedus.You sucked Micah and Tristan into the bratva somehow, didn’t you? Was it your grandfather’s money to begin, like you did with me? Was it blackmail or threats?”
“Yes,” Logan spat. “All of it. And I would do it again. And I will kill you and Sarah Bell becausethat’s my job and my honor.”
Blaze had been coaching damaged veterans for too many years to miss what was going on, but when someone was trying to kill Sarah, everything was a weapon, especially information.
