Turning the camera around, I show him the master bedroom and the absurdly large bed before panning back to me. “I’m bouncing on your very comfortable mattress. This bed is the size of an ocean liner, by the way.”
“Sweet Jesus I wish I was bouncin’ on that bed with you,” he groans before his smile turns devilish. “Show me what you’re wearing, my pretty, filthy wife.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
In which there is dinner with an unsettling billionaire.
Cameron…
“Get packed, I’m takin’ you on a trip.”
My pretty bride’s face lights up like a Christmas tree. I’ve taken to Facetiming her each night after another day of going through the dregs of Moscow, killing Stepanov men.
Today’s raid on one of their holding cells was particularly bad.
“Really?” Morana, “When are you coming home?”
Something glows in me when she says “home.” As in mine, and hers.
“I’m flying into Dublin in the morning, and you’re meetin’ me there, lass. Fancy having dinner with Nolan O’Rourke at his legendary whiskey distillery?”
“Can we have dinner, but without O’Rourke?” she asks flatly. “He’s unsettling.”
“Unsettling!” I snap my fingers, “I’ve been searchin’ for the right word. We still need to have dinner with him though, unsettling or no.”
“All right,” she agrees unenthusiastically before brightening hopefully. “Could we maybe walk around a bit after? I’ve never been to Dublin.”
“Aye, we can do that.” It feels good to grant her wishes, and she asks for so little. For a girl raised in the pampered oasis of a Russian crime family, Morana is surprisingly unspoiled.
She’s looking at me closely, a little frown between her eyebrows. “You look like today was a bad day. Well, every day has been horrible for you since you landed in Moscow, but…” she pauses, “today was worse?”
“It was.” I hesitate. “The holding cell, it was in the Golyanovo District.”
She winces. “I hope you got a tetanus shot.”
“Not a bad idea.” The doctor’s been and gone already, patching up a bullet wound in my thigh and it’s aching like a motherfucker. “There were forty cages, no bigger than a dog’s crate.” She’s listening in silence, her gaze never leaving mine. “They were all full, but only twenty-five of ‘em were alive.”
Tears instantly spring to her eyes.
“Some of the kids, they couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen,” I stumble on, not sure why I can’t shut up. “One of the girls who made it, she was holding hands through the bars with her sister in the next cage. We had to…” I run my hand through my hair. “We had to sedate her to make her let go. Her sister didn’t…”
“O, Bozhe,dear God,” she sobs, “I am so sorry. For those poor girls. For you to see it. For everything. I wish I could take this memory away and carry it for you.”
“Each time we rescue these kids, I see Sorcha’s face, my little sister’s face. If Cormac hadn’t gotten to her in time, she could have been one of those girls,” I ramble on. “She was kidnapped by a Triad because the MacTavish Clan wouldn’t let them ship human cargo through our ports.
“They took her, my aunt, and my little cousins. After we got ‘em back, we went after the Triad. We killed every one of them. Every. One. But the Stepanov Bratva is the second half of their operation. Until Vadik Stepanov and your Da’ are bone and ash, I’ll still see her face.”
I can sense her sorrow. Just from seeing her expression, I know she feels what I do.
“For the rest of their lives, these girls will remember you,” she says firmly, “they’ll remember the moment the door opened and light came in. The light was you. They’ll see your face in their dreams and the moment they realized they were safe. God willing, they won’t think of when they were taken, but of when you saved them. They’ll remember the light.”
I lightly tap the phone against my forehead and get myself under control.
“I wish I was there with you,” she whispers.
“I do, too.” I didn’t mean to say it out loud.
Morana…
