She’s fucking beautiful.
A fucking beautiful disaster.
I haven’t managed to get her out of my mind since I left the penthouse a few days ago, after we returned from St. Thomas. It hasn’t helped, knowing she’s in the same city. Or that I’ve had to check in on her via the guards posted here.
She gave me a scare with those texts earlier.
And now she’s going to have to pay the price.
I give Cid another slow, deliberate caress, holding her stare. He’s soft and purring. I don’t necessarily love cats, but cats have always loved me. In fact, I think he likes me more than he likes Priest, and you better believe I lord that shit over him every chance I get.
“You left the penthouse without notifying me,” I say, setting Cid down and rising to my feet.
Her eyes are wary, but she doesn’t back down. “I don’t need to notify you. I’m a grown woman.”
“Yes,” I correct as I stalk toward her slowly, “you do.”
“It was just the coffee shop across the street.”
“And someone followed you.”
“I don’t even know if he was following me?—”
“Hewasfucking following you,” I interrupt her, my voice intentionally hard.
She needs to understand what she did. How close she came to being scooped up by a sadistic motherfucker.
Isla jerks her head back like I slapped her. “He was? You know for sure?”
“Yeah, I know for sure.”
“But he could have been waiting for the SUV that picked him up, and that’s why he went the same way I did.”
I take out my phone and unlock the screen, opening the picture I was sent. “Is that also why he snapped a pic of you?”
She goes pale, just like she was on the plane ride home. “How did you get that picture?”
“It was sent to me.”
“By whom?”
By Scorpion, who got it from an unknown number. I shake my head and tuck my phone back into my pocket. “You don’t need to worry about that part. All you need to know is that the man who took this picture is one of the most dangerous, psychotic bastards in the Bratva ranks.”
“The Bratva…”
“The Russian mob,” I elaborate, because she clearly has no fucking clue.
“Oh.”
I still don’t think she gets it. “The Russian mob is at our throats because we’ve aligned two powerful families, and we’rechallenging their control. We’ve been expecting them to make a move any day now.”
But this hadn’t been the kind of move we’d expected them to make. Going after Priest’s cat sitter, for Christ’s sake? For all the Bratva know, Isla is an innocent bystander who has nothing to do with the Andrianis, aside from being hired to look after a cat. Unless we have a mole who suggested she has stronger connections.
I’ll revisit that possibility later, when I’m not all but insane at the idea of something happening to Isla on my watch. Either they’re desperate to go to war with us, so desperate that they’ll harm anyone in their path, or they know who Isla really is. They know that she was Luna’s maid of honor. That she’s someone they can get close to in a way they never could with Priest’s wife.
They know that killing or taking her would cause a hell of a lot of grief to the Andriani crew, Luna and my brother, in particular.
“A move,” Isla repeats slowly, like I just spoke to her in another language. “Are you saying Luna isn’t safe?”
