“I still can’t believe you thought I was kidnapping you.”
“Well, excuse me for being gunshy with the men in this family.”
Chuckling, he said, “Maybe I should’ve kidnapped you. When I told Maksim, he would’ve risen up to beat my ass.”
I laughed at the absurdity of the moment. “He probably would.”
Thinking about him lying in a hospital bed sobered me quickly. “Tell me about what happened in O’Brien’s.”
He shook his head. “You don’t need to know the details.”
“Yes, I do.”
Aleks exhaled a ragged breath. “Like I said, they’d been looking for a weak moment to attack. My uncles want the Korolov Bratva for themselves and their sons. But more than that, they wanted revenge. With the backing of the Newark Bratva, they decided to start clipping us off one by one starting with Maksim.”
I gasped in horror. “All of you? Even the girls?”
“Even them.”
“That’s insane.”
A cruel look flashed in his eyes. “Theywereinsane. They’re dead men walking now.”
I swallowed hard. “You haven’t found them yet?”
“We’ve been too focused on Maksim. But we will. They have no idea the wrath they’ve just brought down on themselves.”
Although I shouldn’t condone the violence or their methods of revenge, I nodded my head. “Make them suffer.”
“Trust me, we will. They will be tortured for days for what they did to Maksim…and Vasily.”
At the mention of the kind bodyguard, I asked, “Is he…?”
When Aleks glanced down at his hands, I knew the answer to my question. “Did they stab him, too?”
With a shake of his head, Aleks said, “They used a silencer to shoot him in the head.”
Tears pricked my eyes. He had been so kind to me. And I knew he was the one who had helped get Silas to rehab.
And now his life had been cut short. I knew he couldn’t have been older than thirty.
Thinking about Maksim again, I asked, “Will you tell me what happened in the bakery?”
“He was outnumbered and stabbed. What more is there to tell?”
“How many times?”
“Almost too many in the gut.”
I shuddered. “They just stabbed him and left?”
Aleks clenched his jaw. “They wanted him to suffer. Bleeding out from a gut wound is pretty painful.”
“How did you get to him in time?”
“He hit the panic button on his watch. Dima knew none of us could get to him in time, so he called an ambulance.”
I furrowed my brows. “Wait, but how did you get him to the house if you called an ambulance?”
