“And Andrei?” I asked lightly, the tone in my voice put there intentionally to make my enemy underestimate how carefully I was listening. “He likes to fix things. He’s probably charming the whole logistics wing into handing him an access badge as we speak.”
If Andrei was still free, he’d likely try to get me released through diplomacy first, then do something noble and catastrophically dumb if that didn’t work.
I hoped he wouldn’t.
The commander came closer still, just out of arm’s length. He wanted me to lunge so he could punish me for it. I wanted to crush my knee into his dick so badly that it took everything in me not to. I unclenched my hand from the coil and let my fingers hang open.
“Congratulations. You’ve got your hostage then,” I said, testing him.
“Hostages,” he corrected pleasantly. “Plural.”
Heat licked the back of my neck. He wanted me to demand names. I didn’t. If he had all of us, he’d be angrier; if he had no one but me, he wouldn’t be here. He was here because he had just enough to preen. Which meant Katya, almost certainly, and that meant he probably had the Markovs and Kara Lennox too.
But he didn’t have my brothers.
“I’m touched,” I said. “I must be pretty special for you to schedule a visit with little ol’ me then.”
“You matter,” he said, smile widening, “because you are the easiest one to catch. You will talk when we threaten those you love.”
“I talk when I’m bored.”
“We’ll try to entertain.”
“Fine,” I retorted. “Let’s start with the terms.”
“Terms?”
“You said it yourself,” I shrugged. “You claim we broke our agreement. So, let’s draft a new one. I tell you something that interests you; you tell me something I can use. Mutual entertainment. You seem like a man who hates wasting time.”
He looked amused and annoyed, a combination that always ended in men telling me more than they intended. “What could you possibly tell me that I don’t already know?”
I nodded at the camera. “That depends. How much time do you have?”
He took the bait. “Answer my questions,” he teased, “then I’ll tell you where we’re keeping the little traitor.”
I smiled.
So they did have our Katya after all.
I shouldn’t have felt a thrill. Should have felt fear, maybe. Or desperation. But no—Viktor Dragunov didn’t do noble. I did survival. And survival meant keeping my mind sharp, my pulse steady, and my dick out of decisions where it didn’t belong.
Mostly.
The commander stared at me with that smug little smirk, the kind of face I’d grown up punching off of rich boys who thought the world lived to serve them. He didn’t blink as he waited for meto dance for him, to beg. Men like him always waited for a man like me to crack.
I was made of cracks. Old ones, healed over with scar tissue and vodka and spite. None of them were for him. He should know that metal is strongest at the weld.
“Terms,” I repeated, rolling the word over my tongue. “You like rules. Structure. That whole organizational chart fantasy where everyone salutes your genius. So let’s negotiate.”
“You seem to think you’re in a position to demand anything.”
“I’m not demanding,” I said. “I’m offering entertainment. You seem bored. And trust me—if we keep staring at each other like this, I’ll start imagining more creative uses for that tie clip. I don’t think you want that.”
His jaw flexed. Ah, so there was a human under all that starch.
Good.
Bravely, he moved a fraction closer.
