“Me?” Viktor’s expression morphed into something real. “Or my employer? I did not broker the deals that have saved you before. I am a foot soldier, no? Kill my men... they are nothing to you.”
Embry’s brows shot up, perception flaring in his clever eyes.
We were missing something.
But what?
Alexei spoke again in Russian.
Viktor answered him only with a hollow stare, but it was enough thateverythingchanged.
10
DECOY
Trouble for the club was more than a tangible chain of events. It was a prickle on my skin. A taste in the air. It was the faces of my brothers as they huddled around the ancient table, features drawn with stress.
“You don’t have to be here,” Nash said to me. “We’ll try and keep it clean while you’re at the table, but I can’t promise you’re not going to hear shit you don’t like.”
That was the way of it sometimes, and for the greater good, I fought hard to convince myself it didn’t matter. No one in this room would ever tell a fed I had dirty hands, and no fucker was getting in my head to prove them wrong.
I took a seat and gestured for Nash to speak. “Give me the need to know.”
“There’s been an incident.” Nash’s gaze slid to Alexei. “Alexei and Folk were attacked on the road last night. They, uh, neutralised the problem, but it turns out the marks belonged to the Russians.”
“To Viktor?” I’d come across him before—at the warehouse fire.
“Seems so. We’ve managed to convince him we didn’t do it on purpose, but he’s not happy.”
“Why did his men attack us?”
“They were double agents working for the Sambinis. And it was a chance hit. If our boys had been somewhere else last night, it wouldn’t have happened.”
I computed that, struggling to keep my gaze from shifting sideways. To the left, where Folk sat, the set of his shoulders were perhaps the least strained in the room.
Neutralised the problem.
That meant he’d killed people last night, and his crazed leap into the sea now made more sense. What had he called it? A reset?
Nash lit a cigarette. “Anyway, we straightened things out with Viktor, but we have a different problem now.”
More stress seeped into the mood around the table. I leaned back in my seat, taking it all in. I’d left Locke outside with River, and Cam wasn’t here. But aside from Alexei, everyone else was. Nash, Rubi, Saint, Mateo. Embry.
Folk.
Don’t look at him.
I didn’t.
Just.
But god, it was tough. Only the pull between fighting for my brothers and protecting my daughter was tougher.
“What does this mean?” I asked. “You’ve squared things with Viktor, but he’s still pissed off, right? Will he go to his boss about it?”
Nash winced. “Hard to go to a bloke who’s dead. That’s the other reason he came—to tell Alexei that Pavel Sidorov was assassinated the day before yesterday. Viktor thought it was the Albanians. Then Sambini switched sides, and us eliminating Viktor’s agents made it look like we had to.”
I blinked, battered by the influx of information, none of it good. I didn’t have the depth of knowledge I needed to understand it all. Didn’t want it. But what stood out the most to me was that the man who’d saved Alexei from a life too awful for me to truly contemplate—who’d savedCamfor no other reason than his affection for Alexei—was dead.
