“It was a note, left by one of the men who attacked,” he explains. “No address, but a number on it.”
“Give it to me.”
He reaches into his pocket and hands me the note, and I look down at it, lip drawing back into a sneer as I look over what this bastard has tried to convince me of. He really thinks he can just walk in here, walk into my life, my house, my mansion, and take my family from me? And hold them to ransom till I give him what he wants?
He’s more stupid than I imagined. Even if I were to give him the warehouses here and now, he couldn’t think for an instant that I wouldn’t be back to take what was mine. And to make him pay for the fear he inflicted on my family.
“Go speak to the men,” I order Ilya. “Check how they’re recovering. Any dead?”
“Only Vinski’s men, though Martino took a bullet to the leg.”
I grimace. Vinski was willing to pay with the lives of the men who trusted him. That suggests he doesn’t have much to lose.
Ilya turns to head out of the office, and I spread the note out on the table before me. My gaze flicks over the messy handwriting, and sure enough, there’s a number at the bottom of it. I pull out my phone and dial it, bringing it to my ear, and someone answers after just a few seconds.
“Pakhan,” a voice comes down the lines. “A pleasure to finally speak to you-”
“Where are they?” I spit back. This must be Vinski; the smug tone to his voice, the clear self-satisfaction he contains knowing that he has managed to make a fool of me and leave me fearful for Nina and Cara, this is likely exactly what he was hoping for.
“They’re safe, if that’s what you’re asking,” he replies, not missing a beat. My lip curls up in disgust.Safe. I saw the way that Cara looked at me as she was dragged away, the terror in her eyes. No way is she feeling safe right now, and I can’t even imagine how petrified Nina must be, facing off against a world she should have known nothing about in the first place.
“Not fucking good enough,” I growl. “Let them go, Vinski. Now. And all of this will be over.”
A lie, of course, and judging by the way he reacts, he knows it as well as I do.
“Come on now,” he replies. “You must take me for an idiot if you think that.”
“Maybe I do,” I cut him off. “Because only an idiot would be stupid enough to think that they could take a stand against me without paying the price.”
He pauses for a moment, and I can hear him breathing. “The warehouses,” he replies curtly. “That’s what I want. Hand over the deeds and the keys and move all your men out, and they’ll come back to you in one piece.” His voice is cold, calculating, and sounds rehearsed.
“You really think I’m going to just give you what you want?” I snap at him, an edge of taunting to my voice. “After everything you’ve done?”
“I think you’d be smart to realize that I know your house from the inside out now,” he reminds me. “And that I can come again, and again, and again, if that’s what it takes. And I will, if you don’t accept that you’re part of the old order, and I’m what’s coming next.”
I can hear a hint of my old self in his tone, the sharpness and fury in his voice that is focused on getting exactly what he wants. For a moment, I don’t reply; how similar is this man to me? I push the thought aside swiftly.
For all his brutality, cruelty, and callousness, which we might have in common more than I would care to admit, I know that I would never target children this way. And I will not let this fucker throw me off my game.
“What’s coming next,” I reply coolly. “Is your body in the fucking ground, Vinski. Don’t forget it.”
And, with that, I hang up the phone. I’m not giving him what he wants. Not a chance in hell. Even if I believed every word that came out of his mouth, and truly trusted that he would just step aside and allow me to take back Cara and Nina if I did as I was told, it opens a door to this kind of shit. And I don’t play these kinds of games.
I down the rest of the vodka and toss my phone on to the table. There has to be a way to figure out where they have taken them. My men, I need to get them moving, get them working on figuring out where they have taken them and just what they intend to do now they have them there.
How long will they keep Cara and Nina alive for?The thought flashes through my mind, and it sickens me to my core that I even have to consider the idea.
I catch Ilya as he emerges from the guard’s room at the end of the hallway and lift my chin to catch his attention. “Get everyone who’s capable of sitting up to the meeting room,” I order him. “And pull all the CCTV footage from the building. I want to see where those cars went after they took off, and I need to know how far away they managed to take them...”
“On it,” Ilya replies, not missing a beat as he springs into action. He knows as well as I do just how important this is. Maybe more important than anything we have ever done before. Because this is my future—the future of my family, beyond Max, beyond this mansion.
And this is Cara, the woman who has been stuck in my mind for so long that to lose her now would feel like a sick cosmic joke at my expense.
That bastard is going to pay with his life for what he has done.
And, no matter how long it takes me to make that happen, I’m going to see the walls painted with his brains, one way or another.
18
