“You think I won’t do it?”
“No, you won’t,” he rasped. “You think you can use me as leverage to get to my father, but you’re wrong.”
My grip tightened instinctively, irritation flaring sharply. The blood pressure monitor spiked, but still he laughed.
“You’re right. I can get more out of you alive than dead.”
“You stupid Morozov bitch!” he bit out, tears running down his pale face.
I frowned, something in his tone catching my attention, and not just the insult.
“He doesn’t care,” Dmitry went on, his grin widening despite the blood on his lips. “I’m the bastard son he doesn’t want to acknowledge, so kill me and you’ll be doing him a favor.”
“Whether he acknowledges you or not is moot,” I said. “He might not want you, but he’ll have no choice but to react if he doesn’t want his namesake humiliated by us.”
“I’m not nearly as valuable as you think I am,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. He sounded hollow and young. Only twenty-two from the information on his ID. I knew enough about parents who didn’t give a shit about you and the kind of monster they bred. Monsters like me. Monsters like the little shit bleeding out in front of me.
“I want to know how your father is distributing drugs on my turf.”
“Your doctor doesn’t look like he is fond of your methods,” he said weakly. “I can see you care about him. If you don’t kill me, he’ll be the first one I target when I’m free.”
A red haze flashed before my vision, and I spread myfingers to grip his neck, shoving down to cut off his breathing. His legs thrashed and his body rocked against the bed as instinct drove him to try to break my hold. His face turned blue, and he gasped, the sound of a dying man desperate for air.
Next to the bed, the monitors set off an alarm, beeping an angry buzzing sound that must have been a death knell to him. I could have given him a chance to tell me the truth, but the minute he said Leo’s name, his existence and everything I wanted to know from him became secondary.
Dmitry flatlined, his body giving up resistance as he lay still, my hand wrapped around his throat. I’d killed him. I had no answers for Maxim, but I’d eliminated the threat to Leo even though there was a slim chance that he could ever harm him.
Footsteps pounded on the concrete floor, and Leo came to a sudden stop a few feet away from me. He looked at the corpse he’d worked so hard to keep alive before looking at me. Our eyes held, and his were full of disbelief and tears. He looked devastated.
“You killed him.”
I ignored him and nodded to Dezi, who had come up behind Leo. “Cut his head off and send it to Arkady as a message. They want to play games, they can connect the dots to find the missing pieces of his son’s body.”
28
LEO
The car door slammed hard enough to rattle the frame, the impact jolting through the vehicle, but I didn’t stop. Didn’t look back. Didn’t even think to apologize. I just moved quickly toward the front door. Behind me, boots hit the pavement in hurried strides, but I kept going, my pulse pounding and vision blurring. The hand that reached out to unlock the door shook so hard that I flubbed the first attempt.
Breathe.
In.
Out.
It didn’t work.
My hands were still shaking. My chest felt too tight, like there wasn’t enough air in the world left for me to breathe. Suppressed fear, anger, and disbelief burned like acid at the back of my throat, but at least this time the security system acknowledged my fingerprint.
I had to get away from him.
Did he even care about the trauma he’d just caused? I’d watched him murder a man without so much as a hitch in his breath. And the look in his eyes afterward had been so normal, too. They weren’t vacant as if he’d had to go somewhere deep inside his mind to be able to commit such an act.
Sergei looked like it was the most natural thing in the world to get blood on his hands.
And what did that say? That those green eyes that glowed when I made love to him could be plotting my murder, and I wouldn’t even know.
I could still see it.
