Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 90084 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 450(@200wpm)___ 360(@250wpm)___ 300(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90084 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 450(@200wpm)___ 360(@250wpm)___ 300(@300wpm)
I kick open the door and come into a kitchen, my gun up and aimed forward. There’s a scream nearby and more gunshots. I move low with Anton at my back and enter into a narrow galley space. Two Armenians are up ahead, both of them armed. I squeeze off three rounds, putting two in the lead man and one in the second before Anton finishes him off. Their bodies crumple to the ground, bleeding profusely from their ruined skulls, but I don’t see our men anywhere.
“This way,” I snarl, rushing forward. A man in a chef’s outfit is hiding under one of the tables and I’m about to move past him, when I have an idea. I reach down and grab him by the shirt and drag him out. I stuff my gun barrel, still warm, into his mouth.
“Where is Arsen?” I ask.
The man stares at me with terror and tries to speak.
“Move the gun,” Anton suggests.
I pull it from the chef’s mouth. “Upstairs,” he gasps out. “Steps are to the right.”
I pat his cheek and hit him hard in the side of the head. He goes limp, unconscious, probably not dead. I push him back under the table and move fast, following his directions. When I turn right, a set of stairs disappears to the second floor.
There’s more gunfire from up there.
Anton pushes past me and goes first, the fucking bastard. When he reaches the top, someone shoots at him, forcing him back. He nearly falls down the steps, but I steady him. There’s shouting in Russian, our men telling us to be careful and noting the Armenian positions. I come up firing blindly in the direction they mentioned and manage to wound one man as I stagger up the steps and fall into a blind roll.
Gunfire erupts, barely missing me, but Anton’s got my back. He kills my attacker, a man leaning out of a door to the left. The Armenian I injured is trying to crawl into another room, and I shoot him three times to make sure he can’t get away.
My soldiers emerge from a door toward the end of the hall. “Sergei is dead,” the leader says, a grizzled veteran of several Eastern European conflicts named Leonid. “Target is in there.”
“On my back,” I say, stalking past him. The door is clearly marked office, and it crumbles inward when I kick it hard.
I find Arsen Sarkissian hiding in a closet.
He’s young and brash, and he tries to fight, but I shove my gun against his throat before he can so much as land a punch. I smile at him, enjoying the fear in his eyes. He’s got dark hair and dark eyes like his father, with a little piggish nose. I don’t know how this ugly shit is related to my beautiful wife.
“You are coming with me,” I tell him.
“Russian scum,” he says, showing his teeth. “You’re a dead man, Valentin. When my father finds out—”
I slam the butt of my gun into his front two teeth. One gets knocked loose and he gags on it before I wrench his arms behind his back and drag him out to the van.
He’s spitting blood and cursing the whole way, but we fix that with a gag and some rope before Anton speeds off back toward Philadelphia.
Chapter 29
Karine
I’m a nervous wreck. When Valentin leaves for the kidnapping mission down in Baltimore, I pace around the house for nearly two hours before I decide there’s no way I can sit around and wait for him to come back. It’s a long drive to Baltimore and a long drive back, and I won’t hear a word until everything is over.
A dozen scenarios play through my head, and all of them end with my husband murdered and dead in an alley far away.
Strange, how suddenly he’s my husband in my head.
Instead of torturing myself for another few hours, I call Merrick. “I need something to do,” I tell him. “And I feel like you owe me.”
“Darling, it’s early, but if you’re so bored you can come let me paint you again.”
“You sure my husband will be okay with that?”
“I’ll gift him whatever I make as a little present. How’s that sound?”
“I’m sure he’ll love it.”
Which is how I end up naked in Merrick’s art studio as the sun rises outside his big windows. I drink coffee and pose myself however he instructs me, and he busily makes marks on his canvas and chats with me about aimless, normal things.
It’s nice, actually. Living with Valentin made me forget that there’s a big world outside the Bratva and most normal people only worry about things like when the farmer’s market is opening and where their next cup of tea is coming from.
And even the ones who were like me, who had to obsess over every penny and spent most of their time stressed beyond healthy levels, even they have it easy compared to me right now.