“Not a word of this, do you hear? I don’t want this getting out. If people discover what we’ve done, we’ll have more than a war on our hands.”
Lenin waits for me to clean the last of Vaughn’s blood from my hands before locking his eyes with mine. I’ve known him for over twenty years, and this is the first time my eyes are darker than his. My pupils are filling my corneas, making my usually icy blue eyes as cold and desolate as the room Lenin locked Zariah in over three hours ago.
I was so hell-bent on vengeance, I couldn’t see sense through the madness when Lenin brought Zariah to the room I was punishing her brother in. My mind was in lockdown mode, my sense of normality obliterated. If it were any man but Lenin defying me as he had, he would have paid his penalty with his life. Even then, it was a close call.
This kills me to admit, but the soaring highs and devastating lows of the past twenty-four hours broke me. I could never be accused of being mellow, but not even my crew has seen me like this. I’m unhinged, both mentally and physically.
The words Zariah screamed when Lenin dragged her out of the room rang through my ears on repeat. They played with my thoughts when I unshackled Vaughn from the ceiling and placed his flopping body onto the body bag men in my industry use in bulk; they were there when my gun pinched the skin of Lenin’s temple as I squeezed back the trigger. That’s how deep into the darkness I’ve descended. If it weren’t for what Zariah did and said tonight, who knows how far the carnage would have spread?
I hate being deceived. If you cheat, I’ll find out. If you try to hide someone’s deceit, I’ll find out. If you try to tell me I’m wrong, you’ll die along with those who deceived me. Those rules would usually lead to a higher kill count tonight than what I’ve amassed so far.
Once again, if it weren’t for Zariah, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
As much as my ego hates confessing this, what Zariah disclosed earlier was true. Dominique wasn’t visiting Zariah during her near daily outings to the Volkov compound in the four weeks leading to her death. From the intel I’ve gathered the past four hours, they didn’t even cross paths the day Dominique was killed. In a way, I’m relieved. If Zariah was present, who’s to say she’d still be here today? She may have been killed too; then I’d have more than one death to avenge.
I will also admit that I’m torn. For twelve months, I’ve craved a bloodbath. I wanted the people responsible for Dominique’s demise to suffer as I had. But in less than twenty-four hours, everything I thought I knew has been upended.
I still want revenge; I still want to hear them plead for their lives as they kneel at my feet mere seconds before I deny their claims, but my focus has shifted. Nothing I can do will bring Dominique back, and even if it could, after what I’ve discovered, I can’t guarantee she wouldn’t suffer the same fate. But Zariah doesn’t need to fall on the same knife Dominique did. I can protect her from all of this. I did years ago, and I will now as well.
I’m dragged from my thoughts when Matvei enters the bathroom attached to my office. The grave expression on his face makes sense when I realize he’s arrived empty-handed. I asked him to fetch Zariah for me. I wasn’t fucking happy when Lenin advised me he locked her in a room a few doors down from the one he dragged her out of, but with my bedroom door no longer having a lock, he didn’t have much choice.
“Where is she?”
Matvei’s wide shoulder notches up as he scrubs at the stubble on his chin. “I don’t know. She jimmied the lock with a hairpin. We’ve searched the entire compound. . . She’s either hiding real good, or she isn’t here.”
His pause before his last sentence is warranted. I’m fucking ropeable. I can’t protect someone when I have no clue where they are.
“Get Bahrain—”
“Already on it,” Lenin interrupts, talking over his cell attached to his mouth. “He’s tracing her last movements.”
Lenin didn’t lie when he told Zariah I have motion-activated cameras in every corner of my property. Usually, I would have had a tracker implanted on Zariah by now as well, but up until a few hours ago, I had no fucking clue what she truly meant to me.
Things are starkly different now.
Even if I hadn’t already claimed Zariah as mine, Vaughn’s confession tonight would have flipped everything I thought I knew. This is bigger than Zariah being sold. It’s a fucking war, and we were the pawns used to start it.
I shift on my feet to face Lenin when he sighs. “Matvei is right. She’s no longer on the property. Bahrain has her exiting one of the garages a little over two hours ago.”
“Which car did she take? They all have trackers; have him trace her location.”
“She didn’t take a car,” Lenin grinds out before disconnecting his call. “She went on foot. Bahrain is sending us footage from the main gate. If she left the compound, that’s the only way she could have exited.”
He’s not lying. We have dogs trained to rip you apart if you so much as step foot past my property line, and the tall fences surrounding us have skin-shredding wire curled around the top.
When Lenin’s phone flickers to life with a video, I step closer to him. Bahrain has tracked Zariah to the main gate. Her dark shirt and hair mean she’s barely visible in the blackness of the night, but the whiteness of her wide eyes as she crawls past the security station at the gate can’t be missed.
“What is she carrying?” I point to a shimmer I see reflecting in the bottom left hand corner. She’s holding something close to her body.
“A camera?” Lenin’s tone is as unsure as his facial expression.
A smile tugs at my lips when he taps on the screen two times to zoom in the image. She’s not holding a camera. She’s clutching projector film rolls.
The adrenaline thickening my blood throws out clones when the truth smacks into me. “She’s going home.”
Those projector reels hold more memories of Zariah’s mother than Zariah and I have combined. She would only take them if she had no intentions of coming back, and considering this is the only home she’s had beyond the compound she grew up in, where else would she go?
My smug grin sags when the Zariah on screen leaps to her feet and sprints toward a stream of cars rolling past our property. I’m not angry at her attempt to flee, I’m glad she’s still holding some of the courage that’s captivated me the past two weeks; it’s her flagging down an unknown motorist to ask him or her for a ride that’s pissing me off.
