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“Then how the fuck are we going to find him?”
“We don’t,” I said as I turned to face him, rubbing my arm across my blood-splattered face. “There’s only one person who can.”
“The woman.”
“Yes.”
Kirill laughed. “As I told you before, you like playing with fire. This time, you’re tossing gasoline onto the flames.”
“So be it. Sergei Politoff will never threaten my family again.”
* * *
“Loving someone is giving them the power to break your heart but trusting them not to.”
—Julianne Moore
Stephanie
I wasn’t certain why a quote I’d read many years before had come to my mind, playing over and over again until I was sick of thinking about the words. Sadly, they were especially true about Alexei. While I’d fallen hard for the brutal man, I couldn’t trust that the limited confidence we’d developed would last. He wasn’t the kind of man who accepted any loss of control or could envision himself as anything but what he was.
A ruthless killer.
He could call himself whatever he liked, including a consummate businessman, and he was, that couldn’t change who he’d become over the years. I knew he had his reasons, including family loyalty and a sense of righting the wrong enacted on his father, but that didn’t give him the right to treat others with such little reverence.
Or maybe I was just too Pollyanna in my thinking. Hell, I’d been stupid enough to believe Gregory for all his foibles was still a good man at heart when in fact he’d become no better than my Russian lover. I pressed my forehead against the cool glass, the window looking out at the New York skyline. It was beautiful, more so than I believed a man like Kirill could want in his life.
The furnishings were stark, but I could tell recent feminine touches had been added, the woman in Kirill’s life entirely different than I’d anticipated. I’d insisted on having the television on, although the eleven o’clock news had done nothing but make me cringe. She’d left it on CNN, turning the volume down after I’d almost thrown my bottle of water at the screen.
The same sense of dread I’d felt at the safehouse continued to furrow in my stomach, my heart racing as time ticked by. The timebomb was also clicking down. I could feel it in every muscle and tendon in my body.
“You’re welcome to go up to the guest room anytime. I tried to find some things you could wear,” Candy said from behind me.
“Thank you. I should have said that to you a few hours ago.”
“Nonsense. You’re scared and uncertain of everything. It’s the least I could do. Are you okay?”
“Fine.”
“Uh-huh,” she muttered.
I continued to stare out the window, rubbing the spot on my neck where my necklace should be. Not being able to track down Sarah’s killer had nearly broken me all those years ago. Now I feared the ugly mess I’d gotten myself into would finally be my undoing. I was usually much stronger, but details of her murder mixed with those of what Sergei had done to the two men employed by the Kozlov family. I’d never equated them before because a small part of me had felt that the soldiers had deserved it. I’d never admitted that to myself.
What kind of person did that make me? Was I really any different than Alexei or the men he employed who were just following orders? They’d had a life, many of them with families, kids, sisters and brothers. I’d honestly believed they were nothing but savages, which had allowed their deaths, while horrible, to somehow fade away.
I’d been more than just naïve. I’d allowed my position to get in the way of my humanity. That had to stop.
“Why don’t you drink this,” Candy suggested as she tried to hand me a glass of wine. “You’re as tense as when you walked in here.”
“It’s after three in the morning.”
“You’ll need to learn that life runs on a completely different schedule around men like Alexei or Kirill.” She laughed, her green eyes sparkling in the iridescent lighting hanging over the window.
I accepted the glass, unable to tolerate anything other than water up to this point. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Tolerate loving a man who kills people for a living.”
