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“Did you ask him about the hit after Danil took us the other night?” My voice rises. Gripping the phone, I turn toward the window, staring at the beach below.
“Yeah. He said he didn’t do it.” Another pause.
“But? I can hear you thinking it.” My eyes flutter closed, fingertips numb from clutching the phone so tightly.
“He shut down completely. Never said anything about the meeting.”
“What about Bohdan and Uncle Isai? Did they ever get back to the house? Are they safe?” I tap on the window with my fingernail, narrowing my eyes when I realize that there is no reflection at all in the glass. Not my face, not my finger. It’s completely clear, like I’m looking through air.
“Bohdan is still gone. No trace. No phone calls, no texts. It’s like he vanished. And Isai—”
But before Petro can finish, a strong force yanks the back of my hair so hard, a strangled yelp explodes from my throat.
“Rysa,” Petro yells. “What’s happening? Talk to me.”
I can only choke out a garbled response when I feel a cool, sharp tip jab the side of my throat.
“Hang up the phone now.”
With shaking fingers, I manage to hit the off button. It slips from my fingers and clatters across the floor.
“I thought you were a smart woman, Larysa. You disappoint me.”
“I didn’t tell him anything,” I rasp. “Please don’t hurt Daniela.”
He flips me around so I’m facing him. Danil’s pupils widen to the point where they fill his entire eye, drenching his gaze in malice. He shoves me against the window. It shudders at the sudden impact. He moves the edge of the knife against my cheek and hisses into my ear.
“You should worry more about how I’m going to hurtyou.”
Chapter24
Danil
Waves pummel the shore below. They gather force and speed before rumbling toward the beach, the swirling curls breaking fast and hard as Larysa’s stilted breaths break the silence. Tension hangs heavy in the air between us. My heart thrashes in my chest as if I was caught in one of those barrels, swept out to sea with no way to escape the unforgiving ocean.
The stainless steel blade of the knife glimmers where I hold it against her tear-stained cheek. My hand shakes, forcing me to clench the handle tighter. When I woke up to find her side of the bed empty, I figured she went to check on Daniela. My vision flooded with red when I heard her on the phone in my office. I grabbed my stiletto knife in a blind rage, the threat of her betrayal stinging worse than an open gash doused with alcohol.
Her face drains of color as the seconds tick past. “Please don’t do this. I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Do you know how dangerous it would be for your brothers to know your location? If they were intercepted by the people hunting you, they would invade this place like cockroaches. And you were worried aboutmehurting her?” I let out a dry, humorless laugh.
“But you’d save her, wouldn’t you?” Her voice quivers. “You’d take care of her?”
“I’d lay my life down for her in a heartbeat.” I slide the knife down the side of Larysa’s neck.
“Not for me, though,” she says in a low voice, almost as if she’s muttering the words to herself.
I grit my teeth, invisible steel walls springing up around me. She wants something from me that I can’t give her. My life doesn’t have room for a family. For as many targets as I get paid to eliminate, I have double that number on my head. Luka got out of the assassin business because he took over for my dad as head of the bratva, but also because he knew that being a killer for hire would put Natasha and any kids they’d have at risk.
“You’d be safer without me.”
I don’t have any delusions about living a normal life, baby or no baby. Daniela is part of me, yeah, but she needs to be with her mother.
And far away from me.
I can’t give either of them what they need, least of all hope.
Whatever happened between us yesterday was stress-induced. Nothing more.
