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Worry. He was worried sick about Ruby. About what she’d endured, about how she’d been treated, about how she’d feel when she discovered that Adam — not her father or her sister Brooke — had taken custody of Olivia in her absence.
“It’ll be dawn soon,” Max said.
Roman knew what he was getting at: the shift change at the grain terminal.
If his father didn’t know his men were dead and Ruby had been rescued by now, he soon would.
“I know,” Roman said.
They were entering uncharted territory. For the past three weeks his father had used Ruby as leverage, alternating between retribution and pacification. Several men who hadn’t turned to Roman’s side had been killed on suspicion alone, Roman’s own men watching their backs even as they tried to protect him.
And then, the pledge of Ruby’s return, of a reconciliation, a new model in which Roman would be given more authority in the bratva, his father’s soft-spoken promises whispering to the child in Roman who still wanted to please the old man who would never be pleased.
The carrot and the stick. His father wielded them with equal mastery.
Except Roman wasn’t a boy anymore. He knew his father’s moves, knew there was no freedom — for Roman or the men — and no survival of the bratva under Igor’s rule.
Now he’d lost his bargaining chip. The city would fall into full-fledged war, a war no one but the criminal underworld would see but a war that would nonetheless have deadly implications.
“What should I tell the men?” Max asked.
Roman knew his friend was looking for a strategy, a way forward now that the board had changed, now that Roman’s queen had been restored to the chessboard, but he couldn’t think about that now.
Not until he’d spoken to her, explained why she would have to stay away from Olivia and the rest of her family.
Why she would have to stay with him.
“Tell them to watch their asses,” Roman said. “And assume an attack is around every corner.”
9
Ruby
She sudsed her hair and body twice with the expensive bath products in the shower and stayed under the hot water until her skin started to wrinkle.
She wasn’t sure anything had ever felt better in her life.
Her body was unfamiliar under her hands, and she felt the dissonance of her smaller breasts and waist, her flatter ass, as she washed. She was still soft — she would always be that — but weeks of eating one meal a day had taken their toll.
The captivity diet.
She suppressed maniacal laughter at the thought.
She was probably not right in the head.
She turned off the water and stepped from the shower, then wrapped herself in one of the impossibly thick white bath towels hanging on a gold rack next to the shower.
It was warm, and she realized the rack was a towel warmer, its indicator light going dark when she grabbed the second towel for her hair.
She used a hand towel to wipe the steam from the mirror and stared at her reflection.
It was strange to see herself after weeks with no mirror. Her face looked thinner, as unfamiliar as her body, and her eyes were shadowed with dark circles, devoid of life.
She looked like an empty husk. Felt like one too.
But at least she was clean.
She slathered her body with lotion and thought of her mouse and rat friends in the old building. She hoped they would be okay, that they would find enough to eat and maybe some kind company from time to time. They were living things, just trying to make their way like everyone else in the world.
