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Just as quickly as he came, he released me. I stagger forward without his body pinning me to the wall once more, and I watch as he walks away from me. He glances over his shoulder to wink before he leaves the stage.
“Seven. Be ready.”
CHAPTERTEN
Daniel
Seven cannot come fast enough.
I can’t get that devil of a woman out of my head. When she looked up at me, it was almost as if I caught a small glimpse of the woman that nearly ruined Nikolai’s life. There is a temptress inside of her, and I have now made it my mission to coerce it out so I can play with it.
“Boss?” Michael’s voice comes from the other end of the phone, interrupting my train of thought. For a moment, I forgot that we were in the middle of a conversation. My mind keeps drifting back to Helena playing her piece so beautifully. Her skirt nearly pushed up to her hips, showing a fair amount of delicate thigh muscles and a hell of a lot of skin.
I can still feel her pressing herself against me.
I force myself to snap out of it and return to the present moment. I'm at a stop sign at a four-way intersection where, thankfully, no one is waiting for me to pass through. I start the car again and sigh to myself. I haven't been distracted by a woman in years, let alone so strongly.
“Go on, what have you found?”
“The tracker that you placed on her is fully operational and mapping out all of her locations just as intended, sir.” Michael’s voice is tight, and I can tell that he’s fighting the urge to ask me, “what’s the matter?” He knows that I haven’t been acting like myself the last few months. He’s privately expressed his concerns more than once.
Between my father’s failing health, the weight of the family, the businesses that I’m supporting, stepping in as a parent… and now this? I’ve been quicker to anger than usual.
“Good. Is that all?” I ask shortly.
“No, we’ve got a couple of the boys looking into the man that Helena is staying with. It seems that they are sharing a house rented out in a man’s name. Presumably, the one she’s living with. But of course, it’s a fake one. The records attached don’t go back further than a couple of months. Even with his real name, I don’t know how much we’re going to get on him just because of his age.”
Secretly, I’m glad that the man she’s living with is older. I don’t have to worry about any possible complications, like her having another husband or a family. I don’t like having to kill if I don’t have to.
“Word is that the man is likely a friend of her father’s or somebody else that she felt that she could exploit into helping her with her new life here.”
“Makes sense. She wouldn’t have been able to come all of this way and start over again on her own, that’s for sure.”
“From everything that Volkovich gave us on her, it seems unlikely that she was even able to get out of Moscow for a while, so there’s no telling just how long they have been stateside,” Michael agrees.
“Make sure you have the boys scouring every hospital record on the east coast. I want them checking for any records of a lengthy stay as a result of her injuries,” I add.
“Oh, they’re going to love that.” Michael chuckles.
The boys in question are a pair of dark-haired, green-eyed twins, only twenty-one years old. I couldn’t find anything on them before they hit eighteen, with little history to speak of. I took them under my wing when I found them on the street, and since then they have proven their gratitude time and time again. They won’t enjoy the repetitive nature of hacking into quite that many hospital records, but I know they will do it quickly and efficiently.
“They know what will happen if they don’t do it.” I grin to myself. In many ways, they were the only practice that I had in raising children before Henry was placed into my care. “In fact, tell them that ‘every time they complain the deadline will be cut in half’.”
Michael chuckles sadistically. “You got it, boss. I’ll check in if we get any more news after that.”
The line goes dead on the other end, and I tuck my phone away as I pull onto the small, mostly unoccupied street that Helena lives on.
She took her sweet time texting me her address. For a moment, I almost thought she’d bail and force my hand. I can already tell that she’s the sort of woman who likes to walk that fine line and push any boundaries she thinks that she can.
Learning about her manipulation and deviance was one thing. Experiencing her first-hand is something wholly different. I haven’t even chipped at the iceberg yet.
I roll the windows of my car down and turn the engine to idle as I wait for Helena to come outside. It’s seven exactly. The time that I had spent lost in my own thoughts had almost made me late.
The tiny house that she’s living in cannot be more than two bedrooms. Two floors, but it’s structurally narrow. A very far cry from the life that she had led before. She’s probably going crazy in there, waiting to see if the coast is clear and biding her time playing music teacher until she feels safe enough to go in search of her next rich man to ruin.
It’s easy now to see how effortlessly she could fool a man like Nikolai.
A minute passes.
