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“Get out of my way.” I punctuated the message with a menacing step forward.
“I’ve seen the way you look at her—” Adrian began.
“Fuck off!” I roared at him.
“You have enough ghosts haunting you from all the shit you’ve done, Con.” Adrian’s palms collided with my chest. “Let me do this, so that when you discover you’re wrong about her, you won’t shoot yourself over it.”
Adrian hated getting his hands dirty, and a small flicker of gratitude fluttered through my chest that my cousin would spare me this. But I wasn’t wrong about this. He was.
“No, I tried to pawn my responsibility onto you once. As a result, Iryna...” I drew in a deep breath and tried again. “I refuse to split my loyalties. It’s on me to end this scourge I brought on our family.”
More gently than I knew I was capable of, I pushed my cousin aside, knowing he didn’t actually want to fight me.
“You and Daniel stay out here,” I commanded. “Come see me if Jakob has an update.”
I didn’t blink or draw in a breath, I simply pushed into the workhouse. Jakob owned several of these houses. While they could be used for hiding from the authorities or enemies, they were called blood houses due to their usage for holding prisoners’ captive, extracting information, or simply being a place to make a clean kill and dispose of the bodies in a way that nary a piece was found. As such, any and every tool necessary for those deeds was here.
Several computer monitors blinked in the dimly lit living room, their screens illustrating the perimeter of the property. The monitors were attached to explosives, and the external sensors would initiate a sequence if someone who wasn’t scheduled to visit approached the house. The whole place was rigged to burn so no evidence would fall into the wrong hands.
As I stalked through the kitchen, going for the cupboards containing an array of dreadful tools, a six pack of bottled water caught my attention. I reached for one of them without thinking. The plastic seemed to pulse with a feral energy in my hands. If I gave her this, it was a mercy.
Talia’s innocent.The wayward thought exploded in my mind. My fingers gripped the bottle so tight it burst. Breathing hard, I threw it in the sink with a silent roar.
How could I believe her? How could I believe anything? The memory of her unpainted face gazing down at my wounded form flashed through my mind.
“It doesn’t matter,” I growled to myself. “She has to know something of where her family hides. She owes me that at least.”
I steeled my spine. An eye for an eye.I can do this.
Chanting my sister’s name in my mind, I trailed down the hall, my pistol in hand. While the window unit cooled the front part of the house, these back bedrooms were so heat-baked that the air was stale. Each breath was harder to draw.
I liked my work as an assassin. My kills were clean, without need for torture to gain information. During those times, I detached myself, but as I reached for the door right now, vivid images of Talia’s long, lithe body rose up to torment me.
This was never going to work if I couldn’t get in the proper frame of mind. Mercifully, there was the image of the hulking ape and my sister’s brutalized face to clamp down on any conflicting notions in my head. With my willpower reasserted, I pushed into the room...but I wasn’t prepared to see my wife in a bikini, dozing on a scratchy wool blanket. The mottle of bruises covering her flesh had me turning on my heel and stalking back to the damn kitchen.
I’m not a sadistic brute.
If she was in any way to blame for what’d happened to my sister, I would put a bullet in her head. But I reached for a bottle of water, because while I was a villain of the underworld, I wasn’t a monster. As much as the thought tormented me, I knew in my heart that there was a chance Talia might be innocent in all this.
