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Cody had never felt this possessive before about any woman, and his lips compressed into a thin line as the sharp awareness tugged at his conscience. Keira didn’t belong to him...not in that way. She was her own woman. She’d given herself to him, but that was her choice, not his. He’d always firmly believed it was a woman’s choice whether she slept with a man or not. But that didn’t stop the primal urge to claim her as his.
He clamped his jaw shut, restraining the primitive desire, and instead told her, “We’re in this together. We’ll work it out. Okay?”
“Okay.”
But it wasn’t okay with him. Not by a long shot. A savage, inner voice—the alpha wolf howling on the hillside—still insisted that Keira was his, damn it! His woman. His mate, body and soul. The future mother of his children. He wanted to put the stamp of possession on her so she’d know, so everyone would know.
She belonged to him. And he’d kill any man who tried to take her from him. It was that simple.
Chapter 14
Michael Vishenko limped to the plate glass window in the library of the Long Island compound he’d inherited from his father, and stared out into the night. Everything was finally coming together. “Six years,” he whispered to himself. He’d waited six years to avenge his father, and even though it had just begun, the taste of it was already sweet.
His first impulse had been to hunt down his father’s murderers himself all those years ago. But his uncle Alexei had talked him out of it. “You are not the man to do it,” Alexei had said with brutal honesty. “You can kill some of them, yes. Any man can be killed. But you would not be able to kill them all before you were caught, convicted and sentenced to death.”
His second impulse had been to ask his uncle to take care of it—the Bratva had men who killed in the blink of an eye. But he’d discarded that idea, too, as an admission of weakness. The indignity of the physical deformity he’d suffered since birth was bad enough. He had always refused to let that deformity define him—he would not let it define him in his uncle’s estimation.
No, this way was best. It had taken longer, far longer than he’d wanted, but this way was sure. His father’s money had smoothed the path, but his own brain had devised the means, his own determination had brought it about. Though other hands would do the actual deeds, the vengeance was his.
It had cost him a substantial sum to uncover the names involved, and even more to track them all down and keep constant surveillance on them, but it was worth it. From the federal prosecutors who’d first put his father in prison, to the men who’d murdered him, to the men who’d covered up the murder, the list was now complete. Soon they would be eliminated.
Callahan and Walker, DeSantini and Brockway, D’Arcy and McKinnon. Vishenko smiled coldly. Each one would die by fire. A deserving end—one his father would have appreciated and approved. He’d been a silent witness in the courtroom when his father had wildly shouted the words, “I’ll see you in hell!” to Ryan Callahan. But it wasn’t enough to just send Callahan to hell. The other five needed to join him in the inferno.
Then and only then would Michael Vishenko’s father be avenged. Then and only then could he take back the name on his birth certificate—Michael Pennington—the name his mother had stolen from him the same way she’d stolen him from his father. Because then and only then would he have earned the right to bear his father’s name.
* * *
Keira watched in silence as Cody dressed. More than anything she wished he didn’t have to go, wished she could fall asleep in his arms and wake up the same way. But she knew he had to go back to his apartment. He needed to change for work tomorrow, if nothing else—he couldn’t show up in the same clothes he’d worn today. Not that people noticed what men wore the way they noticed what women wore, but still...
She lay there with the sheet pulled up under her arms, and as she watched him dress she realized there was something so elementally male about his actions. Men didn’t dress themselves the same way women did—at least Cody didn’t. There was an economy of motion to the way he shrugged his shirt on and tucked it into his slacks before decisively closing the zipper and buckling his belt.
