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He sighed. “The scotch is good, and the company better, but I must go.” When he stood, I stood with him.
“I’ve said something wrong, haven’t I?” I asked before I could stop myself. I hated myself for sounding so weak.
He turned with shocking quickness for a man his size, and gently caught hold of my chin, leaning down to kiss me, a long, fierce, breath-stealing, thought-destroying kiss that warmed me to my toes. His hand was in my hair pulling me close and I could feel the length of his cock pressing against me, as his body crashed into mine.
“It’s not that at all,” he said as he pulled back.
I stared at him, speechless and dizzy from the kiss.
He smiled. “It’s that if I stay any longer, I’m going to spend the entire night fucking you. And I don’t deserve any space in your bed until I find our daughter.”
Our daughter.
He left, and I watched him go mutely, and it felt like he took my heart with him.
Chapter 10
Gregor
Iwas seething as I drove back to my apartment. The temperature was continuing to drop, my breath steaming in the air until the heater kicked on properly, but I couldn’t feel it. My whole body was burning with a mix of emotions I never thought I would feel.
The sexual frustration was only a small part of it. Getting the confirmation that Michelle was mine had broken a dam inside of me that I hadn’t known existed, and out of it had poured a kind of primal anger. I was always outraged and disgusted when someone hurt a kid. But somehow, learning that the kid in question was mine had me so stirred up that I almost made my way to that daycare in search of the Ivanovs right then and there.
I wanted to put a bullet in every single person responsible for that kiddie porn trafficking ring. I wanted to erase every last fucking one of them from the Earth in a way that served as a warning to every pedophile, snuff porn producer, and atrocity-addicted sack of shit.
It wasn’t just ideals fueling me now. Every man who wasn’t a total waste of skin hated child rapists and traffickers. The fact that this was now personal, that this wasmychild, had thrown gasoline on my fire.
It didn’t help that my child had been kidnapped, endangered, tormented, kept captive, and forced to witness atrocities until she couldn’t even fucking speak, by a family who up until veryrecently had been under bratva protection. They had done this under our knife, with our money. And if I had followed Vasily’s orders…
Thank God I had always had a stronger code of ethics than some of the men around me. Otherwise, I might have been like some of them, even Vasily maybe, and left my own kid to burn.
Just thinking about it made me want to punch Vasily in the teeth, but I couldn’t entirely blame him for what the Ivanovs had gotten away with. He should have checked where his money was going, but Vasily had dozens of such operations under his control. His attention was split a hundred ways just running things. He didn’t know what kind of porn the Ivanovs had been making there. He couldn’t have.
But Vasily, my brothers, and I, we were still culpable. For not only had one of our people taken Michelle, but we were also the reason why Alissa had to wait so long to get her daughter back.
The Chicago PD wasn’t incompetent by nature. Underfunded, undertrained, undermanned, all of that was certain. But their failure to find Michelle wasn’t on them. It was on us.
Vasily and our organization had a lot of pull with CPD. We had deals, treaties, agreements with the police brass and the mayor’s office. When some idealistic rookie screwup went against all of that in search of a justice that mostly existed in his head, it threw off the balance of things. Added a lot of tension and drama to what would otherwise be business as usual.
I hated that. Vasily had made it clear that he hated that. And I knew that I couldn’t let Alissa take on that role in search of her daughter. Her ideals were admirable, her courage was admirable, but the evidence she had gathered and given tome, had warned me that she was way too close to throwing a spotlight on a bratva-connected operation. If she hadn’t let me take this on for her, if she didn’t trust me…
I was as likely to murder the mother of my child and leave my child bereft as I was to lop off one of my own limbs. But Vasily would have ordered it if she had come to know too much and was not under our control.
So I had to make sure that she only found out as much as I allowed her, and that Vasily knew my personal matters would not interfere with my duties. Other men had married and had children, the old days of having no family were long gone.
But right now, I had to ask Vasily two favors at once, and I hated it. One was to let me keep Alissa in hand and make sure that both her safety and the organization’s were maintained. And the other I had decided in a flash of pure outrage the moment Alissa had told me Michelle was mine. The Ivanovs running the porn operation were dead and gone, and had deserved it. But their cousins who ran the daycare were still in business. Still alive.
My eyes narrowed as I drove. I had never asked permission to kill anyone before. I had always killed whoever Vasily pointed me at.
But I wanted the Ivanovs dead. Every last one of them who had been involved in this. I wanted to watch the light fade out of their eyes and know their evil had been erased from the world and that they would endanger no more children.
I had saved my little girl. I was going to reunite her with her mom and support them. But my child, my blood, deserved more than a rescue, safety, and a good life.
She deserved vindication.
And I was going to give it to her.
***
