13. Ivan

13

IVAN

L eVant’s seemed calm when I arrived. Nothing stood out as a concern. No cops milled around. During the drive that I’d had to endure to get here in the heart of the city and make my way through the hallways to reach the secret location, everything had settled.

“Tell me,” I instructed the supervisor in charge tonight. Kenneth was a good man, a former soldier in the army who’d turned to the Bratva for a sense of belonging. He was the best man to keep an eye on things at one of the Bratva’s most profitable sex clubs. LeVant’s was in good hands when he was on the floor.

He shook his head, shrugging. While he stepped aside to speak with me, he maintained a close eye on the clientele and staff here. The man never relaxed or lowered his guard, and that was why I felt confident that nothing bad had happened here while I was out playing house with Becca and Emily.

“A couple of guests were drugged.” He mentioned their names, and that detail didn’t alarm me. A pair of entitled, young socialite women. They were often wasted when they came here to party and look for a good time. I wasn’t surprised.

“I was concerned with how quickly they went down.” He furrowed his brow. “The Doms in the scenes with them seemed freaked out about how rapidly they’d fallen unconscious. Seizures too. But when they removed them and took them to the hospital, they seemed to improve.”

“Did they run tox reports?”

He nodded. “I believe they are still waiting on results.”

“What were they taking here?”

“Nothing, actually. Since those incidents last year with the older folks trying out the harder lines of coke, we’ve been careful.”

I knew that. And he was correct. Drugs happened. The Valkov Bratva moved a lot of them, sometimes through clubs like this, but we were in the business to make money, not to kill anyone. We wanted customers coming back for more, not surviving to want another hit. Drugs would never disappear in this world, and if we could control some of the main transportation routes of them, we could see to them going where they should and not being abused by other organizations. We were far from saints, but money did make the world go round.

“It wasn’t anything bad. Romeo was on the phone with Maxim when the women were found drugged in their rooms. But I was surprised when you showed up.”

I patted his back. “I know you’d have it under control.”

Still, Maxim seemed concerned. He wasn’t often out in the field as much as Alek, Nik, Dmitri, and I were, so maybe he needed to hone his judgment about what was an emergency or not.

People got roofied, too. It happened no matter where people went to drink and party. It was a stark but true fact of life.

“Sorry to ruin your evening,” Kenneth said respectfully.

I grunted. Ruin it? It wasn’t his fault. All I’d been doing was staring at Becca when I thought she wasn’t looking. And helping Emily not be so fussy. It seemed like I couldn’t avoid bonding with that sweet baby, but I was relieved when Margie showed up to take over so I could leave.

Emily hadn’t hesitated to reach for Margie to be held. Margie just had that quality of calm about her.

Driving into the city gave me a chance to try to get my head on straight where Becca was concerned. Distance helped, but I wondered if I was too far past the point of simply setting a buffer between us. I’d tried that for the first three weeks we’d stayed at the vacation villa upstate.

No matter how long it was between the times I saw Becca, I missed her. And regardless of whether I was in the city or just the next room in the house, I yearned to be near her again.

My body and heart were in sync with wanting her to a possessive depth of urgency, but my mind lagged behind. I knew I had no business trying to envision her as a permanent fixture in my life, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her and wishing for another chance to enjoy her sweet surrender.

Seeing her as a mother of a baby changed my view of her. It didn’t soften her, but it showed me that she was far more than just another pussy to fuck, just another woman to fill with my cum.

She mattered. She had the role of raising an innocent baby. And she did so with strength and determination that were damned sexy.

With every minute I spent at the club, walking around with Kenneth and dealing with other minor matters of supervision here, I registered the passage of time as another minute away from Becca. I worried all the while, stuck on the slightly paranoid thought that coming here—being away from her—was the goal.

Was it a diversion, trying to separate me from Becca?

Was this not-so-serious concern of drugs a way to distract me from something else?

But from what? For what?

Being away from Becca and Emily bothered me, and I wanted to assume my anxiousness to return to them was nothing to be concerned about. That I felt off and alert because I wasn’t there to see them and know they were safe and under my watch and control.

And why isn’t the fucker trying to get her back? The Bratva men had left plenty of pointed messages of Becca being held hostage by now. And still, the man hadn’t bitten once.

Becca had scoffed that Steven Murphy, her father, didn’t care about her, and I had to seriously consider whether that could be true.

But I wasn’t ready to give up on keeping her as a hostage yet.

Whatever Murphy was plotting seemed to be a complicated and delicate scheme if he was determined to be this unreachable and stay hidden for so long. I had to wonder, again, who he was hiding from. What had he done to need to stay on the down low for his own safety? The fucker was as corrupted as they came. He could’ve gotten mixed up with any number of bad things and bad players.

Not knowing bothered me. If I knew what he was doing—with the Rossinis or anyone else—I’d be able to track him and finish him off once and for all. Or I could manipulate his foes to get him to react. The enemy of my enemy was my friend, but in this violent world, we were all fucking enemies at the end of the day.

“Trust me,” Kenneth said in conclusion after we’d checked on all of the club. “This drugging incident tonight is nothing like what happened at Harrow’s.”

I nodded, thinking back to how the Cartel had attacked people at one of the Bratva’s strip clubs. First, the Ortezes snuck in and shot a few guests. Then they escalated in an attempt to wound the Bratva by burning the whole place down.

The Valkov Bratva wouldn’t fall because one of our many establishments had been scorched. Murphy had been tied to that incident, too. It was just one of a long list of infractions that cop had with us.

Being asked to come in and check on a report of two women being drugged was nothing like the loss of Harrow’s and the reputation of the Bratva business being a target of the Cartel. What I faced here tonight—and what Kenneth had under control appropriately—was a hiccup compared to the strip club fire.

Still, I was on edge, wondering what I was missing.

Without any other way to describe it, this felt like the calm before the storm. A deceiving spell of peace that wouldn’t last.

I didn’t know if wanting and missing Becca had me off like this or if the delay and wait for Murphy to reveal himself was bugging me.

I couldn’t shake this sensation of waiting for something bad to hit. And this report of drugged women wasn’t that bad.

“Thank you for having everything under control,” I told Kenneth before I left.

He nodded and smirked. “Of course. Of course. Are you heading out?”

“I am.” To get back to Becca. I didn’t have to stay with her at that house. The men guarding it would keep her and Emily safe there. Now that I’d made the drive into the city, it would make more sense to stay here. Maybe even hang out at the club and try to lose this grip Becca had on me without even trying to snare me or seduce me. According to what I’d told her, she was there as a hostage. It wasn’t surprising that she wouldn’t take the initiative to approach me.

But I suspected that I wasn’t alone in this awareness. Any time I came into the room, she tensed. I felt her eyes on me, always watching. Any time I helped with Emily, she went quiet and watched me so carefully, so full of wonder and appreciation that I felt like I was impressing her. That I was fitting into her life as more than a criminal and thug who’d taken her.

She’d been so responsive to both my teasing with the knife and then when I’d lost control and fucked her hard. I still recalled with clarity how she’d cried aloud and sounded so sweetly blissed out.

“Veronica was asking for you specifically yesterday,” Kenneth said, arching one brow.

I didn’t reply, staring at him and knowing he wouldn’t lie. Not about that. Veronica was a regular, loaded with money and an insatiable sex drive. If she wasn’t at one of the Bratva’s operated sex clubs, she’d be at another elsewhere. The older woman had no scruples about seeking out pain and pleasure, and to my knowledge, she'd never once uttered a safe word.

Long ago, I got a thrill out of sharing a room with her. Years ago. She’d entertained me with the notion that I could do whatever I wanted. I could fulfill my darkest, most depraved kinks. And she’d tolerated it—no, she’d thrived on it. At first, I realized she was an adrenaline and danger junkie, needing to be pushed too far to be turned on and let go. After a while, though, it lost its appeal.

Still, she claimed years ago that I was the “best” at making her happy.

I shook my head, rolling my eyes as I wondered about the woman ten years my senior. “What is she on, husband four or five now?”

He smirked. “Six, I believe.”

We had dossiers and profiles for all the clientele at LeVant’s. He wasn’t gossiping. But that fact dissuaded me further from spending time with her.

Hell, I wasn’t interested in spending time with anyone but Becca, and the lines were set too deep in stone to mark us as enemies, as untouchable.

“Have a good night,” I told him as I left, not even bothering to comment on Veronica missing me at any club. I’d never given any guest, any subbie, any woman the impression that I was open for anything more than a singular, no-strings fling.

Except you. I thought of Becca with every mile that my car sped until I returned to the vacation villa.

I nodded at the guards patrolling as I entered, and I quietly locked the door behind me. All was silent, and I grinned to myself, pleased that asking Margie to come and help was the smartest thing I’d done in a long while. She was a godsend, ideal to help with any hardship or trouble. I wasn’t shocked that she’d somehow helped fussy Emily stay down for the night.

Without making a noise, I headed for Becca’s room. No matter how busy I was, no matter where I went or what I worked on, I always checked that she was sleeping. Some nights, I couldn’t—when she was up trying to get Emily back to sleep and I was awake as well.

Tonight, she lay alone in her bed. Emily was in her room down the hall, near Margie’s, I bet.

I stalled, watching Becca as she rested, and I felt comforted at seeing her content. Making her comfortable appeased something stupid in me, something that felt like too many messy emotions.

Something like love. And a man like me would never qualify in that department where she was concerned.

Instead of risking her waking and catching me spying on her, I turned and went to my suite. In the bathroom, I stripped and turned on the water, needing the soothing, pounding pressure of the water to clean me and also provide me with the lubrication to jerk off to the memory of her coming for me in the city.

I panted, breathing hard at the force of my orgasm, but I snapped out of the trance of bliss. A sound reached my ears, past the droning thrum of the water, aside from the fan spinning.

I tensed, turning my head to the side.

Right outside the door stood Becca, her red hair noticeable through the frosted surface of the door.

And she was staring right at me.

The idea of her catching me masturbating turned me on all over again.

Blinking once, twice, then wiping the water from my eyes, I wondered if it was a dream. Another fantasy.

It wasn’t.

She stood there, and I smiled at what she might do if I yanked the door open and hauled her under the water in here with me.