Chapter 13

Viktor

“The Mexican food’s here!” Nick ran in a small circle in excitement. I watched him in quiet amazement. I’d never seen anyone, let alone a kid, bounce back from a traumatic situation so fast.

Of course, I could be mistaken. He could be doing better, but not well. But as I got up to pay room service for our burritos and drinks, I just couldn’t stop being fascinated with the situation I had found myself in—even if, like looking after the boy, it was full of unfamiliar situations.

“Yes, yes it is. Go wash your hands and we’ll have burritos.” I paid cash to the skinny, liveried kid at the door, tipping him well and taking the bag.

“What about Mom?”

I smiled, wondering if he remembered his real mother, or if he had been so young that Emma had stepped into the role seamlessly. “She’s very tired. Let’s not wake her up just yet.”

I unpacked the big, warm bag as he went to wash up in the bathroom. The boy had shown fear of me, back at the studio. Now, though, I had suddenly turned into every other adult guest he had ever had in his young life. Like a babysitter, or his mom’s boyfriend.

Isn’t that all kinds of ironic.

Here I was, in the belly of the beast—the very home of my enemy, with his family in my hands. I should have been delighted. This should have been my endgame. But the coward had fled, even knowing that the two innocents he had left in my hands would pay for his abandonment.

Except I didn’t want that.

I had just spent three and a half hours getting Minecraft explained to me by an enthusiastic little kid who reminded me so much of my younger brother that it hurt. Nick was a ray of sunshine, innocent, sweet, endlessly optimistic. Emma had done well by him. But that very quality, along with his coloring, was practically giving me flashbacks.

It had to be a coincidence. Leon would have told me if he’d had a son. Though the boy was old enough that he’d likely have been in the womb when Leon died. Perhaps they never met.

No. No, no, I was imagining things. My brother was gone. Learning about my brother’s killer had made the loss even fresher, which was playing tricks with my mind. The poor boy’s only relation to Leon was that he was the great-nephew of the man responsible for my brother’s death.

But I still didn’t want to hurt him. Or his lovely mother, for that matter. I had already done worse to them than they could have ever deserved, something that had made even strong men wince to contemplate. They didn’t deserve it, and harming them now wouldn’t do a thing to Charles.

Only one thing would, finding him and killing him.

For that, I needed Emma intact, and I needed her cooperative. And if I did a single thing to hurt or even threaten Nick, I was certain that I would lose any chance of cooperation. She had too much steel in her, and too much heart, to let it stand.

“I’m back!” Nick called as he ran back in. He had droplets of water on his sleeves and smelled faintly of the bathroom’s citrus hand soap. “Can we eat in front of the TV?”

I hesitated. My experience with parenting was nonexistent, unless you counted Leon. And that had been advanced big-brothering more than anything. “Okay. But just this once. And if your mom says we can’t do this again, no complaining.”

He nodded and plopped down on the couch while I set the plates on the coffee table.

Once he was fed, sleepy and bedded down, it would be time for me to start searching this place in earnest. Hopefully that would include Emma’s help. I knew she would cooperate to the best of her ability for her and Nick’s safety.

Maybe, if I was very fortunate, I would not have to do anything else to scare her again. At least, not in her presence. But I wondered if I could actually pull that off. Her murdering bastard of an uncle had to die. He had to die in a nasty, public, and humiliating manner, and once that was done, Emma would know who was responsible.

I had to find a way for his death to cause her less pain. To cause Nick less pain, when he finally learned the truth.

There were only two ways to do that, that I had any confidence in. One, I could kill Charles and then cover up the details. Make it look like he’d offed himself rather than be caught by us. But Emma was smart. She might not buy it. So that left me with the other alternative—showing her once and for all what her uncle really was. Making sure that she hated him, was disgusted with him, just as much as I was.

If she knew his crimes, if she knew everything he had done, maybe she would go from outraged and disappointed to truly despising her uncle. Just like he deserved.

I heard movement back in Emma’s bedroom as Nick was busy demolishing his burrito. A few minutes later, Emma walked out in a fresh outfit, hair brushed, makeup fixed and still stifling a yawn. She looked around at Nick eating, the TV on with his game paused, and me standing up to greet her. “Looks like I missed a few things,” she mumbled with a small, tentative smile.

“Just supper and Minecraft. I didn’t know what you liked so I got a few different kinds of burrito.” My tone sounded like I was trying to impress her on a date. I coughed into my fist and straightened my shoulders. “I still expect your assistance, but not on an empty stomach.”

She looked back at Nick, who waved at her with guacamole-smeared fingers. “Hi sweetie. Slow down before you choke, okay?”

He slowed his frantic little chomps a little and she rolled her eyes but left him to it, turning back to me.

“You’ll have my cooperation as long as you don’t cause us any more problems. This thing between you and my Uncle Charles should have stayed between you and my uncle from the beginning.”

I opened my mouth to explain myself, then closed it again, frowning. I wasn’t about to apologize any more than I already had. “Had that been possible,” I replied simply instead, “I would have done so. However, as you have seen, he has no problem with sacrificing others to ensure his own safety.”

She sighed and nodded. “It sure looks like it, yeah.”

I felt badly for her, but quashed my pity and looked at her firmly. “Come, get something to eat. We will take the matter up again when we have more privacy.”

She gave me a strange look then, one I hadn’t been expecting. An odd mixture of longing, resentment, fear... and something else. If circumstances had been different, I might have suspected desire.

But all she said was, “Understood.”

I nodded and she sat down in the middle of the couch again, leaving one end to me and one to her nephew. “Did I miss anything besides Minecraft and the burrito order?’

“Not really,” I said flatly. “As it is, we are monitoring both his accounts and his images online. His wealth protects him to some extent, but he’s going to have some difficulty with it soon enough.”

She tensed slightly. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Later.”

My burrito was stuffed with grilled steak chunks, salsa, avocado, rice, beans, and cheese. A calorie fest that I would need a few days to properly burn off at the gym. It would have been easier with a lover—given enough inspiration, I could have burned off all my extra calories in half that time with her.

I realized I was gazing at Emma speculatively as she ate and quickly turned my gaze back to my food.

She was as attractive as ever, something I grew more aware of with every hour I spent with her. But given how we’d met, and that she was still technically my captive, I was doing my best not to look like I planned to take advantage. The idea of being that kind of creep, or even looking that way, disgusted me.

Still, I wanted her. I wanted the fear and the control and this whole situation to be over and done with, so I could contemplate having her in my arms without feeling like a monster. And then...”

“What is it?” she asked me quietly. I suddenly realized that I had gone back to staring at her and she had caught me.

“It’s nothing,” I lied. It wasn’t. Not at all.

In my mind, the image of her bare, curvaceous body, her glossy hair, her lips parted with desire, rose up to tease me again. Behave yourself, I demanded of that part of me, but of course, I was already flushed with heat, and hard as a rock. Hopefully she wouldn’t notice either.

I would have to be strong to be gentle with this one. This was no time for desire. I couldn’t afford to scare her off for the sake of a roll in the hay.

***

Within half an hour, Nick had eaten his way into a food coma and Emma was gently shuffling him off to an early bedtime. He protested in a low, whiny voice, but Emma was having none of it. “No you don’t, sweetie, you’re back at Uncle Charles’s in your own bed, time to catch up on some sleep.”

They disappeared into the room, and I stood back, listening, still half wary of an escape attempt. I had been as lenient with them as I could afford, but that didn’t make me incautious. I knew what might happen if I let my attention stray for too long. For all the justice in my intentions and for all my desire to keep this from destroying Emma and the boy, I was still the big, scary man who had them in hand, and meant to kill their relative.

Ten minutes later, she came out with a small smile on her face, closing the door behind her. “Out like a light.”

I nodded. “Good. There are discussions we need to have without the presence of little ears.”

“I guess I should thank you for that.” She licked her lips and looked away from me uncomfortably. “You said you wanted to get started looking for things around here.”

“I do.” I gestured toward Charles’s study. “I have a specialist who can get into his computer, but a man his age usually keeps a great deal of his files offline.”

“That’s always been the case with Charles,” she murmured. “He didn’t really understand or trust computers so much. He got passably good at some things, but trying to teach him anything beyond that was like pulling teeth.”

I lifted my eyebrows as I opened the door to the study. “You handled that?”

“Some of it, yes. Once I left, he was pretty much on his own except for the staff. I haven’t heard from any of them, thinking about it.”

His staff. Of course. A man like Charles never did anything or himself that he could get away with foisting on someone else. I made a mental note to have my men track them down and bring them in for questioning. Probably under the pretense of being law enforcement. “Has he ever been in any kind of legal trouble?”

“No.” She moved past me into the room, considering the filing cabinet that lined one entire wall of the study. “Not that he ever allowed me to be aware of, I mean. He could have done something before I was born.” She put her hands on the top cabinet drawer. “What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“We’ll start with any overseas real estate,” I replied. “Anywhere he might run and hide beyond local reach.” We still hadn’t managed to get a flight plan for him, which troubled me. The fact that he was making his escape so efficiently, only strengthened my resolve to catch him and make him pay.

She nodded and started digging through the filing cabinet, while I turned my attention to the computer. “Hmm. Now you said you taught him most of his computer skills. Is there any chance that you have his password?”

“No, but I may be able to guess it.” Her voice betrayed her tension. I smiled faintly, but she only tensed a bit more.

“Give it a try then,” I instructed, moving aside from her—but not completely. She had to brush past me to get around to the keyboard, and the slight contact with her warm curves sent a pleasant tingle through me. For a moment I wondered why I was resisting temptation again.

As she worked on breaking into the computer, I went through the paper files. The old man clearly needed an assistant for more than his housekeeping, the paperwork was in a ridiculous mess.

I did my best, and soon saw some patterns. We had thought that Charles spent nearly all of his time in this very penthouse, but flight plans for his private helicopter and jets showed differently. He was using his rooftop helicopter to slip away multiple times a year to places warm and tropical, where the locals were poor and desperate, and the extradition treaties lax to nonexistent. He had a lot of correspondence with people like land surveyors, contractors, and even more lawyers—these ones, international.

He was definitely up to something. “What do you have?” I asked distractedly as I kept digging.

“I’m trying pretty much everything I can think of,” she replied in a tight voice. “I spent years trying to get him to make his passwords simplistic. Right now, I’m kind of hoping that it didn’t finally sink in.”

“Me too,” I said drily, and she snorted a little in spite of herself. I turned to look at her bent over the keyboard, hair up in a messy bun, the bare back of her neck gleaming smooth. Inviting.

Staring down at her as she struggled with the password, I was suddenly struck with the desire to lean down and start kissing that vulnerable patch of flesh. I drew a deep breath and turned back to my work.

“Wait,” she said, not a minute later. Some more typing, then there was a beep. “That’s it. I’m in.”

“What was it?” I asked, now genuinely curious after all that fast and fruitless work.

“The date of my parents’ death,” she said in an uncomfortable voice. “I wonder what made him choose that of all things?”

“That does strike me as a little morbid.” I turned and moved in next to her to get a good view of the screen. She was already opening folders and searching through them methodically.

She sighed through her nose as she found his financials files and started going through them. There was an awful lot of offshore transactions over the last few years. “You know, the more I think about my uncle, the more I wonder what was really going on in his head.”

“You’re a psychiatrist, dear lady, can’t you guess?” My tone wasn’t mocking, just a bit light.

She eyed me. “I’m a psychiatrist, not a psychic. But I can try.”

“Try, then.”

“Well, he’s certainly more of a coward than I would ever have believed. The man doted on me and my sister growing up. He doted even more on Nick, before all of this.”

“Do you know if anyone has ever tried to threaten or blackmail him before?”

“Not that I’m aware of.” She frowned as she looked through the files. “I think there was some conflict when my parents’ will was read, but I was too young to understand.”

“I’ll take a look around for his legal files. Just keep digging,” I instructed gently, while I continued looking through his filing cabinet.

“I almost wish I could find a journal. It feels like the best way to possibly figure him out. He sure never talked about much of anything substantial with us. Not about himself,” she said, sounding wistful. “He doted on us, but he was also intensely private. Maybe even secretive.”

I let her talk, as it seemed like she needed a sounding board.

“I think he always put himself above everyone around him. He treated me and my sister well, and also Nick. But with the few interactions I saw between him and his business associates or friends he seemed to consider himself smarter, more important or more authoritative.”

“Old money rich-guy syndrome?” I guessed, not quite able to keep the disgust out of my voice. I never respected men who did little work, and risked nothing, only to make a fortune rooted primarily in their family’s money and connections.

She chuckled. “Something like that.” But then she frowned again, and went quiet, hands stilling on the keys.

I watched her. “What is it?”

“I was just thinking about the difference between how he acted before my parents died and afterward. I was very young, like I said, but it was still noticeable.” From her face, she was comparing it to yet another Jekyll and Hyde personality shift, his sudden disappearance when we’d kidnapped her and her son.

“Tell me about it.”

She smiled faintly at my tone. “Dad and Uncle Charles never got along. They were always arguing, and he never paid any attention to me or my sister. We were just kind of nuisances to him when we were around. Though maybe because we were so young he didn’t know how to interact with little kids? Anyway, my mom didn’t even want to be near him, even though he was her only sibling. She hated coming here. Mom and dad were just as wealthy as Uncle Charles, but we never lived high like this.”

“I see.” I pursed my lips. “If Charles was one of your patients, what would his behavior be telling you?”

“My father was a very good man. A kind man. He didn’t like living large. He wanted to give back to Los Angeles. He wanted us to live more modestly so we could help others, and still have money for the future. But you know, I was a smart kid, but I only understood so much of it.”

“That’s understandable. And Charles did not get along with him. What does that say about Charles?”

She was staring at me suddenly. “What is your angle, Viktor?”

Damn. I must have overplayed my hand somehow. Maybe I’d sounded too much like someone in her line of work. “My point is that you need to be prepared for the kind of things you may find out about him. I doubt that arranging my brother’s murder or abandoning you, were the first wicked acts he’s committed.”

She looked up at me, chewing her lip slightly. “I…” She let out a low sigh. “I’ll be as prepared as I can be. There have been a lot of ugly revelations in my life lately.”

The sharp look she gave me included my actions in that statement. There was no doubting it. “I can hardly blame you, especially under the circumstances.”

Her typing slowed, and then she took her hands off the keyboard and looked up at me. “I- I don’t get you. Viktor.”

“What don’t you get?” I met her gaze calmly.

“You kidnapped us. But you did it in our sleep. You kept us hostage and threatened our lives. But when my uncle bailed on us, you- you didn’t hurt us. You didn’t follow through on your threats.”

“There was no point in punishing you for what your uncle did. If consideration for you has no power over him, at least above his need to save his own skin, then using you as a hostage was pointless to begin with. Though of course, we only learned that after the fact.”

She stared at me, then let out a little, high-pitched laugh. “I’m sorry, I just- that almost seems reasonable.”

I smirked and raised an eyebrow. “Well, I would hope so, I’m known for being a reasonable man.”

“I just don’t know what to think of you,” she breathed. “One minute you’re the only Big Bad I’ve ever met in my life, and the next you’ve got the moral high ground on my uncle somehow.”

“I am not a good man, Emma,” I murmured, glancing away from her. “Do not be fooled. The life I live prevents it. But I have my honor, and that is something that your uncle clearly does not have.”

“Honor.” She said it in a flat tone, not sarcastic but with no warmth to it either. “You know, I’ve met a lot of people in my line of work who thought they were good, but then did terrible things. Beat their wives, stole from work, one guy drove drunk and mowed down a homeless woman. Didn’t stop.”

I made a disgusted noise.

She rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I had to sit there and listen to this guy rationalize day after day while I wanted to slap him. He couldn’t understand why he was going on trial for vehicular manslaughter. He kept talking about how he went to church and was almost never out sick at work and had never even gotten a parking ticket before. Like any of that mitigated drunkenly killing someone.”

She paused and looked like she was wrestling with something important. Letting out a resigned sigh she said, “I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t trust you much. But I’d trust you a lot less if you came to me and claimed to be a good man. As for your honor, I guess we’ll see.”

“Yes, you will,” I replied simply. “You will see soon enough that I am a man of my word.”

“Well, I’m not dead yet,” she murmured, not quite able to meet my eyes. “So I suppose that’s a pretty good sign.”