Chapter 45

Forty-Five

R uby

Nausea swirls in my belly, and my head pounds as I peel my dry tongue from the roof of my dry mouth. I need water.

I start to move, to push up from the bed where I've spent a hellish night, when I realize that I'm not in a bed. There is no soft blanket covering me. The fabric beneath me is that of a hard, worn carpet. When I rub my face, I feel the imprint of it—the filth of it—a pattern on my cheek.

It's not night, like I'd thought. It's daylight, if the beam spearing through the seventies floral curtains is anything to go by.

I wrinkle my nose at the scent of stale cigarettes and—vomit? The stench wafts in the air, stirred up by the crank of an AC unit.

Where am I?

What happened?

There is a black spot in my memory, a blank black spot where nothing exists.

Sitting against the wall, I try to listen beyond the room with the bed. But I hear nothing. I see nothing, really.

I can't seem to get over the hump of why, if there is a bed, I've been dumped on the floor like this.

I start to push up, but a sharp pain bursts in my brain. Little black spots of fuzz drift across my vision. I swallow hard through another sharp blade of agony that feels as though it's cleaving my brain in two. Clamping my teeth into my bottom lip, I do my best to silence the cry. I don't know where I am or what happened, but I suspect I'm not in a safe space. No one who meant for me to be safe would have dumped me like this on the floor.

Again, my brain screams ‘what happened?' as my body tells me ‘nothing good.' and that I need to escape.

My hand covers my wildly turning belly, jogging a thought. It's a tiny spark of thought, but it begins the chain that leads me to answers. The answers only spark more questions. The baby—my baby. With Kirill—my husband. A doctor's office. A security detail…

A doctor. A needle. Pain and fog.

The man appearing through the back door. The glint of a silver blade. A slash of red blood.

The closing in of a black hole until now .

I gasp, a shuddering cry I contain at the very last second with a trembling hand to trembling lips.

I've been taken. Again.

The bounty. That's what that is about. Artyom's bounty. Someone is cashing in.

What will come of me? My baby? Kirill…

I want to weep. Why does this keep happening to me?

Curling my legs into my chest, I wrap my arms around my legs and—what is that?

My heart is a wild thing in my chest as I drag my hand over the thin, hard lump that sits in line with the seam of my leggings. Confused, I push my hand down my pants to retrieve a long, thin silver blade. A scalpel.

Another spark. Another chain.

The doctor and his whispered, shaken confession. His fear for his family. He'd tried to help me even as he fed me to the wolves. He'd sacrificed himself for those he loved, and had still done his best to leave me with a means of protection—a means to see myself to safety—even though I'd been the one to bring his terrible end to his door.

I sob again for the life of a good man lost. A man who spent his life bringing new life into this world. A man with a family he loved enough to die for. A man who, in his end, had been faced with an impossible decision.

A sound pricks my ear. A thud somewhere close by.

Shoving the scalpel up my sleeve, I curl into my ball and wait. I can no longer hear anything outside the thudding of my own heart, and that terrifies me.

I keep my eyes pinned to the door on the opposite side of the room, my fear building and finally peaking, when that door opens and a man enters. No, not just any man. My brother.

My half-brother.

A man as evil and awful as my father had been.

I hate him.

I hate them, I realize. It's the first time I think of my father, and feel nothing besides antipathy and disgust.

Artyom looks like him, I realize now. More than I first thought in the photo. It's not so much his features, because he definitely has a bit of his mother in him, whoever she is or was. He looks like my father in the way that he moves. There is a lethal confidence in his gait, in the way he holds himself. I'd always thought it was from my father's vast success in the dangerous business he did with dangerous countries. Now I know this lethal confidence has nothing to do with success and everything to do with a blatant disregard for human life.

"Hello little sister." Artyom lets his sneer curl into a vicious smile as he moves to sit on the edge of the bed, facing me. "I suppose congratulations are in order."

He knows. He knows about my baby.

The thought sends a bolt of fresh fear through me. Fear for the child who, if Artyom has his way, will surely never live.

Please, God, save us.

"Why am I here?"

"Our father made a very bad business decision not long before he died, little angel ." The hate that drips from his words is nothing short of terrifying. "You see, he had a large supply of faulty weapons he'd attained over the years, and when he hid them in a sale of other, working weapons, he never imagined the Prince of Oil he sold them to overseas would realize, that in his shipment of illegal, untraceable, working weapons, were duds." He smirks a bitter smirk. "That betrayal has led the Prince to demand retribution. Life in payment." He claps his hands together. "He can't have our father's life, because your brother-in-law already took that." He waits—waits for my grief. When he doesn't get it, I see a flicker of surprise.

He presses on. "He can't have my life, of course. So, I promised him yours. And the baby you carry, well, that's an added bonus."

"Why are you like this?"

"Like what, dear sister?" he sneers.

"Evil."

"I'd tell you to ask our father, but he's dead. Torn apart by your new brother."

"You're hideous," I accuse. "And sad. Pathetic."

He shrugs. "And you likely will be as well." He laughs. "When the Prince is done with you."

I'm about to speak when the sound of his phone ringing pulls his attention from me. He answers in clipped English, which is a surprise. I'd thought he'd take his call in Russian. But when he hisses, "They killed them all? Your whole army is gone?" And then a pause, "The Yakuza doesn't pull back. You are not weak! You fight!"

I watch Artyom as he loses hold of something that clearly matters deeply to him, although I am unsure what that something is.

He says some more words, but they are angry and rushed. I think maybe I sense a hint of fear through the thick bleed of his heavy accent.

And then he hangs up, his hateful eyes cutting to me. "If I didn't need you, I'd cut you up and deliver you in a fucking box to your fucking husband."

I shrink away from him, the terror of such a possibility having me wishing to become one with the tacky wall.

Artyom stands, and roars. Veins burst under the skin of his neck, and in his forehead. Big fists clench in rage so violent, so vicious, I whimper.

"Fucking Ilya Volkov!" he shouts. He's a very dangerous, very grown man, throwing a very uncontrolled tantrum. When he lunges for me, his hands banding around my throat and squeezing, terror like nothing else spreads wildfire through my veins. "He killed my brothers, my father—and now he's butchered the men of my ally. Butchered my fucking ally! They set me up to take the fucking fall! " Spittle flies from his mouth. His eyes are wild. Crazed. "The Yakuza is going to come for me now. It looks like I set them up for this. I'm the only one who knows they're here!"

His hands squeeze tighter around my throat. "I'm going to die now. I may as well have the pleasure of killing you myself." His hands shake as I try to pull his fingers from their mission to crush my windpipe. "I'll be seeing our father in Hell." He lifts me off the wall, slamming me back into it with a crack that has an explosion of black stars winking in my vision. "But at least I'll be bringing his little angel with me."

No.

He means to kill me now. He truly means to kill me.

I can see it in his eyes. The end. Our end. My end.

My baby…

My fear is strong. So strong, it's crippling. But my will to live is stronger. The will to save the life that grows inside me, a flicker, a blessing, a gift from above—well, it's stronger than the fear that threatens to paralyze me.

I reach up and claw at his face, scraping my nails down his flesh as he screams in my face. Blood pebbles his flesh as he lifts me a second time from the wall only to slam me back into it again. And again. And again.

Blackness hovers at the edge of my vision as my hands fall away from the man who means to kill me. A man I share blood with. A monster.

And that's when I feel it. The slide of the scalpel in my sleeve. It hits my palm, threatening to prick me even as I curl my hand around it. Artyom's hands squeeze me around my throat again. He thinks he's won. I can see it in the crazed determination in his eyes. He thinks he has this upper hand on the Volkov family who has bested his family in every way. My family.

But he hasn't won.

I won't let him win this.

I never thought I could kill a man, but as I lift my hand with the scalpel, plunging it into his temple, I know that I can.

I don't expect the bloodlust that overtakes me, however. Or maybe it's fear. Because with the first plunge of the scalpel into his temple, his hands around my throat slacken. His face drops, his eyes wide. He teeters, and I give him a push with my knee, pulling the scalpel free as he falls to the floor, a gurgling sound of death welcoming him into the black.

Adrenaline rushes in my blood. Fear, and anger, and so many emotions erupting from the depths of my chest in a scream I'll forever associate with the call of the reaper. I don't think as I climb onto his chest, sinking my little blade into him repeatedly. Blood sprays. His body is limp. But I keep sinking the blade in. Again, and again, and again.

He doesn't even look like a person anymore. His suit is in tatters and his chest is gaping when the door flies open, cracking against the wall.

I scream again. A battle cry of the unhinged leaking from me even as I keep killing what is already dead.

"Fucking fuck." A voice rougher than any I've ever heard cuts through my insanity as iron bands clamp around my waist from behind. I'm tugged back into a hard body as the same rough voice rumbles in my ear, "You are safe. I have you, Little Ruby. You are safe."

I slump in the man's hold, even though I don't know him. Even though I've been so hurt, so betrayed so many times, I trust the man at my back, whoever he is.

A second man moves closer, and I blink away the black shadows that ghost along the edges of my vision, threatening to pull me under even now. He crouches, and I see eyes a shade of blue I've never seen before. The blue is set in a ring of midnight so vast, it's like a void. But it's his face that sparks something in me—something thrilling. Because this is the man who killed my father.

This is my husband's brother. I see the similarities in everything but their eyes.

And I know, even though I am well aware I face a monster, that I am safe.

"Ilya," I gasp, slumping against the man at my back. The man with the rough voice that somehow soothes. His arms cradle me gently, and yet tightly.

Ilya's lips twitch, just the faintest amount. "Hello, Little Ruby."

That's the moment my body gives in, gives up the fight. And I slip into darkness.