Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 107079 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 357(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107079 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 357(@300wpm)
“WAIT!” I grabbed his arm. “Jesus, you don’t have to kill him!”
Gennadiy shook me off. I could feel the anger throbbing through every tight muscle. “You don’t understand how our world works,” he told me. And he leveled his gun again.
I jumped between him and the assassin. “You can’t—Look at him, he’s defenseless!”
“Alison,” said Gennadiy tightly, “Move.”
“No!” My heart was hammering in my chest. This was murder, and I was still an FBI agent at heart.
Gennadiy scowled at me for several seconds while the others watched in tense silence. Then he sighed. “Fine,” he said tightly, and holstered his gun. Then he nodded towards the exit. “Come on.”
I let out a long sigh of relief and walked over to him. We started towards the exit—
Gennadiy turned around, pulled out his gun, and emptied it into the unconscious assassin. Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the bar.
On the street outside, I pulled free of his hand and stood there gaping at him. “What—What—Why?!”
Gennadiy turned away from me, his hulking body taut with anger. I could see his shoulders rising and falling as he took big, shuddering breaths, trying to calm himself.
When he finally turned back to me, the raw emotion in his eyes made my heart forget to beat. A deep, protective need, so strong it overwhelmed him. “Because the way I feel about you,” he snapped, “I’m not interested in subtlety or second chances. I want the whole city to know and be afraid. I’m sending a message: if someone tries to hurt you, I don’t put them on the floor, I put them in the ground!”
The first shock was what he’d said. The second was that there was a tiny, secret part of me that went warm at the idea of him slaying anyone who touched me. I swallowed and nodded. Gennadiy cursed under his breath, then wrapped me up in his arms and pulled me tight against him.
The other Aristovs must have been giving us a minute, watching from the doorway, because as soon as we went quiet, they trooped out and joined us. We formed a tight huddle on the sidewalk. “The assassin was too scared to talk,” Gennadiy told us. “But I got his phone.” He showed us the call log. “He called someone before and after he tried to kill you. I’m guessing that’s Grushin’s number. If we can get a hacker on it, maybe we can find out who else Grushin’s been calling, and find out what he’s been doing.”
“Did you check his banking app?” I asked. “We can see how he got paid.”
I was just doing what we’d do in the FBI, but Gennadiy looked impressed, and fired up the app. “Twenty thousand paid in, a few hours before he showed up at your apartment,” said Gennadiy. Both of us spoke at the same time: “We should look into the account he was paid from.” Then we both blinked at each other, surprised. We were on opposite sides, but we worked well together.
“Let’s go home,” said Gennadiy, and led the way to the cars. I fell in beside him, deep in thought. He killed that guy because he hurt me. Could I really be with someone who killed so easily? And he was only getting worse over time, ruthlessly expanding even though the Aristov empire was already huge, brutally killing anyone in his path. It only ended one way: with Gennadiy dead in some gun battle. I’d lose him.
I felt my fists bunch. No. Fuck that. I wasn’t going to lose the only person who got me. The only one who made me feel safe, and beautiful, and complete.
Three months before, when I’d stood outside the burning theater, something inside me had hardened into unwavering resolve. Now, I felt it happening again.
Once, I’d sworn to take Gennadiy Aristov down.
Now, I was going to save him.
41
ALISON
Back at the mansion, Gennadiy was pulled straight into a phone call and then had to race off to the casino to solve some problem there. I’d always known he was busy, but now that I was on the inside, I was starting to see how massively overstretched he was, and there didn’t seem to be anyone he could hand things off to. It slowly hit me that the Bratva wasn’t like a business, or even like the FBI. You can hire more managers, train more agents, but you can’t just magic up more brothers or uncles, and family were the only people Gennadiy trusted enough to delegate to.
I explored more of the enormous house and stumbled upon a whole crowd of Russian men in suits sitting, cleaning their guns: Gennadiy’s security. They showed me their area, which took up most of one wing of the first floor. There was a barracks, a break room, and even a small shooting range.