Total pages in book: 51
Estimated words: 45957 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 230(@200wpm)___ 184(@250wpm)___ 153(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 45957 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 230(@200wpm)___ 184(@250wpm)___ 153(@300wpm)
My mouth screwed up in distaste. “He doesn’t fuck them, does he?”
Ivan grimaced. “Fuck no. Or at least, I hope to fuck he doesn’t.” And now, he looked a bit disturbed. “Christ. Now I need to talk to him about his fetishes and kinks.”
“Sucks to be you,” I muttered, my eyelids fluttering closed again.
“Both of them were drugged,” Ivan continued, ignoring my smart-ass remark. “He found strychnine in both their systems. The pilot died before the crash, but the flight attendant died during the crash, according to the times Igor gave me.”
“What the fuck is…” Yeah, I wasn’t even attempting to repeat that word. “The drug?” I finished.
“Strychnine,” Ivan repeated, but he didn’t sound frustrated with having to repeat himself. He sounded… patient. And dammit, why did that make me feel fuzzy? I had to have really hit my head hard. “The way Igor explained it, the drug stops the muscles from working. Doesn’t shut off brain power immediately, but it leaves the person in a shit ton of pain, and eventually, it halts breathing because your lungs aren’t working any longer. That’s how I understood it anyway.”
“Why them and not us?” I asked, getting a little more comfortable against the pillows. I was ready for a nap.
“Our guess is that it was supposed to be all of us. But neither of us asked for anything to eat or drink. Igor sent a team out to grab everything from the plane food and drink wise, and he’s currently testing it all for that drug. My guess is whoever is after your family is now trying to take us out, too. And what better way to start than trying to take out the Pakhan?”
He wasn’t wrong. The best way to dismantle an empire was to start from the top.
“Was James notified?” I asked.
Ivan sighed. “Unfortunately. When you weren’t answering his calls, he called me and demanded to know what the fuck was going on. I had to stop him from coming out here and taking you back to the United States. Dr. Lebedev convinced him that transporting you would be unwise and unsafe. For one, you were too ill to safely move, and two, there’s too many variables when we have to rely on transportation, such as a flight. Look what happened to us.”
I nodded, though it was sluggish. Ivan suddenly pulled the blankets up around my shoulders. I opened my eyes just enough to look up at him, and my breath caught in my throat at the intense, searing gleam in his eyes as he stared back down at me. Something charged and electric zapped between our gazes that had my heart slamming against my chest bone.
“Get some more rest,” he told me quietly. “I have dinner being made for us. I’ll wake you when it’s here.”
I was too tired to argue that I wasn’t hungry, and I was too damn exhausted to try to figure out what the fuck had shifted between us in that moment. So, I just shut my eyes and trusted him to keep us both safe.
And damn if that wasn’t a fucking alarming thing.
9
Adrian
“What?” I sighed, looking up when Ivan just barged into the room I was staying in without knocking—not that he’d bothered the past few days either. The doctor had finally given me the all-clear yesterday, which meant today, I was finally going to be off my ass and doing something. I’d started the morning with a light workout before the rest of the place was even awake. I had to regain my strength. Laying in bed for a week had left me feeling bleh.
Ivan took a moment to rake his green eyes over my body as he shut my bedroom door behind him, trapping us in the room together. And suddenly, it felt a hundred fucking degrees hotter. I wasn’t wearing a shirt, my jeans weren’t buttoned, my feet were bare, and Ivan was staring at me like I was the juiciest fucking steak he’d ever seen in his life.
“Why are you in here?” I demanded, wanting to reach for my shirt. But it was on the bed, and that meant I had to move past him to get it. And being in that close of proximity to him while half naked and my cock already filling out with the way he was fucking me with his eyes was a recipe for disaster. And a sure way to destroy my self control.
I’d grown too soft toward him over the past few days while I’d been bedridden and recovering. Ivan had been there, sitting right in that chair beside my bed every time I’d opened my eyes. He’d woken me up when I needed to eat and made sure I stayed hydrated so I could finally get that fucking IV needle out of my arm. And the couple of times I’d woken up in a cold sweat, my heart hammering after reliving that fucking plane crash all over again, he’d been right there, sitting on the edge of my bed, his blunt fingernails raking soothingly over my scalp as he ran his hand through my greasy, unwashed hair. There’d never been any judgment in his eyes. Just a promise for revenge. A promise to take out whoever had decided to fuck with him.