Introduction
Now that my heart belongs to Elizabeth, I need to make sure she doesn’t crush it. Now that I’m committed to giving her everything, I need to ensure that I’m left with nothing. Now that I’ve gotten everything I ever wanted, I need to make certain that things don’t fall apart…and I will fight like hell for it.
The first night the dark and dangerous Roman Masterson laid eyes on Elizabeth, the earth shifted beneath him, changing the trajectory of his life forever.
The only thing that existed for him from that moment on was her, but nobody said a happily-ever-after was going to be easy, especially when one gunshot could change everything.
Prologue
ROMAN
It amazes me how time can become an abstract construct when some of your senses are muted and others heightened. I am seated on a cold concrete floor and there is a large blindfold made of a sour-smelling fabric wrapped tightly around my skull, completely blinding me to my surroundings.
There is an irritatingly loud song playing on a loop in a language I don’t understand. Based on some phonetics of the song, my guess is it’s a Russian band. My hands are tied tightly behind my back with what feels like two zip ties, my ankles are duct taped together, and I have no idea how long I’ve been here. My guess is five hours, but it could easily have been fifteen minutes. Who the hell knows.
I’m fuming.
It’s been a long time since anyone’s gotten one up on me, which is why I’m furious with myself that I’ve allowed this to happen. The old man is right. I must be slipping. I’m getting entirely too soft and complacent. This is my fault.
When I was a kid, I was always the tallest and the strongest boy in the neighborhood and no one could beat me. As I grew into an adult, my reputation preceded me, and I didn’t have to be the biggest or the strongest because I was the most feared. Now, I find myself in a unique position. The men in this room either don’t fear me or don’t know that they should.
I’ve long since stopped struggling to free myself from the ties that bind my wrists and ankles, because I need to think clearly and reserve my energy. My sole mission at this point is to get back to Elizabeth and my baby boy. That’s it.
All I see are their faces behind this mask. All I hear is the sound of their laughter. All I smell is the warm jasmine on her skin and the faint baby soft scent of his. So I need to be really confident about any action I take next to get out of this clusterfuck.
I can’t let them down.
Not again.
I hear a heavy door creak open and then footsteps. Based on my count, there are at least two men crossing the room toward me. They speak to each other in brief terse sentences in what I’m now positive is the Russian language, and while I don’t understand what they’re saying, I can sense things from their tone.
They’re worried.
And they should be.
Once Camden, Cutter, Stone, or Joseph find out what happened to me there will be some slow singing and flower bringing for these jackasses. They’ve kidnapped the wrong motherfucker and there will be a reckoning.
“Wake up,” one man orders as he pushes the makeshift scarf off of my eyes.
I slowly raise my head and open my eyes. The lighting in the room is dim, which fortunately helps my pupils adjust faster than if it was normally lit. I’m being held in an area which is larger than I thought. It looks like an unused storage facility with unfinished concrete floors and walls. The only thing inside here besides me is a battered-looking utility sink, a portable boom box which was no doubt the source of the wretched Russian rock music, and some sealed cardboard boxes on the other side of the room.
I make sure to stare my captors directly in the eyes. Just by their body language, I can tell who the one in charge probably is—the one who’s silent. The one asking all the questions is probably the enforcer, the man who puts in the work so that the boss can sit and analyze my responses. How I answer determines whether I live or die.
“What business you have with Patricia?” he asks in broken English with a thick Russian accent.
I’ve been hired to handle a lot of jobs over my career as a professional fixer, and I’ve never been under any delusion that my past couldn’t come back to haunt me. In fact, I’ve lived my life knowing that it could. So the King Brothers and I pay an exorbitant amount of money to a private detective to keep tabs on all of our clients and most of our enemies. We usually stay on top of most everyone, but I didn’t see this one coming.
That’s because Patricia wasn’t a client.
She was a favor.
“None.”
The asshole kicks me swiftly in the ribs with his steel-toed boot.
“Wrong answer. What business you have with Patricia?” he repeats.
“Nichego,” I say in a truculent manner.
It just so happens that I know about five words in Russian. I learned them from a female bartender who worked for the club years ago when my father first bought it. One of them was her safe word, nichego, which means nothing in English.
The enforcer’s eyes widen when he hears me say the word. The other man doesn’t express any emotion at all, but I know that I’ve at least created some doubt. They aren’t sure who I am and what I know. They might even question whether it’s possible that I understand Russian since I know such a random word. All of this uncertainty is buying me time. I need it so that my boys can find me. If I know Camden, he probably has trackers on shit I don’t even know about. If anyone can find me, he will.
I hear the rusty hinges of the door creak again before I see it open. Another person enters the room and both men immediately straighten their spines and stop speaking. Now I realize that they must both be enforcers because this woman strolls in the room like she is the real boss.
She looks like a middle-aged Nikita on a budget. Her cheap high heels clack against the solid floor and her hips swish exaggeratedly. She’s dressed in a long, leopard print, slip dress and a pair of very high black pumps. Her puffed-up lips are painted a deep, crimson red, no doubt to distract us from the fact that her face has been pulled so tightly that she resembles a sixty-year-old Bratz doll.
She stands in front of me and gives me a pensive long look. I stare back at her just as intently. Something about me intrigues her because the corner of her painted lips lifts in a small smirk.
“Do you speak Russian?”
“Nyet,” I answer with the second word I know, but this is easy. Many people know how to say no in Russian just by watching television, but again the point here is to create doubt, not certainty.
The woman beams this time.
“You lie to me?”
“Nyet,” I repeat.
She walks in a circle around me and the squeak of her heels grows increasingly more annoying than the god-awful music they were playing earlier.
“The beautiful boy you put your hands on at Drexel Village is my son.”
At least she gets right to the point.
“Your son needs some manners,” I tell her, as I contemplate how the hell this woman knows who I am and where she could find me.
“Who are you to speak of manners when you have no respect?”