I hustle up the sidewalk. To my credit, I don’t bust through the door and sweep her against me. Or maybe that’s stupidity. Maybe I shouldn’t have given her the choice.
No. She’d fucking hate that.
I knock twice and wait for her to answer. She will, because as much as I need to see her to explain, she’s going to need to hurt me for my combined list of past and present slights. And I’m going to take it because I deserve it.
The door creaks as she yanks it open and the first thing I see—her tears—hit me in the gut harder than those Kuznetsovs did at the restaurant.
“Corrie—”
“Don’t you fucking call me that.” Her voice is low, almost a whisper, but the anger screams at me. “A fiancée? Really, Tomas? It didn’t occur to you to mention her before you put you came and fucked up my life?”
She’s only crass when she’s angry. I didn’t want to have this conversation on the front porch but she has blocked the doorway. So be it.
“Katerina means nothing to me. And I mean nothing to her. This was all arranged for us. By our fathers.”
“Poor you. Doesn’t hurt that she looks like a supermodel.”
What am I supposed to say? If I’d known that Corinne had come to the city after college, things might have been different. If I’d ever thought to look … but I didn’t. Maybe I knew we could never work out.
But I’m not giving up yet.
“It’s over now.”
There are a thousand other things I should tell her.
Like how I only love her. I only ever have.
Like how I’ve been planning our future together since the minute I opened that door and found her on that bed in the hotel.
Like how she did something to me and now I’ll never be able to go back to the man I was. And that by choosing her, I’ve turned my back on the life I left her to have.
“What’s over? Your engagement to another woman or your relationship with me?”
Probably both, unless I can figure out what to say to change her mind. But I don’t answer because she’s moved out of the doorway to stand almost nose to nose with me, and I want to put my arms around her and draw her into my body because it’s where she belongs.
Instead, I breathe out slow and steady, measured and calm even though my heart is slamming against my ribs.
She shakes her head. “You lied to me again.” Then she steps back. “I don’t even know why I’m surprised. You did it once before. There’s no reason I should’ve thought you’d be any different. Oh wait, you are different. You fucking kill people now. I should’ve known back then what you’d turn out to be.” Her voice is poison.
My words whip out harshly. “I can’t change the past. But you could quit hanging on to it like some kind of fucking kind of lifeline. I made a mistake. I left.”
I would sell my soul to take it back. To have stayed with her and found a different way through all the helplessness being a killer helped me erase.
“But I’m here now,” I continue. “That’s all I can do.”
“I needed you then,” she whispers. “I needed you when my heart was so broken and my grief was so blinding I didn’t see I was losing our baby. I didn’t know.”
As I’m about to apologize, her words sink in and my gut aches.
“Our what?”
Our baby. She said our baby.
“Oh, yeah. Our baby, Tomas. I didn’t know how to find you after you vanished. And I was so stupid and so devastated … I lost her. Our little girl. You left me to deal with all of it on my own.”
I reach for her because I want to comfort her as much as I need her to comfort me. “Corrie...”
She shakes her head. “Get out.”
“Please, Corrie.” And now I’m begging.
“Get the fuck out of here. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
My shock makes me weak. I’ve ruined things with Corrie. Destroyed the alliance with the Kuznetsovs, which means I’m a dead man to the Dubrovsky Bratva. Can’t find my best friend and partner, who’s either dead or getting tortured in some godforsaken Italian dungeon.
And I’ve lost a child I never knew about.
A daughter. My daughter with Corrie.
Fuck.
20
Tomas
I pull the car into a semi-empty, unsupervised lot back in the city and sit.
I lost so much that night. My mother. The love of my life. My baby.
Maybe “lost” is the wrong word. Truth is, I gave them up.
I gave up my future with a woman I love and the family we would’ve made. I tossed them all away, along with any chance of happiness. The boy I was before that night believed in happiness, believed there was nothing Corinne and I couldn’t make our way through.
In a sick, twisted way, young Tommy was my first kill.
My unborn daughter was my second.
My stomach turns, and I want to slam my hand through a window, hear the shatter of the glass, feel the pain of my skin slicing open. I want to kill someone. Maybe that will take my pain away.
My phone rings, and I pull it out praying it’s her. Like a fucking fool. When it isn’t her, I slam my hand against the wheel as I answer. “What?”
“Tomas.”
The accent is thick. Russian. Heated. One of my father’s men.
“The club is under attack.” I can hear the gunfire in the background. Automatic. High-powered. Fuck! I slam the car into reverse and spin out of the lot. The streets aren’t crowded, but neither are they empty and there’s just enough traffic to make the going slow. Too slow, no matter how many alleys I speed down or sidewalks I drive up on.
When I skid into the lot, I roll out of the car, watching every shadow, listening to every whistle of the wind through the cars. The only sound is that wind whistling. No gunshots. Of course, there’s no pulsing music either. No whoops and hollers or drunken shouts.
Too much silence is as dangerous as the sound of bombs. I’m alone with a single gun and ten bullets in the clip.
Slow, deep breaths. Silent steps inside the club. Bleeding bodies.
I’m too late.
I run to the office in the back, the one that sits behind a wall of four-inch steel secured by an electronic lock and an iris scanner lock. Three people can get into that room: my father, Aleksey, and me.
I step to the sensor, but the door is already open. My father is face-first on his desk, his breath loud and rasping. Blood is sprayed on the wall. A pool of it collects under his face. A hole gapes in his back.
“Father!”
He’s alive. Barely. “Aleksey…” His voice is weak and confused. Fading fast.
“No, Dad. It’s me. Tomas. Who did this?” I have one hand on the desk phone and the other measuring his breathing. Not that I know what to do if it stops, but I have to do something.
“Aleksey.”
He’s fucking losing it. Goddammit. “Dad … it’s me, Tomas.”
But he lifts his head and nods. “Aleksey...”
On the third repetition of the name, I finally understand. The phone slips from my hand, and I look at him in horror.
“Aleksey … pulled … trigger.” My chest burns as my father takes his last breath, a shuddering, gurgling gasp.