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"Yeah, guess I didn’t mention her before," he replied, grinning. "She’s around your age. Studying in Budapest right now."
"Oh, wow," I murmured. A daughter, my age? That … That came as kind of a shock. I knew is should probably have dimmed my attraction to him, but I didn’t see him as some ancient father figure. Not when he looked at me like that.
"Olya," he continued. "Maybe you’ll get a chance to meet her. I think you’d like her."
"You do?"
"She’s got a bit of an attitude," he chuckled. "Like you."
I laughed, the tears starting to ease slightly.
"I bet you’re a good dad," I murmured to him. He shrugged.
"I try. I try to live by the standards I wanted my father to live by when I was growing up. Taking care of the women in my life. Trying to do right by them."
I slid my hand to his chest, and I could feel his heart beating fast beneath his shirt.
"You’re right," I agreed. "You should. And I’m so grateful to you for that, Maxim. If it hadn’t been for you, I …"
I could hardly even put into words what the alternative might have been. I didn’t even want to think about that. I shivered, and he rubbed his thumb along the top of my arm.
"All that matters is that we got you out," he replied. "You never have to think about what might have happened."
"Right," I replied. But, at the back of my mind, I couldn’t stop thinking about him—about my father. He was somewhere out there in the city, likely faring worse than he ever had before. Even after all he had done to me, I was still worried about him.
And I had a bad feeling about what was going to happen if what he’d done to me got out.
Chapter Seventeen – Damyan
I drummed my fingers on the wheel as I waited outside his house, eyes pinned to the door, waiting for him to emerge once more.
It had been nearly three hours since I had arrived there at the address I’d managed to shake loose from one of the regulars down at his local bar. When I had dropped the Antonov name, it hadn’t taken a whole lot to get them talking, it turned out, and soon, I had all the information I needed on Dimitry Markov.
He had been the son of Ian Markov, a Bratva boss who’d made a decent name for himself back in the nineties, but when he had passed, he had left his empire to his son, and Dimitry had made a mess of it, squandering all the money and influence he had on indulging his very worst habits. Before long, he was bankrupt, forced to sell the townhouse that he had grown up in just to afford the rent on some place he had shared with Mina before he had sold her.
Maxim had done his best to talk me out of this, but there just wasn’t any way in hell I was going to let Dimitry get away with what he had done to her. The anger was still burning in my veins, scorching me with every breath. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do when I got my hands on him, but I intended to make him pay in any way I could.
I had pulled up the car as I had watched him stumble drunkenly into his house—the way he was walking, it seemed a miracle he was still upright, but that was just going to make it easier to get my hands on him when the time came.
It was dark out; the streets were quiet. This part of town wasn’t one I made a point of coming to that often because of how rough it was. Hard to believe that somebody could have gone from being the heir to a decent business to living like this, but that was the impact of addiction—it turned you into someone you never thought you could be, someone you never imagined you were capable of living with.
If he even was living with what he had done. It wouldn’t have surprised me. He was probably drinking as hard as he was just to handle the guilt and shame of what he had done. Did he even know it? When I thought of the scrawl on that paper I had showed Maxim, it was hard to believe he had been sober when it had happened. Hard to believe he was in his right mind when he had agreed to it.
But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he had done it at all. And I was going to make him pay.
All at once, the door to the house opened once more, and he staggered out, a packet of cigarettes in one hand, a lighter in the other. His face was bloated and red, I could tell even from here. I felt my lip curling up into a sneer at the sight of him.
Go time.
I opened the car door and stepped out, closing the distance between us quickly. He was so out of it he hardly had time to look up before I reached him.
"What the—" he began, and I pulled the gun that was tucked into my pants. I jammed it into his side, grabbing him by the arm.
"Come with me," I ordered him, my voice low, leaving no room for argument.
"Who the hell are you?" he demanded. His voice was shaking, slurring, but I could tell there was still a part of him that was willing to put up a fight—a part of him that wasn’t going to let me treat him like this. He had been raised in a Bratva family, and that had given him some edge.
But not enough to beat me.
