AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I pressed the gun against his side a little harder, making sure he could feel it.
"No arguments," I barked to him. "With me. Now."
I dragged him towards the car, his body so limp and drunk he couldn’t fight me off. I shoved him in the back seat, locked the doors, and drove like a madman back to the club.
It was late, late enough that all the staff were gone and the last of the customers had cleared out. I dragged him from the back of the car, knowing that Maxim would likely see me on the CCTV cameras. I hadn’t told him what I was going out for tonight; he had stayed in with Mina, taking care of her, making sure she was doing okay. I was glad he was. Because, right now, I was well and truly distracted with taking care of her shithead father once and for all.
"Please, whatever this is, I can pay you—" he pleaded with me as I forced him down the stairs to the basement, where crates of drinks were piled high.
"What the fuck are you going to pay me with?" I growled at him. "Now that you’ve already sold your daughter?"
Those words made him freeze to the spot. His eyes widened.
"How do you know about—?"
"Shut the fuck up," I snapped, shoving him down into a rickety chair in the center of the room that was usually used as a makeshift ladder to get crates down from the high shelves. I could see in his eyes that he was starting to sober up, the reality of this situation hitting him hard. I didn’t care. The rage was controlling me right now, making the calls for me. I wanted to show him that he couldn’t get away with using his daughter like that. When I thought about Mina, the look on her face when she had been handed over to us … and to know her own father had put her in that position? Yeah, I wasn’t going to stand for it.
"What are you going to do to me?" he asked. His voice was shaking hard. He clearly didn’t know how to handle this. This was the exact situation he had been trying to avoid when he had sold off Mina, but now, he was facing the reality of this world—that there were some debts you couldn’t escape paying, no matter how much you wanted to.
I laid my gun down on one of the shelves and cracked my knuckles. I didn’t want to kill him. Not yet anyway. No, I wanted him to suffer, just the same way he had forced his girl to …
But before I could pull my fist back and land the first strike, I heard a noise behind me. A door opening. A light spilling from the top of the stairs to pick out the scene below. I turned around, lifting my hand to shield my face …
And saw my stepbrother staring down at me, his expression furious.
"Damyan," he demanded. "What the fuck do you think you’re doing?"
Chapter Eighteen – Maxim
I could hardly contain myself as we rode up in the elevator together. Damyan was glowering straight ahead, the anger coming off him in waves, but it was nothing on how fucking pissed I was right now that he had dared try to pull something like this without my permission.
We did everything together. That was how this worked, how it had always worked. We stuck together through everything, ran every decision past each other and made sure we were on the same page. But this? This was all him. And I was just glad I had managed to get in the middle of it before something serious had happened.
Going after her father like that … it was a mess. I got it, I did, I was angry at him too. I wanted him to pay for what he had done. But this? This wasn’t the way to go about it. We needed to control our approach and talk to Mina about it, not take the control from her again and decide how this was going to unfold.
The moment we stepped back into the penthouse, he rounded on me.
"If you think I’m just going to let him walk," he snapped at me, "you’ve got another thing coming."
"I know you’re not going to do that," I muttered. We had left him cuffed to the chair downstairs, and he was so drunk, I doubted he would have been able to navigate his way out of there even if we hadn’t bothered to restrain him. He looked awful—hair lank, eyes ringed with dark shadows, face puffy and florid from the years of alcohol abuse. Mina had good reason to be worried about him. It seemed like she had been the only thing keeping him together, and now that she was gone, there was no way for him to keep himself from falling apart.
"Then why the fuck are you making me leave him there?" he demanded. I lifted my hand to stop him in his tracks.
"You have to hear how fucking crazy this sounds," I warned him. "You can’t just go out there and start snatching people off the street—"
"You’re the one who wanted to help her in the first place!" he exclaimed. "I’m just doing what needs to be done."
"If you think this is what she’d want, you’re crazy," I fired back. "She doesn’t want him hurt."
"She can’t see that he deserves it," he protested. "He deserves to be taken down for what he did to her. That fucking asshole—"
"What fucking asshole?"
Both of us stopped dead in our tracks, falling silent at once as soon as we heard her voice. I turned to find her standing in the doorway to her bedroom in a huge tee and a pair of shorts, rubbing her eyes as she glanced between us.
"It doesn’t matter," Damyan told her, quickly closing the distance between us and squeezing her hand. "You go back to bed. Get some sleep."
"No, you have to tell me what’s going on," she demanded, looking between us, clearly confused. "What are you talking about? Why are you arguing?”
