AllFreeNovel
Share Us
What’s really holding me back is the knowledge that Sloane will not approve. She wouldn’t want me to do this.
Still, I feel that I must.
So for the first and only time in my marriage, I go against the silent advice of my wife echoing through my brain.
I say to Marko, “I’ll help you.”
We takesix of my men and six of Marko’s.
As I guessed, Sloane is not at all happy with my plan. Still, she wants to come with me.
“I don’t trust him,” she says, her dark eyes furious and resentful. “He’ll stab you in the back, Ivan. You know he’s jealous—you still have your wife and children.”
“And he still has his daughter,” I remind her. “So he has something to lose, too.”
Sloane frowns, not letting go of my hand.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen her frightened before. Not even when I had her locked in the cells beneath this monastery, when we were not yet well acquainted.
“Why are you smiling?” she demands.
“I was only thinking, if you failed to kill me, there’s no fucking way that Marko could pull it off.”
Sloane laughs, though I know she doesn’t want to.
“Sometimes I think we’re invincible, because what you and I have can’t be killed,” she says. “Still . . . be careful, my love.”
I kiss her hard. “Nothing could keep me from coming back to you.”
Sloane only agrees to stay with our children because Dominik will be with me to watch my back.
I’m sure he endured a similarly tense parting from Lara. Their youngest son Kade is a curious child who gets into everything, and his older brother Adrik grows wilder by the day.
If all goes as planned, we shouldn’t be gone for long.
We meet the Malina in Kyiv, checking our gear for the assault on Taras Holodryga’s compound.
It isn’t wise to retaliate so quickly. Taras knows that Marko survived the attack. He’ll assume that we’re coming for him.
Marko insists that Taras thinks this particular house is unknown to anyone but his inner circle. It’s a small farmhouse in Baczyna, seven hours outside Kyiv along the Dnister River. The farmhouse has, of course, been renovated to the appropriately luxurious standards of a gangster, but it still sits in an orchard of plum, cherry, and walnut trees, lacking any serious impediments to attack like the stone walls of the monastery.
“He’s holed up there with his mistress,” Marko snarls. “Like a rat in a hole.”
We drive out in the dead of night, surrounding the farmhouse from all sides. With night vision goggles and tactical coordination, it’s not difficult to dispatch the four soldiers patrolling the orchard.
One of Marko’s men is shot entering the actual house, but it’s only a mild injury to the bicep. In less than five minutes we’ve rousted Taras and his woman from the master bedroom.
Taras looks weak and pitiful, his soft belly hanging over the waistband of his boxer shorts. I can see the lamplight gleaming on his skull through his thinning hair. His pale eyes blink up at us, half-blind without his glasses. Marko finds the glasses and rams them onto his face.
Taras is blubbering and pleading. He has none of the steel of his uncle, and even less of his strategy. Petro Holodryga would never have been foolish enough to fail to kill a rival and then hide in such an unprotected place.
“Go ahead,” I say to Marko. “Take your revenge.”
Marko towers over Taras, his limp all but forgotten. The devil is raging behind his eyes, fully awake and in control of Marko’s goliath body. He deals the man a vicious blow to the mouth that knocks out one of his front teeth. Taras’s head lolls limply.
I expect Marko to draw his gun and shoot Taras between the eyes.
Instead, I hear the screams and whimpers of two children being dragged down the farmhouse stairs.
