Unbroken (The Protectors 12)

Because he was standing in stunned silence in the entryway to the kitchen. And I knew instantly that he’d heard everything.

Chapter 10

Aleks

“Aleks—”

When he reached for me, I couldn’t help but step back. The trust I’d so unfailingly given back to him the night before felt like it had been obliterated in the last two minutes.

They were brothers.

Vaughn’s nephew was the one who’d been taken just like me.

And Vaughn’s brother had been the one who’d had me kidnapped again.

“Oh God,” I whispered as I took another step back. I ended up in the front room of the house. The door was right there. Thankfully, for once, my body overruled my brain and I did something I hadn’t done enough of in my life.

I ran.

But Vaughn caught me before I could get the door open.

“No!” I shouted.

“Aleks,” he began as he grabbed my arm. Then the gun was suddenly in his hand, but he didn’t point it at me. Amazingly, he pointed it at the other two men who had followed us into the front entryway. “Don’t either of you fucking move,” he practically snarled. I’d never seen or heard him so angry.

Until a few seconds ago when he’d been fighting with the one named Luca.

His own brother.

I tried to catch my breath as bits and pieces of that argument came back to me.

You knew he was off-limits! I never asked for one goddamned thing from you, Luca! Not once in the eight years I’ve been doing this! All you had to do was leave him the fuck out of it…

What did that mean?

“Aleks—”

“Talk fast, Vaughn,” I said. “Because you’re scaring me and you promised me last night you wouldn’t let me down and I believed you—”

“The men who took you from the alley the other night weren’t his men,” Vaughn interrupted.

“But you said he had plans for me.”

Vaughn’s eyes remained on Luca and the other man as he spoke. “His men were there too. That’s why I couldn’t get to you before the men in the van grabbed you.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand,” I admitted. My head felt like it was going to explode. I could feel the chill settling over my skin, beckoning me to the darkness. It would be so easy.

“No, Aleks, stay with me,” Vaughn said desperately as he gave me a little shake. I felt his hand cup my cheek. “Baby, please, just stay with me.”

I forced myself to take several deep breaths in order to stave off the blackness that was lining the edge of my vision. I managed a nod.

“When I got to Seattle, I recognized Luca’s men sitting in a sedan on a side street near your shop. I wasn’t expecting to see them there,” he said, his eyes going dark as he snapped his eyes back to his brother. “I disabled them, but I didn’t know what was happening in the alley.”

“Disabled… like you did with the guys in the van?” I asked. Bile churned in my belly. As much as I’d hated those men and I was grateful to Vaughn for saving me, it had been a gruesome sight.

“No,” Vaughn said. “I knocked them out. I know both men and I know Luca… he wouldn’t have let them hurt you.”

I didn’t miss the fact that there was more to that sentence than he was saying. He clearly believed that his brother’s men had been given orders to take me just like the men in the van.

“I managed to catch up to the van, but I needed to wait until it was far enough outside the city to make sure those men were alone. Then I pulled ahead of them and parked my car in the middle of the road to force them to stop. You know the rest.”

I nodded. I hesitated and risked a glance at Luca, whose face was as bloody as Vaughn’s. But despite the cuts and bruises, he looked unaffected.

And very dangerous.

I automatically sidled closer to Vaughn.

“They took his son?” I whispered.

“Yes,” Vaughn said. “Gio. It happened eight years ago. Gio was seven.”

I felt my knees go weak.

A whole year younger than me.

“And you’re trying to find him?”

Vaughn wiped at his face with his gun hand, smearing the blood. The second he was done, the gun was trained on the two other men again. “Yes. We knew our only chance of finding Gio was by getting in on the ground level.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Vaughn went undercover,” the other man who wasn’t Luca said. He was nearly the same size as Vaughn and Luca and had the same dark hair, but it was long on top and pulled into a ponytail. The sides of his head were shaved. He had a little bit of dark stubble. Unlike Luca and Vaughn, his skin tone was darker, though. His jeans and dark blue T-shirt were a stark contrast to the dress clothes both Vaughn and Luca were wearing.