Lexa was faster than me and jumped over Adas’s body before running up the stairs to reach her cousin. I moved to where my uncle was lying on the floor, the bullet wound in his chest gushing blood out onto the carpet as he gasped for breath.
I bent, looking into his eyes as the life slowly faded from him. I didn’t even know this man, yet he wanted me dead. Right before my eyes, I watched him take his last breath, and I didn’t feel a single ounce of remorse that he was dead.
“Monroe, who was that guy?” I heard Lexa demanding, pulling me back to what was going on around me.
“Don’t tell anyone,” the girl pleaded with a sob. “Daddy will kill him if he knows.”
“Knows what?” Lexa half shouted. “A strange guy just killed a man for hitting you… Not that I’m complaining. He saved us all just now. But what the actual fuck, Monroe? You have some stalker with a hero complex or something?”
“Swear you won’t tell anyone. Not even Ben,” Monroe said in a voice that was growing stronger with each word. “Don’t let them take him away from me.”
“I don’t understand any of this. But there’s no time to discuss it. What’s wrong with Aunt Willa?”
“That guy knocked her out in the kitchen then took me upstairs to wait for you.”
I frowned down at them. “How did he know we would come here?”
Lexa’s jaw tensed. “That, I don’t know. Unless he has someone with insider intel. Which means we have a rat.”
The pounding of feet on the porch alerted us to a new arrival. Ben came running in, sweat soaking his work shirt, both arms lifted with his gun at the ready. “Lexa?”
“I’m fine,” she assured him. “Monroe might have a concussion, though. She hit her head and was out for a minute.”
“Did you shoot this guy?” His brow was pinched. “You don’t have a gun.”
“I don’t know who shot him,” she told him honestly. “Someone came in behind us and shot him. I didn’t see their face, and they were gone before I could get a look at them.”
Walking over to the dead body, he kicked Adas in the ribs. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. He’s dead.”
Things moved fast after that. More cops showed up, along with Raven and Monroe’s father. The man they called Spider was the scariest motherfucker I’d ever seen with his head shaved and a tattoo of a deadly spider on his neck. He was taller than almost every man in the room, his shoulders even wider than Ben’s. But it was the pure rage in his eyes that terrified me the most. Yet he was so gentle with Monroe that I was shocked speechless.
Lexa found Willa in the kitchen, still knocked out cold, and both Monroe and her mother were transported to the hospital by ambulance. Raven wrapped a blanket around me and made me sit on the couch in the living room while paramedics took Adas’s body away.
The events of the evening were starting to catch up with me, and I shivered as reality began to set in. Adas was dead. Theo was gone. I was all alone. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me next.
Chapter 16
Theo
Yury was waiting for me at the airport when Anya’s jet touched down. With Ivan out of commission from that bullet he took to the shoulder, it would just be Yury and me. Pops had worked out who all the traitors were within his men and had finally gotten Mom and Sofia’s details sorted out, but they were still staying at Anya’s home until I’d dealt with Petrov.
Without a word, I slid into the passenger seat of the SUV Yury was driving and picked up the Glock that was already waiting for me. I checked the clip then placed it in the holster under my jacket as he drove through the city.
I didn’t expect Adas to be out in the open, enabling me to just pop him in the head a few times so I could to step back on the plane before the engines even had time to cool and I could return to Tavia. The bastard was too smart for that, especially after incurring Pops’s wrath the night before when he’d attempted to have Sofia taken.
No, the motherfucker was probably in hiding, afraid for his life now that he was on Adrian Volkov’s shit list.
But he would still want Tavia. His blood feud with the Bykov family was too strong for him to give up. I needed to be patient and set a trap to catch him before I could put a bullet in his brain.
And that meant letting everyone see me. If he knew I was back in the city, he would come straight for me. For one, because I’d killed his brother, but mostly because he knew I was hiding Tavia.
“Where to first, boss?” Yury asked.
It was early evening, but I could still make the first move.
“Let’s make the rounds. I don’t care where we start.” All that mattered was that it would get me to the endgame.
Twenty minutes later, we were walking into one of the many clubs Pops was a silent partner in. I visited them all often, checking up on Pops’s investments for him. The music was loud, and the liquor was flowing quickly.