That’s the man I was watching right now.
And beside him was Kuznetsov, the man I’d questioned not long ago, who’d been working diligently for us since.
He was also a man who was showing no mercy, as he plunged a blade into the man’s leg, while Blade made shallow wounds with his own on the man’s stomach.
“Where’s Ribeiro?” Blade barked again. “And don’t pretend you don’t hablar Inglés, cabrón.”
The man screamed as Kuznetsov twisted his blade slightly while withdrawing it.
“La barraca, la barraca,” the man screamed finally.
Blade took a step back as Kuznetsov stood up and leaned into the man’s face. “And where’s the barraca, gilipollas?”
Through his panting breaths, the man gave us directions to a property on the Azarovs' land.
As soon as he knew he was done, Blade mercilessly swiped his knife across the man’s throat and walked toward us.
“You know where that shit is?” he barked as we moved toward the vehicles.
“It’s on the far boundaries of the Azarov property. Call Sacha, and tell him to meet us there,” I barked at Dmitri, who was staring at his phone.
“Already did it, and he says there’s an issue.”
I only just had the self-restraint not to lose my shit at the words. Barely. I was a man holding on now that his child was in danger. I’d seen the shit these fuckers could and would do to anyone, including a tiny baby, and the prospect of it happening to Hendrix…
“What? What the fuck else could be an issue?”
“Nell’s at the property.”
It sounded like my head was underwater as they all exploded, yelling at one another after it. But all I could think was that two pieces of my world were now in danger.
“My daughter’s at the property? I thought you said those rooms were impenetrable?”
“They are,” Dmitri snapped. “She went there herself, and just shot Makar Azarov through the head.”
Shaking my head, I got my shit back in the game.
“Tell Sacha if anything happens to her, I’ll kill him. I need to get to Hendrix, so he’s in charge of her safety from this point on. When we get there, we split into two teams—half to the cabin, half to the house. Ponimat’?”
A glance at Ben, Nick, and Raig showed they wouldn’t be leaving me no matter what I said, so that left her family and my brother and father.
Sliding into the car, I looked at Blade, Dad, and Dmitri. “You get her safely back to the house, then move them all to Dad’s place.”
The weight of what I’d just asked them to do was huge, and even though he was her father, even Blade nodded grimly at me in response.
With a final nod and finger sweep through the air, the door shut loudly on my side, just as the other door did the same on the other, and I saw Ben sitting next to me.
“Time to get your figlio, fratello. I expect he’ll be hungry after all of this. The sooner we get him back to his mother, the better. Si?”
“Si,” I muttered back, staring blindly out of the window. The alert for their next feeding was coming up fast, which meant he’d already missed one.
I could picture what he’d be like, screaming to be fed, and hoped they didn’t do any of the horrendous things people did to kids when they were tired of hearing them cry. I couldn’t even bear to think of him crying, let alone him being in pain.
The flaming inferno that’d been burning inside me burned brighter the closer we got to the Azarov grounds.
Nell
“You know,” Donna said as she slowly paced with Hendrix in her arms. “When Abar introduced me to Ribeiro, I didn’t think anything would come of it. I mean, it just seemed so, how do you say… fanciful.”
If she hadn’t been pacing in front of the gap where the railing used to be—leaving a twenty-foot drop down to the ground—I would have already shot her by now. I couldn’t take the risk, though.
It was my fault it was missing after I’d fought her father, using the Krav Maga moves I’d been taught recently.
He’d gone crashing into it hard enough to break the wood, but that hadn’t been what killed him. No, that was thanks to my gun, after he’d knocked Lena’s out of my hand and was lunging to pick it up.
One down, one to go. But this one had something I wasn’t willing to lose or to hurt—my baby. If I shot her or hit her, she’d go over, and take him with her.
I had to keep her talking until she moved away from there.
“So why did you do it? You had the plan to marry him, why wasn’t that enough for you?”
“Because I want it all,” she shrieked, making Hendrix cry even harder. “Doesn’t this svoloch’ ever shut up?”
“Don’t call him a bastard,” I snapped, losing a shred of the control I had.