Page 10 of Sinner's Sacrifice

The moron couldn’t even see who he was talking to. “Go ahead, send your friends. I could use the exercise.”

“Sir,” Mason said. “I’ll take care of this...” One corner of Mason’s lip curled up. “Gentleman.”

He had a pretty good idea of how Mason would do that. “How? By throwing him in the East River?”

“No, sir. It’s illegal to dump trash in the river.”

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” the pimp asked, wiping his face, his eyes, but it was going to take copious amounts of water before he could see again.

Yvgeny eased Samantha out of his arms and out of the way. “You can call both of us Mr. Breznik.”

The pimp froze.

Yes, you’ve been remarkably stupid.

“Mason, find out what he knows about the missing women,” he instructed. Then he bent closer to the pimp. “If you step foot into one of my properties again, you will be the one who’s gone out of town. Understand?”

“Ye...yes, sir.”

Yvgeny straightened up and offered his elbow to Samantha.

After a hesitation, she took it, and he led her back to the hotel’s back door at a reasonable pace. He would have preferred to carry her at a run, but they were in the open, and they would be on his own security cameras as soon as they rounded the corner.

“Are you going to share the information Mason gets from him?” Sam asked without looking at him.

“With you?”

“No, with the Easter Bunny,” she said with a punch to his arm. “Of course, with me.”

“Why are you looking for these friends?”

It took a moment for her to reply. “I haven’t seen them in a couple of weeks, which isn’t like either of them.”

“Friends with a...pimp,” he said carefully.

“Don’t be a snob, Yvgeny. You murder people, yet here I am walking arm in arm with you.”

“I don’t murder people,” he sputtered. “Much.”

That made her laugh out loud, but there was something wrong with the pitch of her voice. The laugh sounded stressed. Actually, there was something wrong with the whole situation. She was an intelligent, capable person. Brave in the way those who sought to help others often were, but this lack of caution was unlike her.

“Why did you follow that horrible man out of the hotel?” he asked her as the back door came into view.

“Like I said, I was hoping to find out what happened to my friends.”

“By blinding him with pepper spray? Is this a new questioning technique?”

“No. He tried to hit me.”

The rage he’d corralled busted through the gate and tried to start a stampede. It took more control than it should have to keep him walking sedately. He would have rather torn that stupid pimp apart.

“I’m a bigger monster,” he said in a private tone. “All you had to do was let me know and I would have asked him about the women and taken care of him with no one the wiser.”

“I could have, too,” she said through clenched teeth. “But you showed up before I could get the information out of him.”

“And then what?” he asked. “You were going to walk away from that animal without him doing more than just trying to hit you?” Yvgeny was so damned angry his body shook. “The moment you turned your back to him, he would have attacked you.”

They passed through the automatic doors and into the air-conditioned hotel. “You took incredible risks with your own safety,” he said to her in a rough undertone.