Page 86 of City of Salvation
His smile sent a chill down my spine, like the fucking cat that ate the canary. “Oh, but Tasha, we have the perfect bait, do we not?” His icy eye flicked behind me, and he gave a slight lift of his chin before focusing again on me. “And speak for yourself. I am doing just fine.”
“Then you won’t care if I leave,” I said, calling his bluff. There was something in this for him too. Not that he would ever share that with me, but I could tell he needed me.
His jaw stiffened at my call out. “From what I gather, Tasha, you have some very powerful friends you’ve aligned yourself with,” he said, ignoring my words.
The cold surface of his desk met my palms as I slapped them down, shooting out of my chair. The action caused the other men in the room to move toward me, but Andrei waved them away, never letting his gaze drift from me.
“You leave them the fuck out of it, Andrei. They didn’t sign up for this. That’s the whole fucking reason I left them behind, so I wouldn’t drag them down with me if all of this goes to hell.” There was no way I would drag them into anything involving Yuri. For fuck’s sake, I’d never even given them my actual name.
Now he wanted me to ask them to kill my ex-husband?
My facial expressions must not have been as blank as I’d intended because Andrei responded to my internal questions as if I’d voiced them aloud.
“You never told them about your situation,” he stated, his eyes narrowing in a fashion that concerned me. He was cunning and couldn’t be trusted as far as you could throw him, traits I’d decided to ignore when I was swept up in my infatuation with him.
“Your father really fucked you up, didn’t he?” There was a hint of pity in the way he looked at me, and it caused my anger to spike.
“Oh, you’re one to talk,” I spat back, sliding back into the chair as a wave of exhaustion swept over me. Andrei was as much of a mystery to me as I was to my friends. He’d never revealed too much to me about his past, but there’d been one night when vodka made our lips loose, and we’d both shared more than we’d meant to. Trouble was, I didn’t remember much from that night either.
“Do you care about them?”
The sincerity of his question took me by surprise. All I could manage was a slight nod—uttering the words felt as if I were casting a curse.
The guarantee of a broken heart.
But wasn’t I already experiencing that by walking away?
“Then you need to kill Yuri, because the bastard is on his way to the United States.” Andrei wagged a tattooed finger at me while I fought off falling into a panic at the bombshell he’d just dropped. “I’d wondered why he was bothering to leave his secure palace atop the hill. Sure, Maxim was killed, and the cartel heir he was potentially going into business with was also. But people die all the time in this line of work. Men in his station don’t drop everything and leave to do menial tasks themselves.”
My stomach dropped to my feet, sensing the point he was making.
“But he’s not coming here for a menial task, is he, Tasha?No. He’s coming to collect his bride.” He cocked his head to the side, a hard edge to his stare. “What do you think he’ll do when he doesn’t find you in Tucson,Nikki?”
I took a sharp inhale at the dropping of where I’d been living. The name. H e’d known. He was the one who’d selected it, for god’s sake, but where I was living…
“What are you suggesting, Andrei?” I asked, proud that I’d kept most of the shake out of my voice.
He might have been kind to me when I’d showed up at his door looking to broker a deal. I’d give them information and access to Yuri if they’d help me flee. But that wasn’t how it worked in the Ruska Roma, and I’d been required to join. Only reason I didn’t have a tattoo marking my allegiance was because we hadn’t wanted to risk Yuri discovering the ink before the ambush at the wedding.
But I’d never made it back to them after the attack. They held no allegiance to me.
Andrei may have been the one who’d told me to leave, and never to come back, but I had no clue what he’d told the others. As soon as I’d landed in the States, I’d booked a second flight to Dallas, and then eventually found myself in Arizona.
The door opened behind me, and Andrei’s man rattled something off in Polish that I didn’t quite catch. It apparently had something to do with me, though, based on the look Andrei gave me.
“What size are you? I need to get you something to wear to my club tonight.” He pulled out a joint and lit it. When he leaned back, some of his tattooed skin peeking out from his unbuttoned shirt. Andrei was the epitome of the edgy bad boy. It pissed me off because it was utterly unfair that a man got to wake up looking that hot with zero effort.
His demand irritated me—I hated being kept in the dark. “Fuck you, Andrei. I did this little dance once and was nearly shot at the front of a cathedral.” I leaned forward. “The little girl who took shit at face value with no questions asked? She died that day. Natasha? I buried that bitch.”
The corner of his lips tipped up. It wasn’t amusement on his face but something more akin to pride. “Looks like you did some growing up since I saw you last.”
I gave a curt nod, unsure how I felt about his approval. “Tell me why the fuck you need me to come to your club instead of us hashing this out right now and coming up with a plan.”
This time, it was amusement on his face. “Because we’re going to need your friends to help us in the killing of Yu?—”
“Absolutely not.”
His smile grew wider, and my heart fluttered like a caged bird because arrogance shone in his eyes. “Well, you probably should’ve given them the memo, because they’ve already arrived in New York, and if I don’t let them see that not a single hair on that pretty little head has been harmed, and soon, Scarletta Callahan will make her presence known in my little area of her city. Those boys of hers might think they are in charge, but it’s pretty clear she’s got them all by the dick and leads them around with those convenient little handles,” he said.