Laurie was terrified out of her mind.

She couldn’t remember if she had ever been this scared in her life. Even though her father was intimidating, it had never gotten this bad. It had been nowhere close when she finally decided to leave home, even knowing that she had no experience out in the real world and she would virtually be out on her own.

Nothing could probably be as scary as the situation she found herself in.

Laurie had faith that Mickey would rescue her again like he did on the promenade. She had to because it was the only thing keeping her together. Silent tears tracked down her face, whimpers wanting to get out of her chest as she panted harshly through her nose. She just needed to believe Mickey would get her out of this, or she would be screaming her head off and sobbing. It would probably just annoy the man with the gun and get her killed. But she was still pretty scared as Viktor held a gun to her head and ordered the blubbering Karl to keep searching through the bags of garbage he accumulated trying to clean up and find the papers while too high to function.

Laurie almost felt sorry for her brother. Hell, scratch the almost—she did feel sorry for him.

Karl was in way over his head. It was possible he hadn't even known who he was dealing with, and that it could lead to all of this. It in no way excused what he had done, but it did make her feel a little better that her brother hadn't knowingly aligned himself with criminals. In a way, though, it also made her feel worse, that her brother could be this much of an idiot.

She thought of all the ways this situation could have been avoided. If her father had trusted her a little more, not looked down on her because she was a woman while still holding onto his own expectations of her. If he hadn't been so forgiving of Karl's behavior in the past. If he hadn't treated her brother special because he was male. Laurie was the eldest, and her dad should have let her play the role, instead of turning her into her brother's maid.

Maybe, if she'd toughed it out at home, things would have been different. She'd always been under the impression that her father favored Karl, so of course, he had to have the better life. But something must have gone wrong somewhere for him to end up like he did, and not the beloved son and heir of the general.

Of course, he also deserved some blame, most of it. Karl was too old to still be acting like a child, his tantrums had grown old a long time ago. He should have done something on his own, something sane before they ever got to this point. He'd be lucky if all that happened was he ended up in jail for what he'd done.

But he was still her brother. And looking at him, it was probably starting to sink in for him. He was a wreck, moving around frantically, throwing stuff around as he looked for the papers that were the cause of all this. Her brother rarely ever thought ahead, she wouldn’t have seen this situation coming either. He probably just made the wrong friend with all the wrong connections when it came to his drugs and it was coming back to bite him.

No. There was no way their lives would just end here. Where was Mickey, anyway? She'd texted him a while ago but he wasn’t there yet. Or was he looking for an opening? Either way, so was she. But the guy kept a hold on her with a gun pointed at her and had been standing still as a statue behind her the entire time, there was no way he would let his guard down.

Wanting to create a distraction, she picked an argument.

"How the hell did you manage it?" Her voice was low, but Karl heard her and glanced up with a small frown.

"The fuck are you talking about," he snapped back, sounding stressed, not even pausing what he was doing.

"How the hell can you be such a complete screw-up?" she demanded to know. "That you could steal documents that could threaten national security in return for some weed when you could have just stolen the money or borrowed it. Only to lose the papers in your room so thoroughly because you are such a slob that you can't find them even when an assassin from the Russian Mob has a literal gun to our heads."

Her brother shot a glare at her, becoming even more frantic. He stopped for about a second, made a strange noise before tossing some stuff aside.

"Do you think I wanted this to happen?" he said back. "I just wanted to make Dad angry, I didn’t plan on doing anything for the Russian Mob. Yeah, I sold out the country for weed, but I swear I didn’t do it on purpose."

"I don’t care what your 'purpose' was in all of this, why take Dad's stuff in the first place? Was the weed even worth it? Because, seriously kid, you're only more pathetic the longer I look at you, so what had you been thinking? Tell me why."

He sent another glare her way, and she noticed this time the tear tracks on his face that he must have been trying to hold back.

Karl, still whining and crying, finally admitted, his voice gone strained and quiet, "I don't know."

"What?"

"I don’t know, okay?" he snapped, throwing up some more stuff as he went through another bag. "I just wanted to get back at Dad, I didn’t know this would happen."

Viktor found the whole argument hilarious. He didn’t care that they were making too much noise. They wouldn’t be for much longer. The only reason he was having the boy look for the papers instead of offing them both and doing it himself was because it was too troublesome to do it himself when he had someone else to do it for him.

Finally, he went from machinelike to chuckling, distracted enough that he was caught unprepared when Mickey busted in.