Chapter Fourteen
Day eleven, evening…
SERGEI
I am in my office working on designing security for a new building for Operation Salvat. The building houses former trafficking victims who have been freed and don’t have homes to go to. Unfortunately, that’s a lot of them. They became victims because they came from desperately poor situations and it made them take foolish risks. After they’ve been kidnapped, pimped out, drugged, forced to have sex with hundreds of men…they’re released to face a whole new struggle.
They’re traumatized, barely able to function, and either they have no families to go home to, or their families can’t handle these damaged new versions of the women they once were. Mood swings, panic attacks, crying spells, too afraid to leave the house, unable to work…
So Operation Salvat, which I created and financed, offers them housing, education and counseling. We give them job training and get them employment, when they are ready. If they are going to testify against their abusers, we provide security.
When I had to tell Willow that I was a trafficker, it made me sick to my stomach. I wanted to turn around and run back to her, I wanted to scream that I had lied. I was pretending to be the thing that I loathed the most in the world.
Do I regret it?
I don’t know.
It was a twisted situation. All the evil I’d done over the years, the people I’d killed, most of them deserving of it, but still…it poisoned my soul bit by bit until I was toxic and ugly and too foul for a pure, innocent soul like Willow.
Killing Vilyat and blowing up the trafficking ring had left a shocking void in my life, and I felt myself teetering over the brink. I could let myself fall, give in to pure evil. Chase after more and more power and money that I didn’t need, kill rivals, kill their families, fight until finally I went too far and one of my enemies came for me in the night.
And it was tempting.
What stopped me from going that route?
Willow. If I turned into that kind of man, I would not be worthy of her.
And I couldn’t just stay still. I had to change myself completely, one way or the other.
Willow pushed me towards the light, without even knowing it. Oh, I didn’t fool myself into thinking that I could make myself into a sweet, soft man, nor did I want that. But striking a blow against evil felt like a step towards at least being able to move among humans and feel like one of them.
But I also knew without a doubt that coming back into the territory after I’d double-crossed high-ranking criminals and corrupt police alike was like running through a minefield. And I knew my Willow. If I brought her here with me, she’d insist on getting down and dirty, on risking herself for women she’d never even met before. I couldn’t keep her sitting behind a desk.
So I hurt the best woman I’ve ever known, and came here alone. It was like a punishment – like every other time I forced myself to stay away from Willow, but a million times worse. Like daily self-flagellation and then salting the wounds.
When she took her GPS tracker out, it was agony. I had my men following her, of course, but when she came to Russia she turned out to be damn good at hiding. Moving around, changing phones all the time, sleeping on people’s couches. She didn’t have an apartment; she lived out of her bag. She wasn’t working; she had money because after I gave her the mansion in California and everything in it, she sold off a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of furnishings. She didn’t buy a car; she took public transportation or rented cars. She went off the radar for a couple of months, but I knew that she was running around with that foolish group of anti-trafficking vigilantes, and I was sick with worry.
I was shocked and relieved when I figured out that she was regularly talking to Ludmilla and the journalists at Reformat. I snatched her up the first chance I got to take her back under my wing again.
And I realized that I wouldn’t have lasted much longer without her.
I barely slept when she wasn’t there. I moved through life in a burning rage. Food lost its taste for me. I worked eighteen, twenty hours a day, because when I wasn’t working, I couldn’t stand to be in my own skin. The things that I was trying to accomplish – busting traffickers, setting up rescue networks for girls – they were getting harder and harder for me to do without her there.
Maybe if I put her to work doing something for Operation Salvat, it would keep her busy and make her feel like she was still helping. I don’t want her to be bored, restless and miserable, but I also don’t want to let her out of my sight, because I don’t want her dead.
The door opens and Alexei bustles in, carrying a laptop. I feel that dull throb of sorrow that I didn’t even know I was capable of when I think of Maks. Killing the last men on our lists made him worse, not better. Miserable, raging, spiraling out of control once we’d conquered our last demons. Driving alone like a fool after Slavik’s brutal attack, when he should have been on high alert. Almost as if he was courting his own death.
The look on Alexei’s face is grim, so I know the news won’t be good.
“You’ve got a video call from Cataha,” he says. “My men are trying to trace it.”
He sets the laptop in front of me, and my vision clouds with rage.
Cataha, wearing his mask, is standing next to a man who’s tied to a chair. It’s Leonid, a member of my security team. Leonid’s face is battered and bloody. Cataha is holding a knife.
“Sergei, you son of a pig,” he says in his tortured rasp. Ha. He has no idea. I’m the son of two pigs, the unwanted litter from their disgusting rutting. “You have been causing me a lot of trouble. And you have something that belongs to me.”
“I have a lot that belongs to you,” I say. “Property, cars, money. And I will take even more. Including your life.” I am sorry for Leonid, but this is the business, and if he let himself get taken, it means he was careless.
“Fuck you!” Cataha reaches over and viciously slices Leonid’s ear off in one clean slice. Blood sprays out in a horrible red fountain, and Leonid’s convulses in the chair before he screams and passes out.
“You’re not a very good boss,” he says reprovingly. “You’ve got a girl. She calls herself Natasha. Give her to me, and I will give you your man back. I mean if he doesn’t bleed out first. And I will agree to a ceasefire if you stop trying to interfere with my operations. If you don’t, more people will die, both yours and mine.”
He wants Willow?
Cold, hard fury burns through me, but I don’t let it show.
“Interesting,” I say calmly. “I mean, you’ve got all the pussy you want – because you steal it, of course, the way a man does when he’s so inadequate that no woman would be with him by choice. But nonetheless, you don’t lack access to gash. So what’s your interest in this particular piece of ass?”
There’s the slightest chance that if I speak of her disparagingly, he won’t realize her value to me.
“You stole her from me.”
Now that’s puzzling. Has he mistaken her for one of the girls we rescued?
“Bullshit,” I snap at him. “She was never yours. And the only deal that I’ll make with you is if you hand yourself over to me right now, I will make sure that your death is swift and far more merciful than you deserve.”
Leonid’s starting to come around. He’s moaning and shaking with pain.
I do what I always do. Laser focus. Eyes on the end game. Let nothing distract me.
“Convince me,” Cataha rasps. “Tell me her origin. Maybe I’m mistaken.”
Like I’m a fucking moron. He’d never admit to making a mistake.
He’s fishing for information for some reason that I don’t understand, but I don’t take orders from Cataha, or anyone. And I would never breathe a word of information about my Willow, not if it were to save my own life.
“Someday soon, you will regret that you didn’t take my offer,” I say.
“Today, your man will regret that you weren’t more loyal,” he says.
“He’s already dead. And so are you, you piece of shit,” I say.
Cataha turns his masked face to look at Leonid.
Leonid has finally accepted the inevitable. “Sorry, sir,” he says to me, looking right at the camera. He should be sorry. He let this happen to him.
Leonid bites down on the poison capsule that my men carry in their back molars, and white foam spills from his mouth. His back arches in his death throes.
And I cut off the connection. It’s the ultimate show of disrespect to Cataha, snatching his triumph from him.
I glance over at Alexei, who calls his man on his headset, but the news is bad. “Nothing, sir,” he says to me with a frustrated shake of his head. So they weren’t able to trace the video call.
If Cataha wants Willow, I’ve got to get her the hell out of here. Not just out of the district. Out of the country. There’s too great a chance that someone will betray us.
I have the maids pack our bags for us quickly while I make travel arrangements for us to head over to Sweden. I should reunite her with her brother anyway. I never had the right to keep her from him in the first place. I’ve wronged her in many ways, and I will spend the rest of my life making it up to her.
A few hours later, as we’re sitting in the drawing room waiting for the maid to carry in our bags, I fill her in on what happened and ask her why Cataha thinks she belongs to him.
She’s shocked, but then she tells me what he said to her back at the shopping center. Asking her name, where she was from.
A tsunami of rage sweeps me up in its whirling waters. Cataha dared to sully Willow with his filthy gaze. He probed her with his questions, tried to draw her into his web of perversion.
“Why in the hell didn’t you tell me that?” I demand furiously.
“It didn’t really seem to mean anything at the time.” She shrugs weakly, looking bewildered. “I mean, it just seemed like questions from a crazy control freak. He didn’t say anything about me belonging to him. He’s got to have mistaken me for someone. He can’t know who I actually am. I look nothing like I used to. My hair color, my hair style, all the makeup I wear these days…”
I run over possibilities in my head.
“Your father was going to marry you off after you graduated from college. You told me that once. Did he promise you to a specific person?” The mere question makes me blind with rage. The thought of anyone else marrying my Willow…
But she shakes her head. “No. I mean, he died a year before I even started college. He would probably have started looking for what he considered a good match for me a year before I graduated. Some gross old man who came from a connected family, most likely.” Her face wrinkles in disgust at the thought.
“Here’s the thing,” I say. “I don’t know why he wants you, or what he thinks he’s going to get from you. But I do know that he has a reputation as a man who holds grudges, who is obsessed with revenge. If he thinks you’re one of the women who escaped from him at some point, he’ll come for you. And never stop.”
“Would it help if we told him who I really am, then?” she asks helplessly.
I’m sick with anger at the thought of him knowing a single thing about her. It feels like he’s trying to wrap his slimy tentacles around her and pull her away from me. “Absolutely not. Any information that we give him gives him power over us. And if he knows how important you are to me, it will make you even more enticing to him.”
She shudders. “I get it. I really do, Sergei. I understand now why you lied to me.”
When she says that, I feel a sudden lightness. The air tastes a little sweeter, and a tension I wasn’t even aware of unknots inside me. I’ve spent so long beating myself up for all the things I’ve done to her, and for walking away from her, worst of all.
This feels like a step towards redemption. It feels like she might finally come to trust me someday.
Andrei pokes his head through the doorway. “The bags are in the car, and we’re ready to go, sir,” he says.