Absolution (Road Kings MC And Underworlds Book 1), page 12
With Vadim and Val here hunting down the ghost, I felt more at ease than I had in over a year, since I’d first found out about the marriage.
To lose control left you weak. To have it made your enemy weaker.
We were being attacked at all angles—the Bratva, MC, and my personal life—but we were going to fight harder.
And we’d just revealed a hint of what was coming.
Chapter Fifteen
Nell
Hurrying through my shower after I got home from the hospital, I went into the nursery and swapped out more of the diapers in case I didn’t have enough already. I had no idea how many they were going to get through in a day, and I didn’t want to be caught short.
With the piles of freshly laundered and folded clothes also still waiting, I put them in the top drawer, and moved the larger sizes to the one below it.
I guess I was feeling anxious because I hadn’t spent a full twenty-four hours with the boys yet, so I didn’t know how much of anything they were going to need. I wanted to be prepared so I didn’t feel like a shit mom when they needed something.
I was tender in the areas where the staples and stitches had been removed today, especially my cesarean scar, so I took it slowly and was bending carefully when I needed to. That’s why, when a voice spoke from the doorway, I screamed with fright at first, and then followed it with another one from the pain.
“Are you sore, malysh?” Taras’ head jerked when I screamed the first time, and then clouded over when the pained one followed behind it. “Shit, I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Stepping into the room, he pulled me into him and rubbed my back while I waited for the pain to ease.
“Can we maybe not sneak up on the person who had her stomach cut open,” I whimpered into his chest, feeling his arms tighten reflexively around me.
“I’m sorry, Nell,” he whispered into the hair on the top of my head, sounding genuinely upset. “I didn’t think.”
Taking in a deep breath, and barely holding back the groan that wanted to come out of me when his scent hit me, I lifted my head to look at him. Seeing how close he was, close enough to see the dark green at the center of his eyes bleed into the more hazel color that surrounded it, I took a step away.
It was dangerous for me to be too close to him, and I hadn’t stopped kicking myself for sitting on his lap today, regardless of why it’d happened.
He didn’t belong to me, he belonged to his wife.
And the trust I had in him was fragile and solely based on Walker and Hendrix. I knew I had to let him in as their father—for all three of their sakes—but I also had to find a way to protect myself from him at the same time.
My solution so far was distance. So long as I kept it between us, I’d survive this.
“What are you doing here, Taras?”
His head tilted to the side slightly at my question.
“You’re here.” His tone conveyed that he thought the answer should be obvious, but also that he was unhappy about it as well.
Sighing, I ran my hand through my hair, annoyed when my fingers caught on the hair tie holding it in a ponytail, and ripping it out to redo it. Doing it gave me a few seconds to think how to word what I needed to say, and by the time I was done, I was ready.
“I appreciate the time and attention, but you don’t have to come here. There are men outside all the time, I have the Club if I need anything, and you have other things that I’m sure you need to do.” Like your wife.
I expected him to turn around and leave after I was done, but instead, he jerked his head toward the living room. “I would like to talk to you, malysh. It’s important.”
Again, he surprised me by not just walking and assuming I’d follow him, but waiting for me and turning the lights in the nursery out as we exited it. It was a small thing to do, but it felt much more significant. It was domesticated and made it feel like we were doing this together.
Stop it, Nell. You’re reading too much into things.
Moving to sit on the couch, I watched as he sat down beside me. His eyes were on the ultrasound pictures I’d had done during my pregnancy that I was going to glue into their baby book later.
Leaning forward, he picked them up and looked through them, stopping on the 3D ones.
“They don’t look anything like that now,” he murmured.
“No, they’ve definitely changed a lot in a short amount of time. But I don’t think they looked a lot like that when they were born, either.”
Lifting his hip, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and pulled up the boys' photos after they were born, then held it next to the ultrasound. Leaning over so I could compare them as well, I was about to say something when his phone rang, and the name Donna showed on the screen.
It felt like someone had ripped open the scar on my abdomen when I jerked away from him this time, moving as far away from him on the couch as possible.
Cursing, he shot me an apologetic look and answered it.
“What?”
I could hear some shrieks from where I was, but nothing that would help me work out what she was saying.
He didn’t say anything back to her for a while, but eventually he clipped, “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. And if I have to come looking for you, I won’t be happy.”
Standing up, he placed the scans back down on the table, and then moved to plant his fists in the couch on either side of me, our faces only inches apart.
“I have to go,” he muttered, his tone soft and gentle, a total contrast to how it’d been a minute ago. “If I’d thought for a second, she’d—” he broke off as I blinked rapidly, doing my best to tamp down the tears. “Govno!”
“You don’t need to explain,” I stammered quickly. “I only have a couple of things to do tonight, and then I’m going to bed early.”
The muscle in his jaw clenched, and then he stood up. “I’m sorry, malysh. I’ll make it quick.”
It felt like my throat was closing up, so I waved him away as I swallowed to try and clear the blockage, but the words still came out sounding like I was being strangled. “It’s fine. I’ll see you the next time you visit the boys.”
Dropping the hand that he’d shoved into the thick dark hair on the top of his head, he stared down at me, looking tortured.
“Nell—” His phone ringing again interrupted him, but this time he bellowed, “Fuck!”
Looking at the screen, he rejected the call and then moved toward the door. “Don’t leave the house,” he told me over his shoulder, before walking out and slamming the door behind him.
Staring at the scans on the coffee table, I felt the first tear fall, but didn’t feel the others that followed it.
He was married. I had to remember that and not let him get too close to me.
Love was nothing without pain, but the light that’d been shining brightly at the end of the darkness for me had started to fade.
Chapter Sixteen
Taras
“Well, then,” a voice I didn’t recognize muttered.
Normally hearing a strange voice in the same room you were sleeping in would evoke a reaction like jumping up and reaching for your gun. But I’d been born into a life where I knew that doing it would give them the opportunity to attack, so I stayed breathing shallowly, and did what I’d been taught.
The energy given off someone was readable, and what I was currently reading from the stranger was neutral.
Knowing this, I cracked open an eye instantly knowing where I was, and took in the brunette who was staring at the woman in my arms with a small smile on her face.
Shifting her gaze to me, she raised a dark eyebrow. “I’m assuming you’d be the asshole.”
“Lena.”
It wasn’t a question because I knew who she was. I’d done some digging into Nell’s time while she was away, wanting to learn everything I could. I’d discovered her close friendship with her friend Bella’s cousin, who was now in the room with us.
With a long sigh, Nell started to wake up, and I felt it the second she realized she wasn’t alone in her bed, as every muscle in her body tightened up.
“What the hell?” she whispered, pulling away slightly and looking up at me. “What are you doing here?”
“I came back last night.” Technically it’d been early this morning.
“Why aren’t you with your wife?” she growled, trying to increase the space between us, but my arms stayed firmly wrapped around her.
Ignoring the question because it would mean lying to her, I looked up at the visitor in the room that she hadn’t noticed yet. “You have a guest.”
Her head snapped round to look beside us, and the tension left her when she saw who it was. “Lena!”
“Hey, Nelly belly,” Lena muttered back, looking between the two of us. “Got here early, and one of the dudes outside said they were expecting me, so he let me in. Didn’t expect to find this, though.”
“I showed them a photo of you,” Nell explained, and I reluctantly released her this time when she moved to sit up.
Seeing the time, I rolled out of bed and stood up, both women continuing to talk as they watched me walk out of the bedroom toward the bathroom.
Shutting the door behind me, I did my business while I thought over last night.
When I’d left, I’d been headed to Donna’s to hear what bullshit she had to say to me. But on the way there, I’d gotten a call from Vadim saying I was needed at the warehouse.
Changing directions, I’d gone to see what was up, and had found one of the men we’d been suspicious of at the meeting tied to a chair, his face a bruised and bloody mess. I’d recognized him immediately as one of my good soldiers, Kuznetsov.
Bruce and Hunter had also been there, waiting for me to arrive so we could all hear what the guy had to say at the same time.
In the end, he’d given up small snippets of information, like the fact Donna was paying him to feed shit back to her, but none of it had been what we were looking for.
Which, if he’d known us at all—which he should have by now—he would have realized.
He also would’ve realized we were men who’d stop at nothing to get the information we knew he was hiding out of him.
With a nod to Vadim, he’d untied the guy from the chair. The bastard had looked relieved that he was being let go, which really proved he should’ve done his homework on us.
Moving him back toward the wooden wall behind him, Vadim, Bruce, and Hunter had distracted him with small questions, while I’d retrieved the kit Dmitri had arrived with. Once I had what I wanted on a small table beside me, I’d cleared my throat, and they’d moved away.
That’s when I threw the first knife, the blade going through his shoulder and pinning him to the wood behind him, making him scream and try to move away.
When I was ten, I’d taken knife-throwing classes. They weren’t like the normal ones where you aimed at a person or at a target, these were based on immobilizing someone without killing them. At night I had to study the human anatomy, so that I knew where every major organ was and every major blood vessel.
The areas where there wasn’t a lot of fat were the areas you wanted to hit first, because your blade would go through it more easily, and do what mine was doing right now.
After I’d finished the classes, I’d designed a set of knives, slightly thicker than a regular hunting knife, that would slice through muscle, tendons, and skin, then penetrate a harder surface.
I had twenty of them available in my kit, along with some other blades I’d designed that were used on other areas once the person was immobilized.
I’d thrown another five in quick succession, aiming for his other shoulder, the areas of his quads just above his knees, and just above his hips. These locations made it almost impossible for him to move unless he wanted to attempt to rip his flesh out with the knives, which some men still attempted.
Watching it, Hunter shot a grin at me. “Neat trick.”
Bruce, though, wasn’t amused. “Anything you wanna get off your chest yet?”
The man had stopped screaming after the third blade, and was now panting as he looked between us all. “I don’t know anything else.”
When I’d first learned the art of interrogation and torture, I’d been hit by crippling pity for the person it was being done on.
No matter what life you were born into, there was an instinct inside you that wanted to believe them and send them off to be patched up. It was how you grew from the instinct that changed your ability to switch off to that pity, and instead focused on detecting bullshit.
Bullshit which this man was full of.
My hands were a blur as I threw another three knives, this time aiming for bone which was more painful.
Both members of the Road Kings were standing watching it with blank expressions on their faces, but Vadim was grinning as he watched me in action. He had better skills than I did, but he used his to interrogate terrorists and people who would stop at nothing to use their own skills back on him. It was a case of whoever could move the fastest to take down their opponent, came out of it breathing—albeit bleeding badly.
So this style of torture was like watching a cartoon to him.
“She— They— She wanted information,” the man whimpered, his head sagging forward as he tried to gulp oxygen into his lungs. “She said you beat her during your visits, and wanted information to divorce you.”
Now, this I hadn’t expected.
“Donna Azarov told you this?” I asked, walking closer to him and spinning a different type of blade now. This one was small and designed to make small wounds that bled badly.
Not lifting his head, he nodded, and then followed it with a whimper as he sagged, pulling the knives up through the skin of his shoulders slightly.
“She showed me the bruises. My mother was beaten by my father… every day of her life, until he killed her.” The words were said so quietly that I’d had to strain to hear them.
“The suka isn’t so stupid,” Vadim mused, his eyes narrowed at the new information, and mainly keeping to English for the sake of Bruce and Hunter apart from calling Donna a bitch. “She’s investigated your men to find ones with a weakness she can manipulate.”
“Apparently so,” I agreed, but I wasn’t altogether surprised by this revelation. It was one of the reasons I’d gone ahead with the wedding.
The wedding had been agreed on after a conversation between my dad and the Azarovs. During it, Donna and her father had referred to large deals that were stalling after years of negotiations. They were worth billions, so naturally, we wanted them. They’d also dropped the names of the Bratvas who were proving problematic for us, which is what’d given their true intentions away.
All of the ones they’d mentioned were ones few knew we had issues with, which would have weakened us if they’d all been revealed before we could calm the situations down.
After it, the threats to Nell, ourselves, and the MC had begun to arrive, and we’d known it was linked.
It was a discreet attempt at blackmail, but no one outside of the Fedorov Bratva knew about the problems we had with them, so we knew they had eyes and ears inside the brotherhood.
The saying to keep your friends close and your enemies closer is one of the wisest ones ever created, so we’d given them the illusion of a copacetic marriage agreement, and hadn’t given away how much we knew even without investigating who’d told them. It’d enabled us to get more eyes on the two, as well as the other factions we had issues with.
But there was no doubt that Donna and her father had done their homework on us, which meant she’d do the same with whoever was around me. The proof, of which, was currently bleeding in front of me.
Taking a step closer to the man, I asked, “How many others does she have working for her?”
Realizing stalling would only cause him more pain now, he answered immediately. “I know of two, but she has more than that. I was trying to find out the names to bring to you, because she let something slip, and I knew you needed to know it.”
Glancing at Vadim, I saw him shrug like this was nothing concerning. “I have two others. Finding more won’t be a problem.”
Bruce stepped around me until he was in front of the man. “What does she want with us?”
“You took Azarov’s transportation route.”
The Road Kings transported guns, pussy, and sometimes drugs for some groups, but they stuck mainly to doing it for my family and three others that were close to us. Azarov had never had a route or agreement that I was aware of, so this confused me.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one, because Hunter moved closer to his dad. “Which one?”
“I don’t know. All I know is it involves Los Segadores.”
This revelation made all of us stop what we were doing.
We all did trade with particular gangs and families from Mexico, but Los Segadores was a group made up of men from all over Central and South America, who’d joined together to run the drugs, guns, and pussy across the continent.
The most significant difference was that their drugs were cut with rat poison, and had been responsible for adults and children's deaths. They also sold guns to kids as young as six, and the pussy wasn’t there voluntarily, legally, nor was it paid.
They were soulless pieces of shit, who were wanted all over the country, and everyone hated them.
Neither the Fedorovs nor any of our associates ever did business with them. It was a rule between all of the families and people we worked with, and it wasn’t ever to be deviated from.
The man’s body was shaking now as he slipped deeper into shock, and his head was hanging limply on his shoulders.
“Does any of this involve my daughter?” Bruce demanded. When the man didn’t respond, he reached over and pushed one of the knives at his hip further in. “Answer me!”
“I overheard this afternoon,” the man croaked. “She has someone on her.”
