Alexandr's Reluctant Submissive (33 page)

His thin chest heaved as he sucked in a deep, rattling breath. “I regret Petrov’s death, deeply. He was a good man, and a good friend. Know it was not my intention for anyone to be harmed. I did this for you, for both of you.”

“What are you talking about,” Dimitri snarled.

Jorg seemed to sink back into his pillows, his eyelids fluttering. “I have made many, many mistakes in my life but I love you both more than you will ever know.”

“Love?” Alex spat out. “You have no idea what love is.”

Not seeming to hear him, Jorg continued in a breathy, weak voice, “A great change is coming, one so huge you would never believe me even if I told you what little I know. I must protect you, give you a chance to save who you can.”

Dimitri and Alex exchanged a glance, neither having a clue what he was talking about. “You are not making any sense.”

“Silver Wood is the curse breaker,” Jorg said, spittle dripping out of the corner of his mouth. “Had to find a way to keep it in the bloodstream, a way to make sleep until activated. She would only produce it for me if I helped hide her from the Vagrants, hide her so well even I cannot find her. This is my final gift to you both, a chance at survival. The tundra…is melting. Look at Tatiana’s back. Such a beautiful child you have, Alexandr. Hair like your mother, Dimitri.”

He reached out as if to touch the little girl, but Alex beat him to it and blocked his withered fingers from making contact. Across the room his father’s bodyguards took a threatening step forward, but they froze when Jorg waved them away.

With great trepidation, Alex pulled the blanket down, revealing Tatiana’s bare back. Seeing no obvious signs of injury, he scanned her again, then stiffened when he noticed three silver dots the size of his thumb starting at the base of her spine and going up, about an inch apart from each other. The skin around the circles was reddened, shiny with some kind of salve, and he struggled to understand what he was seeing.

“What did you do?” He looked over his shoulder at Jorg while Dimitri looked down at Tatiana from the other side of the couch.

The door behind them opened and a tall, skinny Asian man dressed in a cream suit with a pale orange tie came in, pushing a silver cart with some odd-looking equipment on it, and a small jar of sparkling silver liquid.

“If you do not allow him to tattoo you, I will order Jessica and Rya killed.”

“No!” Dimitri shouted, and surged forward to attack Jorg, but Alex blocked him with his body.

“Don’t,” he snarled, staring into his brother’s wild eyes.

“Get the tattoo, and I will let them go. Both of you.”

“Swear it,” Alex growled.

“I swear.”

Desperate to do whatever he could to save his wife and sister-in-law, he handed his daughter over to his brother, giving him something to do other than kill their father. “Hold Tatiana, please.”

With tears in his eyes, Dimitri nodded, cradling the little girl close while Alex stripped his shirt off.

The Asian man nervously licked his lips, but pulled over a chair and gestured to it.

Jorg watched all of this intently, his chest barely moving with each breath. At the first slight sting of the tattoo needle on his lower spine, Alex tensed, waiting for something to happen, but it was only the familiar scratching pain of a tattoo gun piercing his skin. The artist was quick, and after he was done he bandaged Alex, then gestured to Dimitri.

As soon as the needle touched his brother’s skin, Jorg let out a long sigh that Alex prayed was his death, but the bastard kept polluting the world with his presence. Jorg pressed a button on the small pad next to him and ordered whoever answered to stand down.

“Where are they,” Dimitri said while the Asian man put a protective covering over the metallic silver circles now dotting his spine. “What did you do to us?”

“Experimenting, unable to find way to make inoculation last without monthly infusion. Tattoos…answer. Vagrants don’t know, but you both will see and shape the future.” He sucked in a wheezing breath. “Forgive me.”

“Never,” Alex hissed.

The heart-rate monitor started to go crazy as Jorg struggled to gasp in a breath, then he began to twitch as a seizure racked his twisted body.

Ignoring the medical personnel and people streaming into the room as the machines sounded their alarms, Alex strode out of the room with Tatiana cuddled to his chest and Dimitri at his side, the commotion behind him letting him know that his father was finally on his way to the Hell he so richly deserved.

Oleg was waiting for them in the hall and he motioned to them. “Come, I know where the women are.”

Feeling as if he was in a dream, Alex trailed after Dimitri, a bitter relief entering his soul as the monster he’d once loved with all his child’s heart died behind him.

Seven weeks later

Nico looked up from his laptop and sighed, taking away Alex’s hope even before he spoke. “Still nothing.”

Alex blew out a frustrated breath, knowing he couldn’t vent his anger in a physical way among all the delicate lab equipment. They were in Nico’s new private research facility deep beneath the earth. On the surface it was a normal, well-maintained pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, but four stories below ground, in a sealed and self-contained environment, Nico and his team of some of the smartest medical researchers in the world experimented with shit that gave Alex nightmares.

Anthrax, Ebola, some kind of flu that made a person’s organs liquefy. Scary, scary illnesses that Nico worked diligently to cure. He wasn’t in the business of designing the biological weapons, but rather disarming them.

Dimitri had been the first to remind Alex about Jorg’s mysterious comments about immunity and they’d assigned Nico the task of figuring out if they were indeed now immune to anything, thanks to the introduction of Curse Breaker 2, or CB2, also known as Silver Wood, into their systems.

So far, test after test had revealed that the bacteria just sat inert in their system, like they were in hibernation, slowly consuming the minute amounts of Silver Wood in their blood. They’d tried to find out where Jorg had gotten the mixture from that was used in their tattoos, but so far they hadn’t been able to locate anyone who knew anything, even under threat of torture. However Jorg had done it and whoever had helped him remained a mystery. He’d covered his tracks well and left no clues for them to follow other than the little bit of unused CB2 that had remained from the batch used for their tattoos.

Shaking his head, Nico rubbed his face with a frustrated hand. “The only thing that’s different about the strain of CB2 that your father has and the one the Novikovs received from Lady Death, is that in CB2, Jorg was somehow able to encapsulate the Silver Wood to slowly release over time. The CB1 that Dimitri has will live for at least another sixty years, but eventually their food source will run out because they are awake and active, for lack of a better term, unlike the hibernating CB2. The bacteria in your body will live on long after you are dust if it remains within the circles of the tattoos on your back.”

Trying to keep the frustration out of his voice, he said, “Do you have any theories at all yet?”

He was desperate to find some good news to give to Dimitri and Rya. They were very, very concerned that their unborn child would somehow be harmed by the foreign substance now living in Rya’s body. Hell, he was terrified about the innocent-looking tattoos somehow killing his wife and daughter.

Drumming his fingers on the clear glass table that dominated his private office, Nico’s jaw clenched, then released. “Looking at this from a logical perspective, I have been asking myself what would make this so valuable that Jorg would risk angering the Israeli mafia by basically stealing it from them. Mimi has no idea what it is, only that Jorg was uninterested in helping her until she mentioned the CB1, then he would have given her his right hand for it.”

“We could always ask the Israelis why they wanted it so badly,” Alex said with a grimace.

Nico merely snorted. “Back to the subject at hand, I have many theories, but a few that are more plausible than others. One in particular keeps coming to mind and I’ve been at this long enough to trust my instincts. I think that CB2 is an insurance policy against something, some kind of what I would have to assume is a disease or virus that I haven’t yet run across that Jorg knew about. While I would like to think that I’m aware of every new biological weapon out there, I know it is impossible to predict what type of vile shit some insane chemist out in a jungle laboratory in Brazil is going to come up with next. I will say this, your father had more connections than God, and even if he was crazy, he went to a great deal of effort to get those tattoos on his family. He was not the type of man to waste his time, especially at the end of his life, on useless things.”

Alex’s stomach clenched as he considered the other man’s words. “You believe my father was aware of some kind of future illness and he inoculated us against it?”

The dark-skinned man’s broad shoulders fell, and he closed his eyes as he looked down. “I think that is the most probable explanation.”

The sorrow in Nico’s tone set Alex on alert. “What is it?”

“I believe we need to figure out how to replicate CB2, and we need to do it quickly.”

“Why?”

When Nico met his gaze, the other man’s dark eyes were filled with an edge of desperation. “Because I want to inoculate myself and my wife as soon as possible. If Jorg went to all that trouble to make sure you were protected, I want the same for my family, and it worries me greatly that I can’t do that yet. We don’t have the raw material, mainly the trees, to produce our own and I have a feeling we will need more than we currently have. With your permission, I would like to drop some of my research projects and devote more of my time to unlocking the secrets of CB2, specifically how to make more of the type that was used in your tattoos. I’ll also need you to try to find out where the Silver Wood is growing, and secure some for the Dubinski
Bratva
. Someone somewhere has to be cultivating it, and perhaps if we find them, we’ll have more pieces to the puzzle to put together.”

Trying to swallow past his suddenly dry throat, Alex nodded. “If you truly believe that is necessary, you have my blessings and any resources you might need from the Dubinski
Bratva
to make that happen. We will find the Silver Wood for you, and you and Catrin will be the first to receive the new tattoos once we figure out how to do it. You have my word.”

“Thank you.”

One month later

Dimitri and Alex sat back and smoked their cigars on the large back porch of the Summer House that looked out over the frozen expanse of the lake on the Novikov estate, where their women were ice skating. He couldn’t help but smile as Jessica wobbled on her skates, almost losing her balance, while a pregnant Rya literally skated circles around her with Tatiana. His wife was good at many, many things. Ice skating was not one of them.

Blowing out a puff of fragrant tobacco smoke into the chilly air, Dimitri sighed. “Do you think I could ask Rya to come inside without her biting my head off? She could fall and hurt herself and the baby.”

“Not unless you want to spend Christmas in the guest house.” Dimitri frowned and Alex patted his jacket-covered shoulder. “Relax, she is fine.”

Crossing he legs at the ankle, Alex let his gaze roam the beautiful grounds of the Novikov estate, now covered in a thick blanket of pure white snow beneath the gray skies. While Dimitri had been left the Winter Manor as part of his inheritance, Alex had been left the Summer House by their father. At first they’d wanted nothing to do with it, both having too many bad memories here, but their wives had insisted they not turn their back on their heritage. The women had argued that generations of their ancestors had called this place home, and that they shouldn’t let their father’s memory destroy something that the Novikovs had fought to build and protect. Now they split their time between the apartment and the Novikov estates, where Rya and Jessica spent much of their time cataloguing the contents of both homes and working on restoring them.

Thankfully they had a built-in expert in antique architectural restoration in Gia and her renovation company. Ivan’s wife was more than happy to take on the project and slowly but surely the buildings were coming back to life after decades of neglect. While they tried to restore as much as they could, Dimitri and Alex also had a number of safety upgrades done that had turned the estates into a self-contained fortresses with their own water and electrical systems that Mimi and Mike Anderson had helped them set up.

Guards patrolled the grounds at all times, and as usual Maks was lurking about, his attention focused totally on the women while Krom and his team were on outer-perimeter duty. After the disastrous evening of the party, Maks had changed, no longer smiling and always serious. Alex knew his friend suffered from immense guilt that he’d been unable to predict or stop Jorg, and even though Alex had told him time and time again that there was nothing he could have done, Maks still felt as though he let them down.

The sound of female voices coming closer snapped him out of his deep thoughts and he stubbed out his cigar as Tatiana raced up the steps.

Her pale cheeks were rosy and she placed her hands on her little jacket-covered hips and frowned at him. “Papa, smoking is bad.”

“I know,
solntse
, I know.”

Jessica came slowly up the steps with her arm looped through Rya’s, the women giggling together.

From behind them, one of the French doors leading into the lavish Summer House opened and Gwen’s cheerful smile greeted him. “Come on, everyone inside. I’ve got hot chocolate and snacks ready. That includes some homemade snickerdoodle cookies for you, Rya.”

Alex had to hold back a laugh as his pregnant sister-in-law made a beeline for the door, scooping up a giggling Tatiana on the way, with Jessica trailing behind her.