Russian Mafia Boss's Heir (17 page)

Blini Boy got a little angry. He started to walk over to her, but the overblown muscle man grabbed his shoulder. The two guys argued in terse Russian. Blini Boy was all for knocking her around a little bit. Muscle Man reminded Blini Boy that the boss was on his way right now and wouldn’t appreciate it if she was all banged up.

Boss. Great. That did almost nothing to give Tori a hint as to who the boss was. “Hey, Blini Boy! You know that your muscle bound idiot friend is just bossing you around because he doesn’t think you’re strong enough to argue with him.” When in doubt, poke the male ego. That was Tori’s motto.

Blini Boy shouted at her. “Shut your mouth, bitch!”

“Real original,” Tori said, purposely sounding bored.

Blini Boy stomped in her direction, throwing off the arm of his muscled friend. Muscle Guy took great exception to this. He grabbed Blini Boy and swung him around in a big half circle, using Blini Boy as a counter weight to the pendulum effect. The result was that both men went flying across the room. By the time they hit the ground, they were already smashing at each other’s faces.

“That’s it, Blini Boy!” Tori encouraged. “Sit on him! Squash him flat! Oh, I bet your boss is going to love this!” Tori watched as the two skinny men glanced at each other and then made an obvious mutual decision to let these two beat each other senseless.

“Hey!” Tori shouted to get the other two men’s attention. “Who do you work for? Come on! Just tell me your boss’s name.”

They gave her no answer. And perhaps that was why she was so incredibly surprised when Antonin Orlov stepped into the room. Tori blinked in surprise. In fact, she had pretty much already decided that either her stepfather had taken her hostage, or some other family entirely was trying to cash in on her disappearance.

“Don’t look so surprised,” Orlov told her with a smug smile. “You had to have had your suspicions. The way I snuck around and went behind your family’s back to talk to you didn’t tip you off that my intentions were less than pure?”

“I just can’t understand what would be in this for you?”

Antonin cocked his head to one side, gazing at her with unbridled curiosity. “You know, you were supposed to be our ticket into the Vasiliev syndicate.”

“And I’m somehow responsible for that not happening to your satisfaction?” Tori raised her eyebrows, wishing she could look just a little more dignified. She was hanging from the ceiling like a drowned rat. “I’m so sorry that my mother was killed and I had to figure out a way to survive in that family without her.”

“Don’t worry.” Her cousin waggled his eyebrows at her in a most disturbing fashion. “You’re going to have another chance to fulfill your potential.”

***

MIKHAIL PULLED UP in front of the warehouse and exhaled a sigh of relief. Driving the entire way there with a semi automatic handgun pressed to his temple had been unnerving. He’d kept waiting for the car to hit a bump and Stanislas to accidentally squeeze the trigger, which would have been the end for Mikhail.

“You can put the weapon away now,” Mikhail said darkly. “I’m not going to do anything to endanger Tori. If she’s really in there, then you have plenty of leverage and you don’t need that weapon.” That and Mikhail
really
didn’t like the idea of Stanislas having his finger on a trigger. The man was already a ticking time bomb.

“You don’t know what’s coming,” Stanislas said cryptically. “Now get out of the vehicle and let’s walk inside real nicely.”

“Okay.”

Mikhail exited with his hands lifted into the air. Twilight was just falling, and the sky was indigo with pinpricks of light that would eventually become stars. Mikhail had the odd thought that it was too beautiful outside on this fall evening for something so incredibly horrible to be going on right beneath his nose. It was like déjà vu. He and Ivana had been playing. Dinner had filled the air with beautiful scents of home and warmth. Then someone had burst into his world and destroyed it.

Mikhail spun around quite suddenly, facing Stanislas and looking grim. He well understood that this could be his last moment on earth if Stanislas decided he’d had enough.

Mikhail stared his boss straight in the eye. “Did you order my mother and sister killed?”

“Does it really matter?” Stanislas waved his gun airily. “You are so obsessed with finding out the truth. No? Fine! Your mother and sister have been dead long years. Since before you became a man. Their deaths served as a warning. It kept your father from betraying me. He knew then that I could take whatever I wanted from him without his consent and right under his nose. He wanted to take you far away from me, but I wouldn’t allow it.” Stanislas actually laughed with almost demonic glee. “I wanted you close. I needed him to know that if I wished it, I could kill you too. At any time.”

Mikhail was sick, absolutely sick. Tori had been right. In fact, his wife had been dead on about a lot of things. It was just too bad that he wouldn’t get the chance to let her know he believed her.

Mikhail swallowed back the bile that threatened to overwhelm him. “Where is my wife? Where’s Tori?”

“Closer than you think.” Stanislas waved at the warehouse. “In fact, she should be inside by now, I think.”

“You
think
?” Mikhail wondered what was really happening. There were an awful lot of players on the board.

Stanislas prodded Mikhail in the back with the gun. Mikhail threw a baleful glance over one shoulder and then started walking toward a man door set into the side of the warehouse. The place looked derelict. A few pallets were piled in the alley to the right of the entrance, and there was a loading dock on the left. The exterior lights were beginning to flicker to life. The orange glow cast the entire place in an eerie, sinister light.

“Open the door,” Stanislas ordered.

Mikhail obeyed. He had no choice. If Tori was in there, he needed to get inside and hopefully get them both out alive. Mikhail had no idea how long it would take Dimitri to track them down. His friend was good at running down leads, but Mikhail had never seen this warehouse on any of Stanislas’s invoices or business ledgers. The place obviously wasn’t his, which meant he wasn’t working alone.

The gun prodded Mikhail forward, and he stepped through the doorway. Stanislas yanked the door closed behind them, and Mikhail found himself in a huge warehouse. The drafty space was frigid, and there was a prisoner hanging from a chain suspended from the ceiling.

“Tori,” Mikhail breathed.

To his relief, she squirmed around in search of something. She must have heard the sound of the door opening and closing. That mean she was still coherent and functioning. Mikhail was relieved first, and mad as hell next.

“How
dare
you do this to my wife!” Mikhail snarled at Stanislas.

Stanislas actually looked confused. The gun drooped in his hand. “I didn’t do that!”

“That would be me.”

Mikhail watched in shock as Antonin Orlov strolled into view. It made absolutely no sense. Stanislas was working with Orlov? He
hated
the Orlovs. Unless it was all an act and the old man was more diabolical than paranoid.

“What are you doing here?” Stanislas shrieked.

The intensity of Stanislas’s response and his complete loss of control made Mikhail realize that Orlov and Stanislas were
not
on the same team. Stanislas was now waving the weapon in emphatic circles while he spun around and moaned in Russian about traitors that needed to die.

“Hey, old man!” Antonin shouted. “What the hell is your problem? You’re going to shoot someone!”

As if Antonin had been reading the future, Stanislas’s gun went off, and Mikhail and the other goons in the warehouse hit the ground. There was shouting and screaming and then another wild shot as Antonin tried to grab the weapon out of Stanislas’s hand.

Mikhail gathered himself and prepared to sprint toward Tori. He had to use this diversion and get her free. This was the perfect moment to get away. He could still hear the two lifelong adversaries shouting and arguing over the weapon and pretty much anything else. Antonin was roaring at Stanislas that he was a wife murdering bastard, and Stanislas was just screaming the word “traitor” repeatedly.

Leaping up, Mikhail bolted toward Tori. He didn’t even try to unshackle her. Instead, he wrapped his arms around her slender frame and lifted her up and off of the hook. She was limp in his arms, but she rested her face against his chest.

“I knew you’d come,” she whispered.

Mikhail was already headed toward the door. “Let’s get the hell out of here before this gets worse.”

One more shot rang out through the warehouse, but it hadn’t come from Stanislas’s gun. Everyone froze, and Mikhail watched in stunned silence as Alexei sauntered through the doorway holding his own weapon at the ready.

“Now that we’re all here,” Alexei said smoothly. “I think it’s time we get a few things straight.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

“You?” Stanislas wailed, his voice high pitched and so grating that Tori wanted to clap her hands over her ears. Stanislas pointed at Alexei. “You invited this dog?”

Alexei looked from his father to Antonin Orlov and smirked. “Papa, you really must get over this obsession you have with the Orlovs. They aren’t conspiring against you. Nobody is. And you could live a very peaceful life if you would stop believing that everyone was out to get you.”

“They are!” Stanislas argued shrilly. “Look at all of these people!” He waved toward Tori and Mikhail, Orlov, and the men—who were presumably working for Orlov. Stanislas pointed at Alexei. “You say there are no traitors trying to take what is mine, and yet I am standing in a whole room full of them.”

“But you’re the one who made them that way, Papa!” Alexei said, his expression suggesting that he was getting more than a little irritated. “Nobody tried to take you out. But you’ve been trying to murder anyone who might be considered your successor since the first time you declared an heir. I know. I did some research after you turned on me.”

“Turned on you?” Stanislas put a hand to his chest, looking affronted. “You were plotting my murder!”

Orlov rolled his eyes. “My God, is he always like this?”

“Yes!” Tori, Mikhail, and Alexei all answered at the same time.

“Can we just shoot him and get it out of the way?” Orlov pulled the slide back on his weapon to put a bullet in the chamber.

Tori’s gut tightened until she felt an almost undeniable urge to vomit. She pressed her face to Mikhail’s chest and inhaled deeply of his familiar and comforting scent. That was the only bonus of this entire situation. Nobody had yet seemed to notice that Mikhail was holding her in his arms. They weren’t so far from the exit. If the others began to squabble, she and Mikhail would be long gone.

“It’s all right, my love,” Mikhail murmured. “It’s going to be all right.”

Tori could hear his heart beating slow and steady beneath her ear. It helped to center her. Her wrists were so sore, her hands and arms throbbing as the blood settled into her limbs and started circulating once again. Had Mikhail put her down, she would have fallen. He seemed to realize this on some level, because he was making no moves to set her on her own feet.

“We’re not going to kill him yet,” Alexei told Orlov, gesturing to Stanislas. “He has to admit a few things first.”

“What?” Orlov rolled his eyes like a bratty teenager. “He’s bat shit crazy. What could he possibly have to say?”

Alexei raised his weapon and began walking toward his father. “He could tell us who killed Maria Orlov Vasiliev.”

“Alexei, my son,” Stanislas stammered. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I know you killed her!” Alexei snarled. “She was the only mother I had, and you took her from me!”

Tori felt her heart seize as she realized that what Alexei was saying had more truth to it that she’d ever considered. Maria Orlov Vasiliev had been Tori’s mother, yes. But she had also been more of a mother to Alexei than Tori had realized. Alexei had been ten when Stanislas married Maria. Tori had only been an infant a few months old. Even in her journals it had been apparent that Maria had taken the motherless boy under her wing and loved him as though he were her own.

“Alexei,” Tori called out weakly. “It doesn’t matter who killed her. She’s gone. Just leave it be.”

“No!” Alexei shouted. “He murdered her, and he’s going to tell me how. I want to know the truth!”

“I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t!” Stanislas was actually jumping up and down and stomping his feet like a petulant child. “It was the Orlovs. They did it!”

It was Antonin’s turn to look incensed. “My father didn’t murder his own baby sister! He loved Maria! My father always maintained that you either put the gun in her hand and forced her to shoot herself, or you simply had it done.”

“I—I don’t...” Stanislas lowered his gun hand and used it to scratch his head. “She was in her bedroom. She was writing in a little black book.”

Tori watched in fascination as her stepfather began pacing large concentric circles. Why was she only now realizing that when he didn’t do this he began to get agitated. He actually seemed to
need
to do this in order to remember! He was scratching the side of his head with the muzzle of the gun. It was so obviously absentminded that it was as if he didn’t even realize that he was doing it.

“I loved her, you know.” Stanislas looked up suddenly, pegging Antonin Orlov with a hard stare. “You and your father never believed that.”

Tori inhaled sharply. “I believe you.”

“What?” Stanislas gazed at her as though he were seeing her for the first time. “Tori, why are you all chained up? That wasn’t the plan, you know?”

Tori ignored that for the moment. It wasn’t important, but this was. “I believe that you loved my mother. You loved her as much as you were capable of loving anything. But her heart already belonged to another man, didn’t it?”

“Your stupid, stinking father,” Stanislas said bitterly. “He was dead, and Maria still loved him more than she loved me.”

“Did you go to her room that night and find her writing about my father?” Tori prodded. “Is that what you were saying?”