Page 142 of A Lethal Game of Trust

Now was not the time to be distracted.

Issy shrieked as it took both Roc and Andy to haul a snarling Anton into the room.

When she looked up, there was terror in her hazel eyes. She looked from Roc to me and back. “What are you doing? Why are you here, Roc? Leonie, what the fuck are you… Someone explain—”

“He unarmed?” Dom asked over his sister’s rambles, stepping into my view to protect me from his uncle.

Roc nodded. “He’s clean.”

“Let him go,” Ivan said and it was only after I nodded to Roc that he did as he was told.

“Someone explain!” Issy cried, her nasty glare sent my way. “What is happening here?”

“You shouldn’t be here,” I sighed.

She inhaled deeply, pulled a gun out from her waistband and aimed it at the glass ceiling. “Someone is about to explain right fucking now!”

“This the man?” I asked Firdman, pulling at the collar of his top and pointing my gun at Anton.

Slowly, his gaze followed my aim. He shrugged.

So glancing to check that no one was in the garden, I stretched out my arm and shot the window.

He shuddered, Issy yelped and, in the confusion, there was a scuffle behind me.

“Fucking bitch!” Anton shouted.

But I was preoccupied with Firdman nodding and crying, his eyes locked on Anton. “Yes, yes, it was him! It was him!”

The clocking of guns finally had me whirl around, aiming mine once again at Firdman.

Issy was without hers. Instead, Anton held it, ready to shoot Firdman, but it was too late. He had told me all I needed.

So I took his leverage and pulled the trigger.

I put the man out of his misery, much unlike how my father had struggled on our kitchen floor, gasping for breath.

I’d gotten good at the fatal shot.

Anton didn’t hesitate for a second, inching it to me. “Who do you think you are, bitch? You think you’re going to come in here and kill a Belov in front of the Belovs? That was your plan? God, you’re so stupid. You were meant to be smarter than this.”

He didn’t seem to care that Roc’s gun was inches from his chest or that I wasn’t scared. Though something wild in his bloodshot eyes warned me that fearing him would be logical.

“Why smarter?” Ivan asked. He’d shifted closer to his brother’s back.

Issy was on the floor staring at the body where we had laughed over her birthday breakfast and awful cake just months ago. Only months.

It felt like years.

Anton failed to speak twice, stuttering, but Dom’s eyes darted around the people in the room. “Fucking hell,” he sighed. “You’re a fucked up piece of shit, you know that?”

“What?” Ivan asked, not looking away from his brother.

Anton was breathing heavily as he glared at his nephew.

Dom chuckled. “He wanted Leonie to take you out.”

And I had been so close to it.