Page 52 of Blind Devotion (Letters of Ruin #1)

Back in Lyon, Persetta slept peacefully in the presidential suite bedroom.

Her lips were slightly parted, her chest rising and falling without a care.

Her hair was spread out in an arc around her.

She’d chosen to keep the blonde hair melted into her black roots with what she called a balayage.

It was a new her, different from what we both used to know, just like her eyes and their scars.

Beautiful, all of her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

There was nothing I would change about her. She was my perfect woman as long as she never left. It was my responsibility to never give her reason to, and yet I’d almost lost her again because of my own stupidity. That ended now.

When she woke up, we would talk. In the meantime, the Russian situation needed to be dealt with.

I shut the door to the bedroom and met Erel, Michel, and Jerome in the living room. They whispered amongst themselves, picking at platters of cheeses, smoked salmon, and a charcuterie board that room service dropped off when we arrived.

“Alizé?” I asked, wrapping a slice of salami around a pickle.

“Checked into a junior suite down the hall.”

“Good. What news? Did the police pick up Leontyev?”

“No,” Erel stated gruffly. “The bastard was able to slip through their fingers. Our contacts said they caught two Russians, but they’re lower-tier soldiers.”

“Michel, check in with Franc. See what his techies need from our security to quicken the search before the bastard boards a plane back to the States, or worse, Russia.”

It would make this more difficult but not impossible. Nothing really was.

“Not Franc himself?” Michel asked, already dialing my cousin’s phone number from his cell.

“No, he’ll be on something else.” I glanced at Erel. “I want Franc to construct a secure profile and backstory for a billionaire with an axe to grind with Leontyev. He’ll need to go through Endgame’s channels.”

“You want to place a hit on him,” Erel noted.

“That’s a good tactic,” Jerome added.

“I want everything official and sanctioned. No fuckups this time.” From anyone. Including me. “And nothing leading back to us and the Milieu.”

“You heard that, Franc?” Michel put his phone on speaker, placing it onto the coffee table.

“Not a small ask, boss,” Franc stated.

“You’d be bored otherwise.”

“True. How extensive we talking?”

“He’d need to withstand government scrutiny.”

He whistled across the line, and I eyed Erel.

I’d find and kill Leontyev without this, if need be, but that meant opening up the entire Milieu for war.

The Milieu wasn’t an organization like the Italian mafia or the Irish mob, where members were grouped in a strict hierarchy.

It was a mishmash of gangs all across the C?te d’Azur that more or less got along.

I managed them with broad rules and discipline when they stepped out of line.

It wasn’t sustainable long-term to have them all collaborate in a fight, but it would do until one of Endgame’s teams infiltrated his penthouse apartment in New York.

“Can you do it?”

“Yeah, but it’ll take time.” Something beeped across the line.

“Alright, wow. Seems we caught a break. He reserved a room in the same hotel as your sister and girlfriend this morning. One floor down, almost exactly. Must have been monitoring her.” There was a brief pause.

“Wasn’t the one who checked in, but I’ve got security camera facial recognition on him coming in from the service entrance half an hour ago.

He doesn’t look too good. Went straight up. Hasn’t moved since.”

“How many guards?”

“Five. Two in the hallway. Three inside the suite.”

I looked up at Jerome. He shrugged. “Feasible.”

The sun was going to rise in the next three hours. We didn’t have much time before the halls were busy with traffic.

“Layout?”

“It’s a duplex suite. I’ll send you the blueprints.”

“How much time do you need to create our decoy?”

“A few hours at least.”

“You have one.”

“That’s not enough, boss. He’ll just be a cardboard cutout by then.”

“Flesh him out later. I need the basics up and running with a hit request submitted into Endgame so that he can withstand a preliminary inspection in the next hour. You have until Rurik’s body is discovered to make him authentic.”

He huffed with exasperation across the line. “As you say, boss. But please bring me back any electronics you find on them. I want to know how they got into our system.”

“Good thinking,” I said before cutting the line. I tossed Michel his phone back.

Erel chuckled. “Looks like we’re going hunting.”

I nodded, my lips curling. No one hurt my woman and got away with it. Only one little hour to wait.