Page 16 of Kidnapped By the Boss

“I’m not sure yet. Let me connect with her and then I’ll update you guys in the morning,” I replied. “Thanks. Sorry to bother you.”

“Not a problem. Bye.”

“Bye.”

Katya looked down at me with a lifted eyebrow. “Four hours? That’s all I get before you send out the dogs?”

“Almost five,” I replied quickly. “I started worrying three minutes after you left, so you should actually be very proud of me. Especially since you didn’t keep in touch like you were supposed to.”

“Yeah, I know, but I got lucky early on and got distracted,” she responded. After hooking her hand into the fringe of her blonde wig and pulling it off, she let her brown hair loosen and hang down her shoulders. She came over and reached down for Sascha and I relinquished him to her. “Spokoynoy nochi, moy milyy mal’chik,” she said in a sweet tone.

“You said something about ‘baby boy’,” I said. “I know that.”

She snickered. “I did.” The way she looked at Sascha was my favorite thing in the world. It was so clear in the warmth in her eyes that she loved him every bit as much as I did.

He was our entire world.

“Hehad a good night,” I told her. “How about you?”

When she looked up at me, she had a frown on her face. “Well, I’d gotten pretty good information on a few of the places where The Wreckers spend their time, and I was thinking that our plan could be to capture one of the underbosses and chop The Wreckers at the knees. The person I spoke with told me thatno onemeets The King that he doesn’t want to meet. It sounds like they intentionally recruit outside their base for that reason.”

There was a tone to Katya’s voice that made me ask, “And then something happened?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was on my way home, and The King made himself known.”

I recoiled a bit. “What does that mean?”

She took a deep breath and said, “It was the guy Annie thought it was. The man from the dry cleaners.”

“So he’s had his eyes on you since then?” I asked. “I don’t like that.”

“Yeah, me either.”

“So how are you standing here?” I asked. “Did he put up a fight? Did you escape?”

“Neither,” she replied. “He asked me to be his Queen, and when I told him to fuck off, he let me leave without an issue. He knew who I was, though. He called me Mrs. Costello.”

I was silent for a long time after that. This guy was supposed to be the new big bad in organized crime right now. For him to at least know that Katya was my wife, if not more involved in my empire for the fact that she was running espionage for me, there was no reason for him not to kill her on the spot, or at least attempt to.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said finally.

She shook her head. “No, it doesn’t. And it was kind of terrifying the way it happened. He stopped my ride home right in the middle of the street and just got out, totally unarmed. He asked me to be his Queen and I said no. He said the same thing he said to me in the dry cleaners. The exact same words. ‘I respect a rejection. Thank you for your time.’ And then he just left. I have a really bad feeling about it, Vincent. He’s not the same as the others we’ve seen. There’s something different and incredibly scary about this guy.”

The look on Katya’s face was incredibly unsettling. She was the daughter oftheVladimir Petrov, easily one of the most horrifying people I’d ever met in my life. Even though she eventually ended his life, I never really stopped having the occasional nightmare about him. He nearly crippled my father’s empire with a single deal gone wrong, a plan that would have probably succeeded had Katya and I not found a common ground.

So for her to be as spooked by this guy as she appeared to be gave me a really bad feeling.

“So, what? You think we need to go a different route to deal with them?” I said.

She took a deep breath. “I don’t think the plan we have now is going to cut it. I’m not sure about these idiots he has doing his work, but I get the sense he’s using them as bait. If we attack them, we’ll be falling right into his hands. I didn’t even realize I spent theentirenight in an establishment he has control of. We thought that they were just some young, reckless idiots, but this guy… he’s a different caliber. We need to take our time planning this out, and we need to proceed with caution.”

“Take our time?” I said. “We were going to take care of this tomorrow. We don’t have time.”

Her eyes met mine, and all of her sadness washed over me and deflated me. “I’m so sorry, Vince. I think we should wait to go on our honeymoon.”