Page 192 of Nothing More

“No,” Misha said sadly. “I guess you aren’t that. Not anymore. Not after what you did.”

“WhatIdid? What–” He bit his tongue, and subsided. Misha was manipulating him, working him into a state on purpose. He exhaled, and said, “You weren’t here. I was all alone, in a new country, working for an idiot who was going to get us all killed. I did what I had to. And I’m not sorry for it.” He shook his hair off his face and let Misha see the challenge in his eyes.

It was a stupid move, given he was strapped to a chair. But he’d given up; if they were going to kill him, then that’s what they’d do. Better to convince Misha to put a bullet between his eyes than submit to the machinations of Rosovsky.

But Misha continued to watch him, head tilted, searching and sad.Poor Toly. Poor, stupid Toly. “I wish things could have been different. That you’d been able to stay in Moscow, back then. Spent more time learning from me. You would have been a wonderful general, once I’d removed Andrei.” He stood. “I used to think that. But now…now I don’t know. I don’t think you ever had the stomach for all of this.”

It didn’t seem possible that those words could inflict pain, but they did. Was he ever going to stop being the twelve-year-old boy standing on the edge of the rug? Handed a knife a told to kill his first man?

“You’re like Andrei, then.” His voice was thick, choked-sounding, and there was nothing to be done about that. “You don’t believe in second chances.”

“I don’t believe in trusting your plans to people who don’t share them,” Misha countered.

Toly tipped his head back toward the door. “What about him? You trust theButcher’s son?”

“I trusted him to find you and flush you out. Our needs aligned, in that respect. And now I trust him to hold you, while I work on your president.” He fished a phone from his pocket. “And I trust you to behave while we call him, or Grigory will come in here and hold you down.”

Toly closed his eyes a moment. The problem wasn’t that he was here, or that “Grigory” could hold him down, make him hurt, make him scream. It was that Maverick, loyal and noble and all the things that Toly had never been, would try to get him back, no matter the cost. Would agree to a meeting with Misha, and any meeting at all, no matter how much backup they had, could turn disastrous fast. Unlike Misha, the Lean Dogs didn’t believe in leaving a man behind.

He opened his eyes, and said, “How will you know if I’m cooperating? Maybe we have a code word, and they’ll just leave me here.”

A quick, close-mouthed smile. “No. That isn’t the way your club does things.”

Damn it.

“Are you ready?” He waggled the phone.

The door opened again, and this time it was Rosovsky’s too-eager stride that crossed the floor. His cruel hands that clamped down onto Toly’s shoulders and dug in until muscle and bone shifted.

Toly gritted his teeth and bore it. Nodded. Didn’t ask how Misha knew Maverick’s number, but kicked himself all over again for ever going along with this ruse to begin with. Howstupid. How horriblysentimental.

Misha put it on speaker, and the line rang once, twice. Maverick’s, “Hello?” was undercut with caution. He sounded ready, poised on the edge of his seat somewhere.

“Hello,” Misha said, pleasantly, and Toly knew that Mav would clock the accent straight off. “Am I speaking with Maverick?”

Pause. Rustle like paper on the other end, and Maverick’s voice, hard and sure. “Yeah. Which must mean I’m talking to Mikhail Morozov, right?”

The faintest twitch of Misha’s brow evidenced his surprise. He hadn’t expected Toly to share any intel with Raven, then, and that was the only way Maverick would be ready and sure and armed with Misha’s name.

Toly was filled with a sudden, fierce affection for her, a love sharp as a blade, as painful as the hunger pangs gnawing at his empty stomach.

Misha said, “That’s right.” His hesitation had been momentary, but Toly hoped Maverick – or whoever was crowded around the phone with him – could read a beat of doubt in it. “I have Toly here with me.” He held the phone forward.

Toly sighed and said, “It’s a trap, Maverick. All of it.”

He was braced and ready for the blow that landed against the back of his head – less so for the way it sent him reeling forward against his bonds, dry-heaving as a fresh wave of dizziness gripped him. That concussion wasn’t getting any better, huh?

Through the ringing in his ears, he heard Maverick’s voice, but couldn’t decipher the words.

Rosovsky gripped his hair and jacked his head back. The cold kiss of a knife blade landed on his throat.

“I think he knows better than to say something like that again,” Misha was saying, frowning at him. “Right, Toly?”

Toly didn’t answer, the knife pressing a warning against his windpipe.

His ears popped, hearing sharpening suddenly. On the other end of the connection, he heard Mav’s voice say something that sounded as if it had been thought up by someone else; he had a sudden, wild mental picture of Devin and Tenny scribbling things on flashcards and holding them up for Mav to read. “Yeah, look, I know what you’re doing. You’ve got my guy, you’ve got the cops after him with your little stolen DNA trick, but you know the cop on the take so this can go one of two ways. I cooperate, give you whatever it is you’re after, along with some kinda promise that we won’t ever, ever cross Kozlov again, cross our hearts, hope to die. Then, you make the charges go away, Toly disappears out of the NYPD database, and we’re all copacetic.

“But if I don’t cooperate, you turn Toly over to the cops, he’s doing twenty-five to life in Sing Sing, and you and I still have beef.