Page 25 of Ruinous Need

VIKTOR

I SLEEP WITH my arms around Lisette. I’m getting used to the quiet reassurance of having her wrapped in my arms at night. This is going to make it hurt even more when I have to let her go to him.

Selfish bastard I may be, but I won’t risk her entire family just to keep her.

A quiet knock at the door pulls me out of my thoughts. I slip my arms from around her reluctantly.

“Sir. You know I wouldn’t come in unless it was urgent.” Markov’s face is in shadow.

“What is it?”

It’s not like I can sleep, anyway. Not while I think about her meeting with Semyon.

I should have found out what he told her. Instead, I was so blinded by my own rage — my own fear — that I took it out on Lisette.

It won’t matter in a week, I think bitterly.

I may as well deal with business instead of going in circles in my head.

“Merc and Ben are outside. They say they need to speak with you urgently.”

I haven’t spoken to them in weeks. Not since I blew up at them for touching Lisette.

I’m so out of control when it comes to her.

I drag a hand through my hair and pull out a chair. It makes a loud screech against the wooden flooring.

I need to think straight if I’m going to sort out this mess.

“Bring them in.”

Merc flops onto the couch like he owns the place. Like he’s unafraid of me.

“Have you recovered from that bout of insanity, V?”

“Not really.” He chuckles at the look on my face.

“Is she here?” Ben asks, a note of urgency in his voice. I nod my chin upwards. “In my room.”

“V, she’s in danger. So are you, if what we’ve guessed is correct.”

I size them up. They wouldn’t be here, warning me, if they hated me. Or maybe they would, if they were trying to plant false ideas in my head and double-cross me. I push the paranoid thoughts away.

These are my friends. I am not my father.

“What’s going on?”

“I knew I recognized her the first night I met her. I just couldn’t place where. You don’t go to the Council meetings of the Bratva anymore, do you?”

I shake my head. I stopped attending when Semyon assured me he had it under control and that my talents were better used seeking vengeance against the old guard, smoking them out of their hiding places.

Merc and Ben look at each other. “Then you really don’t know. Has Lisette been safe? Who’s been coming after her?”

“The Irish,” I say, careful not to give too much away. “And other people have been looking for her at the dance studio where she used to teach.”

The way they’re looking at me has my hair standing on end, but I will myself to remain calm.

There’s something like a note of sympathy in Merc and Ben’s eyes and I hate it. They’re looking at me like I’m weak, like I’m out of the loop.

“We shouldn’t be telling you this. In fact, we didn’t tell you this.”

Ben gives me a hard look until I agree. “The Don’s son called a meeting tonight.”

“Romeo?” They nod.

Romeo Cavillini. The heir to the Italian mafia. Just waiting around for his dear old dad to kick the bucket.

“Cut to the chase,” I grit out, resisting the urge to pin them against a wall. “Where does Lisette come into it?”

“The men following you. Sniffing around. It’s not just about Semyon and blackmailing him through his fiancée. It’s about her. ” Merc is wringing his hands.

Ben takes over. “I recognized her from the ballet. That’s where Semyon saw her for the first time, don’t you remember?”

I do remember, vaguely. She was performing — Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring . “Keep talking.”

“But he wasn’t alone. It was the bid for unity, to bring peace.

The one that backfired. All of the heads — the Irish mob, the Italian mafia, the Bratva, even the smaller players like the Albanians and the Greeks.

They went to the ballet, sitting in the same box, making deals, jabbing at one another. And Lisette was performing.”

I don’t like where this is going.

“You know how these things are.”

I do. Put the most powerful criminals in the city in a room together and you create the most toxic, dangerous dick-swinging contest imaginable.

“And they’d all been, uh… impressed by Lisette.”

“Impressed.” I clench my hands into fists.

Merc and Ben glance at each other. Ben, normally calm under any conditions, starts to talk faster as though he wants to get this over with and get out of there as soon as possible. He’s always had a good self-preservation instinct.

“They all wanted her, and it almost started a brawl, right in the box after the show finished. Then Semyon proposed a game.”

“Oh God.”

I flop back against the couch and pinch the bridge of my nose. I know Semyon’s games.

“Whoever could secure the ballerina’s hand in marriage, he said, would be king of the city. And everyone would agree to let him run the new shipments of cocaine through New York. Everyone shook on it, the heads of every mob, that night.”

It sets my teeth on edge. That these grown men saw Lisette, achieving her greatest dreams for the first time as an eighteen-year-old ballerina, and decided that was the end of her being her own person. She would just be a prize in some fucking childish game of capture the flag.

I roll my shoulders in an attempt to loosen the tension that’s built up over the course of this conversation.

“He announced he would marry her the following week. Everyone thought he’d rigged the competition somehow. And now, there’s a manhunt on.”

“Everyone wants that prize.”

Obviously. We’re talking billions of dollars in future revenue. That could make one of the smaller players like the Albanians.

This makes Lisette a target for virtually every mob in the city. This is so much worse than I could have imagined.

“We just had a meeting about it,” Merc interjects.

“About what?”

“Well, the meeting was about her.”

“What?” I grit the word out.

“Her whereabouts. The strategy we could use to capture her.”

“We told them nothing,” he says quickly. “We wouldn’t sell you out like that. Or Lisette.”

“But we don’t think you’ve got long.” Ben’s face is serious. “Romeo knows Semyon has Lisette locked up somewhere. The Irish are on the trail, too. I think you’ve got to move fast, Viktor, or they’re going to try and take her.”

“And we… Didn’t think you’d like that,” Merc adds, as if it needs to be said.

“No shit.”

I’m deep in thought for a second. They study my face carefully.

He’s trying to start a war. That’s the only thing that makes sense with this story. He’s given every powerful, violent man the same object to aim for and made sure that he’s the only one in possession of it.

And that object is Lisette.

It churns my stomach, the way he’s using her. But it makes everything that’s been feeling off click into place. Protecting Lisette isn’t about her, really, it’s about Semyon.

I thought it was because he was infatuated with her. It’s because he’s using her.

This sounds precisely like the kind of competition Semyon would have cooked up when we were children. And then he would have rigged it, to make sure he would win.

I wonder how he did it. He’d probably already researched Lisette, gotten to know about her mother’s illness, then planted the idea with the rest of those idiots.

Because the Bratva have the hospitals, the Bratva can wipe the medical bills, the Bratva have the one thing that Lisette would have done anything for: her mother’s health.

This all falls into place with a sickening crunch. Lisette isn’t just being hunted by the Irish. She’s being hunted by everyone.

These are not enemies of Semyon’s. They’re enemies of Lisette’s.

And now, enemies of mine.

Semyon never makes a bet he can’t win. And now, I have to make sure he loses. Or I lose the one person who’s made me feel like I’m not a monster.

“Merc. Ben. I need a favor.”