Page 38 of The Brutal Arrangement (The Ivanov Syndicate #2)

DAMON

I hung up from the call with the guard from the security team.

John frowned, watching me as I put my phone back into my pocket.

It was weird to be questioned about Lucy’s phones like that. She hadn’t touched that old one and had shown no interest in it at all.

Even if she had hinted at wanting to keep it since I presented her the new one with the new number, she could still be trusted.

We’d gotten closer. We’d talked and shared too much for me to have an inkling of doubt about her.

And if I thought about it deeply enough, I was convinced that we loved each other.

I felt the care and affection she gave me.

Every day, she made me feel complete with her at my side.

And while I struggled to verbalize my emotions or let them stay within me for long instead of denying them and being numb, what I felt for her had accumulated so quickly into what had to be love.

“What’s up?” John asked, so used to working with me on this hunt for Nik that he could probably read me well.

“I’m not sure,” I replied, grateful that he was inquiring. It would help to have someone else’s opinion about Anton calling Lucy and stirring up trouble like this.

He stepped closer while the other men waited a few feet away, on alert and looking out for trouble.

“Anton Kozlov called Lucy. Her old phone, not the one you gave her.”

He furrowed his brow and nodded, listening instead of reacting. This man was one of the best.

“He said that he wanted his maid back and that he sent her to us to spy on us. But her time was up because they wouldn’t want to keep her.”

John narrowed his eyes, glancing up at me as if he was expecting a punchline to a joke. “What the fuck?”

I nodded. “Yeah. My thoughts exactly. What the fuck?”

“That’s not…” He shook his head, rejecting this like I was. “That’s not true. He didn’t send Lucy here. From all I’ve gotten from the men who could spy on them, Anton has been in Greece and unaware that Lucy took Katerina’s spot as the bride. He’s clueless.”

“Unless he’s returned and he can see that Katerina hasn’t married anyone.”

“Yeah, maybe he’s back. But…” He rubbed the back of his neck, perplexed and pissed off like I was.

“But why make up this bullshit that he sent her to us to spy on us?”

He shrugged. “Maybe to stir up shit like this? Maybe he’s counting on her phone and calls being tracked so that he could sow this seed of doubt and try to make her look like a traitor or a liar.”

I growled, not even seeing this hallway anymore. In my mind’s eye, I was taken back to the memory of being held hostage with my brothers for almost two months. Then, worse, the memories of being beaten and led out to that courtyard where we’d be shot, execution style.

“Sounds really fucking familiar,” I said.

“Like Beatrice?” he guessed.

“Yeah, like Beatrice.” Years after my brothers and I were saved because of an anonymous tip that someone called in, we learned that Father had faced multiple accounts of rumors like that, suggestions of Beatrice being unloyal.

“It’s not going to change anything,” John predicted. “Because we know Lucy is loyal. She’s not a liar or a spy.”

I nodded. “Of course. Of course, she isn’t.” I wasn’t stating that because I loved her but because it was a fact. She’d proven it. I had no grounds to doubt her. “Maxim knows that too.”

“And the men at the building do too. We all do.”

I nodded, but something bothered me about Anton going so far to lie about this situation. Perhaps John was hitting the nail on the head. There was a very good chance that Anton was just trying to stir up trouble, maybe as belated retaliation for his niece to have thwarted his plans.

“I don’t like this,” I admitted.

“Then go home.” John dipped his chin. He wasn’t ordering me. He would never. But he saw how bothered and distracted I was. “I can handle this if you’d like. Or I can stand by until Maxim and Saul can come after they’re done with the others.”

“That’s not a bad idea.” The only good idea I could latch on to was going to Lucy and seeing with my own eyes that she was all right. If news of this call reached her, the last thing she needed was the stress about anyone potentially revisiting the worries of her being a spy or enemy.

She couldn’t be the enemy. She was my wife. The mother of my child.

“Does Maxim know about this?” John asked.

I shook my head. “No. I just got the call and it sounded like he was instructed to inform me straightaway. Hell, maybe that was the standing order.” Lucy was supposed to be mine to control and question. But she turned out to be the one for me to protect and love instead.

“Go ahead,” he suggested again. “I’ve got this.”

“I will. Thank you.” I patted him once on the back as I walked away, backpedaling to give him one last wave. “Contact me if you need to.”

“Don’t worry about it. Go. Go check on her.”

I sighed, nodding to myself as a couple of men gave me questioning looks. They flanked me on the way back to the car, and the driver didn’t challenge me about the order to get home as soon as possible.

The moment we pulled up to the building, I ran out, anxious just to see Lucy.

This was how a woman could be a fatal distraction.

With too much of my concern concentrated on her, I could be diverted from something else going on.

If an enemy saw how much Lucy mattered to me, they could use that against me. Against the family.

As soon as I entered the building and saw my father snarling and pacing, livid, I worried that something else was going on here.

That the danger wouldn’t present from outside the family.

But from within.

He turned, spotting me. His chest heaved as he breathed through his anger. Stalking up close to me, he lifted his hand as if to strike out at me.

I’d never hit my father. He was my father . Before the poisoning changed him, he was my boss. The one I’d always respect and obey.

But this wasn’t the same man. He closed in on me, and the second I saw his eyes, so unfocused and wild, I knew he wasn’t even in control of himself.

Painful aches hit me that he might not be aware of who he was anymore.

Whatever was bothering him wasn’t something we could change.

This was a disease of the mind, similar to what Lucy probably had to witness with her mother. And it was fucking heartbreaking.

“Grigory. No!”

A guard rushed up, panicked that my father was about to hit me hard.

I held my hand out to stop him from interfering, catching my father by the forearm and turning him into a simple lock. He was weaker from being poisoned, then in a coma and sedated. While he wasn’t a small man, I was bigger and fitter.

“Stop,” I said as calmly as I could.

He didn’t listen, fighting me and struggling to break free.

“You go and kill that whore!” he shouted. Spittle flew from his mouth as he repeated it three more times, louder each round.

“I order you to go and kill that fucking spying bitch!”

I held him, tense at his choice of words. If I hadn’t just heard Anton’s voice in a message saying something about Lucy being a spy and referencing her with that crude label, I wouldn’t have wanted to snap.

But he’d said the same thing. My father was telling me—no, instructing me—to kill her?

“What are you talking about?” I demanded it in such a loud roar that it seemed to silence my father like it was a sonic boom blasting through the air.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I shouted, shaking him for good measure to snap him out of this eerie stillness he’d shifted to.

“Damon.”

I whipped my head up to watch my grandmother stagger into the room.

With my father facing forward as I held him securely against my chest so he wouldn’t hurt himself in trying to strike me, we both witnessed her enter the room.

She was older, but fit. Nothing should explain her staggering like she’d rushed and was out of breath.

The closer she came, the clearer I saw the redness and swelling on her face.

“What the fuck is going on?”

“He…” She shook her head, glancing warily at Father. “He…”

“Did he hit you?” In a brief moment of sickening confusion, I dreaded that Father had meant my grandmother when he accused a woman of being a spying bitch. But that didn’t make sense either.

“Kill that fucking Kozlov spy,” Father growled, his voice so low that I almost missed it. “I am ordering you, son, to kill that spying bitch.”

Lucy!

My instincts were right. He must have somehow heard Anton’s message and he believed it.

“Hold him.” I shoved my father toward the guard, giving him a lethal stare that suggested he not challenge me. It wasn’t easy to witness our former boss so weak and clueless, confused and crazed. But this was a matter of life or death—the life of my love.

“Where is she?” I yelled at my grandmother, having no doubt my father had hit her as well.

“I tried…” She hurried to catch up to me. “I tried to reason with him, and he struck out?—”

“Where is she?” I screamed.

“Downstairs.”

I tensed, sucking in a deep breath at her reply.

Of all the places in this building where Lucy didn’t belong, that was the first one. She never would fit in the basement where I mutilated and tortured our enemies to get intel. Never!

“I couldn’t tell what was going on,” she said, following me toward the stairs. Fuck the elevator. It’d take too long.

“I heard the commotion of him yelling and accusing her and I just, I was just so confused. I didn’t know what was going on!”

“You know she’s my wife!” I didn’t stop rushing for the door that would take me down. “You know she’s my fucking wife!”

“But can you trust her?”

I skidded to a stop only long enough to glower at her, shocked that she’d ask me something so stupid. She could be a blue blood and act like an idiot about letting others into our family, but she was not keeping me from my wife for a second longer.

Just the thought of her in the basement, in the dungeon, sickened me and pissed me off to a degree of fury I’d never experienced before.

Dashing down the stairs, I hurried with all my might, racing so furiously because even one second was too long for her to be down here, scared and alone.

I slammed open the last door to the dungeon area. One look at the guard down there confirmed that he wasn’t going to hurt her. “Damon, thank fuck you’re here. I was so confused and I didn’t know why Grigory was saying?—”

“Where is she?” I growled, striding toward him.

“In the cleanest cell,” he replied.

“In a fucking cell?” I roared. “You put my wife in a motherfucking cell?”

He didn’t dodge my fist as I hit him, passing him by on my way into the holding cells.

“He insisted.” The man stood, rushing after me. “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t tell what was happening. I told her I wouldn’t let anyone in, and I put the two guards who brought her down in another cell.”

His words faded into the background as I reached the cell where Lucy cowered against the back wall. While the guard unlocked it, I stared at my wife and begged her to forgive me. To see me and know it was okay now.

“Lucy.” I yanked the door back and ran to hold her tight.

“Damon,” she whispered in pure relief as she wrapped her arms around me.

Hugging her so tightly that I feared I’d crush her, I lifted her into my arms to carry her out of here. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. If I knew this was happening, I would’ve stopped it all. I can’t believe this happened.”

“It’s okay,” she said, keeping her face burrowed against my neck, making her voice muffled and shaky.

“It’s not fucking okay,” I argued, carrying her out of the gruesome place she never belonged in.

The only side of my darkness that I ever wanted her to experience was in bed, with my dick deep inside her and her crying out in pleasure.

That was the only way she should know how primally twisted I could be.

Never down here. Never as a prisoner or enemy.

“Damon, how can you trust that?—”

I whirled around at the landing of the stairs, hearing my grandmother’s voice and almost hating her at that moment. “I trust her because I love her! I trust her because she is my wife!”