Page 6 of The Enemy’s Defector (Ivanov Syndicate #3)

NIKOLAI

T hey didn’t stop moving me around. Every other night or so, they’d relocate me. The only constant was the expectation to be beaten. Never to be questioned. Just toted around. Hit and kicked at. Then rinse and repeat.

How much fucking longer will this last?

What’s the goddamn point?

Accumulating injuries would become a problem for me.

Sooner or later, my body would struggle to recover and stay strong enough to last until the next beating.

And the next. And the one after that. While they never pushed me so hard to the extreme that I feared for my life, I felt stuck in a rut of surviving to see another day, staying with it and being cognizant to listen to anything else these captors would reveal.

Now that I had been taken out of the overly heated room and never returned to it, I hoped for another chance encounter with the unmasked man who’d given me a clear sign that he knew what happened the night my father was poisoned. Or both nights.

It was a week later, though, before I saw that man again.

I couldn’t begin to guess if he was just one of those cocky, smug assholes who thought he was invincible or if he was that much of a rebel not to follow his supervisor’s orders.

But he showed his face again. I recognized it.

I could latch on to this degree of familiarity and then wait to learn more.

It was a growing worry that I was being relocated and transported too much, but just spotting this one guy again, I paid attention and wanted to believe I was getting closer to some answers.

“Well, well, well,” he taunted once I was dropped onto the floor of another grimy holding cell. This one wasn’t a furnace. It was damp and chilly, suggesting that I was in another basement level.

“Lookie here. It’s the tough guy again, huh?” His fist found my face, smacking it backward from the impact of his hard jab.

Once more, he did his superior-man routine. Punching and kicking me, he tried to show how big and strong he was to be able to rough me up while I was tied to another chair. As if it was such a challenge to attack a constrained person.

And once more, I did my too-weak-to-speak act, faking my sluggishness and fatigue, as if I were on the fine line between staying awake and conscious or passing out from the pain. It did hurt. It fucking stung and ached to take a beating—again—but it was worth it in the end.

He gave up hitting me when I wasn’t as reactive, no longer flinching or bracing for all his hits just to give him the impression that I was about to pass out.

Afterward, he sat near my chair, drinking and talking with someone on the phone on speaker.

I’d really pulled off an Oscar-worthy performance of being unconscious for him to allow the conversation to be heard aloud.

“The orders are to move him around, not kick his ass,” the small voice said from the device.

I didn’t recognize it. The accent was too clean to identify where the speaker could’ve been from. It sounded like someone who was multilingual, and that wouldn’t help me.

The man sighed. “I know, but?—”

“But nothing, Hayden. The orders are to move him and that’s it.”

Hayden. I knew that fucking name. It was his surname, and the only reason it could matter to me was all due to Katerina.

She’d run the sketchy surveillance footage through facial recognition programs she’d hacked into, and she’d matched one of the men spotted near the Ivanov building on the night of my father’s poisoning with that name.

Now, we’re getting somewhere.

Mr. Hayden, you’re a fucking dead man walking. Congratulations.

Even if I didn’t obtain any other intel from this experience of captivity, I could be victorious in having his name. I’d get out and hunt him down to kill him for his part in trying to assassinate my father, the Pakhan of the Ivanov Syndicate.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Hayden replied curtly to whoever he was speaking to. “This ugly fucker’s being moved around all over the place as it is. He’s not going to know where the fuck he is. Or what day it is. No one’s gonna be tracking him after all this.”

I wished I could prove him wrong, that someone saw me being constantly relocated. My guess was that I was being transferred from one holding facility or warehouse to another, but even then, low soldiers and guards would notice a captive being moved.

For a fleeting second, I also wished that I’d never disabled my phone to eliminate tracking.

No. No tracking. If my brothers could send men after me as an official retrieval operation, then they’d show up too soon before I could get all the answers that I felt desperate to find.

Just a little longer.

Endure it and tough this shit out.

It’ll all be worth it.

It had to be worth it. Because those days and weeks of hunting for the enemy who wanted to take out Father had been so frustrating and fruitless, with dead ends and no direction, that I wanted to do whatever I could to figure out the mastermind behind this.

“And really,” Hayden said, using that laughing, cocky tone again, “it’s so fucking easy. It’s only a matter of time before we can get another one of them.”

My blood ran cold. Anger kept me heated up and nearly vibrating with an instant need to kill at what he said, but I refused to show that I was awake and listening. I had to linger under this guise to get all the intel I could.

But the mere thought of this independent contractor going after any member of my family? ‘

No fucking way.

Over my dead body will you harm my family.

I grappled with the guilt that Father had been poisoned. That was a hard mistake for all of us to get over. Just hearing the slight hint of danger aimed at my brothers was enough to turn me into an enraged beast ready to slaughter anyone in my way.

Protecting my family was something that I’d never slack on.

“We could kill this motherfucker and then go get another one?—”

“No, Hayden,” the man on the other end said. “That’s unacceptable. You follow the orders. Do you understand me? You don’t get to go rogue and do your own thing. You are hired to follow one fucking order and that’s the only thing you’ll do, dammit.”

“Calm down. Jesus.” Hayden huffed a weak laugh.

“I’m not saying I’m going to kill this bastard or anything.

I’ll do what they expect. But you can’t deny that this shit is taking forever.

We could be doing so many more jobs in the meantime.

We’re stalling, moving this asshole around, playing games and shit, but if we just killed him and moved on to the next hit, that’s more money and power to us. Right?”

“Wrong,” the caller continued, instructing Hayden not to deviate from the order they’d taken.

It proved that these guys were independents, but at no time did they tell me what I needed to know. They didn’t reveal who’d hired them to take me.

Hayden eventually took his call outside the room, leaving me alone. In the silence, save for the sound of water dripping somewhere in this dark room, I neared panic.

What if Hayden is too independent from this group he seems to be affiliated with?

What if another contractor tries to get Maxim? Or Damon? Saul?

Fuck. What about Sloane? Maxim had only just started his future with his fiancée.

But even that first step of being engaged to her and knocking her up was a step toward putting her in harm’s way.

From what it sounded like, Sloane hadn’t enjoyed an easy life until she met him at the strip club where she’d worked.

Maxim had killed men who’d tried to hurt her, too.

If these contractors were hired to take her—to threaten her life and the life of the unborn baby she carried right now…

“Fuck.” I whispered it and slowly opened my eyes to peer at the room I was in.

I didn’t want my brother to be stressed about protecting her when he was already overwhelmed with being the boss of the family.

While I was only starting to get to know Sloane, I would protect her as my future sister-in-law.

That was how fiercely protective we were as Ivanovs.

That was what the family stood for. Security with power.

No one was in the room, and without any hint of someone watching me in here, I opened my eyes fully to mark the scant details of this space. Taking note and being aware of my surroundings was a habit. As a spy, I wanted to leave nothing to guesswork or lower my guard.

While nothing showed as a threat in this space, I felt the beginning stirring of an adrenaline rush anyway. I perceived a threat just from what Hayden had said.

What if they take my brothers?

It wouldn’t be the first time. We’d all been raised to expect danger at any time.

We were targets, the brothers of the most powerful Mafia organization.

Three of us had been taken when we were children and almost shot execution-style.

It was a defining moment for us as boys, a period of maturing too soon and understanding how critical it was to be in charge and have power, not overtaken and weak.

If these contractors were ordered to go after my brothers, then we wouldn’t be held together, like before.

I had no doubt my brothers could overcome hardships and tough out being captive.

We’d all trained to expect the worst and be physically and mentally prepared for hell.

Still, I’d hate for them to go through it on their own and not be able to lean on me for help.

Sloane would be at more of a risk.

I wasn’t belittling her or being sexist. Maxim insisted that she was a strong woman, but I could see that for myself. She had attitude. She was tough. Being his fiancée and the mother of his child, the family’s only heir in the next generation, put her at more risk than usual.

Enemies would see her as collateral. Or they’d treat her as a way to distract Maxim. No matter how strong or courageous she was, she would always be a liability to watch out for.

Just like when Father was married to Beatrice, my mother, she was a liability that he had to be wary of.

She had turned against him, though, proving to be a threat to us all.

Because of her affairs and infidelity, she’d nearly ruined the entire family.

By sleeping with the wrong rival, she’d fallen too easily into a trap.

It was her fault that Maxim, Nik, and I were taken and nearly killed.

My chest heaved as I let go of a big, deep sigh. Exhaustion fought with the increasing anger that I couldn’t quiet after hearing what Hayden had said.

This is why I can’t have anything with Katerina, either.

I’d been hesitant for years to pursue her.

Our being enemies was the clearest obstacle between us.

But it was also that fear of trusting a woman that reminded me to never start anything with Katerina.

It was that reluctance to add on to my obligations of keeping her safe and preventing her from turning against me or being taken.

I’d already messed up with her by caving to my desire that one night. But that had to be the end of it. That had to be the most I would allow myself to have with her.

If I were to let her be included in my life as more than the daughter of a former friend of the family, when Thomas Kozlov was alive, or if I were to let her enter my life as more than the sexy, sneaky woman who was my one-night stand, I’d need to account for keeping her safe.

At the thought of Katerina and how I’d last seen her, I had to worry again that I’d already complicated her life and compromised her safety. If anyone were to find out that she’d slept with me, that she’d ever helped me when I asked her for help to hack into the surveillance, she’d be targeted.

No. I can’t let her in. She can’t be mine.

It was too twisted to consider now, when I felt like a race had begun to keep my family safe.

So long as I was held captive, I could keep a finger on the pulse of threats aimed at my brothers.

And if I were here and nowhere near the temptation of trying to make Katerina mine, she wouldn’t be a risk that tied to my fate.

Forget about it. She’d never be mine.

That one stolen night we’d shared would have to last me a lifetime, and I’d never regret it.