Page 35 of The Games of Madmen

I’m sorry. I can’t live this life.

I need to start fresh.

Don’t look for me.

I don’t want to be found.

“Three Mississippi…”

Chapter Eleven

Zahkar

“Are we going to get to the club or do you want to brood some more,” Rodion says, knocking back the rest of the vodka in his tumbler.

I lean forward on the hotel sofa and reach for the bottle of our favorite liquor. After I refill his glass, I pour more into my own. The bottle is damn near empty. When we ran intoher, we’d both been in a fucking mental state. I had to take three sleeping pills just to knock myself out when we got back to the hotel.

As much as I wanted to scream and demand to know why she left us, I bit my tongue.

I'm used to the women in my life leaving me…

She’d been so damn beautiful, even more so than I remembered, standing in that club. The tears streaming down her cheeks looked real. But that makes no sense. You’re not allowed to cry when you’re the bitch who left us.

Fuck her.

“Yeah, fuck her,” Rodion grunts, holding his glass up.

I blink away my rage and wonder how much of my inner thoughts I actually voiced. Pain lances through my chest causing me to rub at the center as though I can make it go away.

He may not have been looking for her, but I was relentless. I even had our private investigator attempting to track her down behind his back, but the search yielded nothing. There were no credit card transactions, no bank activity, and no passport stamps revealing her whereabouts. It felt like chasing shadows. Little did I know, she had been right under our noses with Viktor, exactly where we had sent Vika, hidden in plain sight.

I feel like a fucking idiot.

“Why here?” I mutter. “Why here of all the fucking places on the planet?”

“Because,” my brother says with a snort. “Life’s a cunt.”

I suck down the cold vodka and slam my glass on the table. “Viktor never once mentioned her in our meetings.”

“It’s just business. Why would he bring her up?” he growls. “He doesn’t know what she was to us.”

“So what’s the plan now?”

“We’ve finalized the deal on the club and now we implement our plans. Nothing has changed.”

Everything has changed.She’shere.

“We ignore her and show her she lost the best thing that ever happened to her.” He shrugs. “I can see why someone would leave me, but not you, Z. It’s unforgivable.”

Ignore her.

Satisfying for mere mortals.

Not for Rodion and I, and he knows it.

She owes us so much more than a damn note and tears.

“It doesn’t feel like enough,” I grumble, scrubbing my palm across my face in frustration.