Chapter Thirty-Six
“Calm down,” Dom ordered. My hands were around Alex’s throat, and his face was starting to turn blue. He had a head wound, and the blood was still trickling out of the wound and on to my hand. It was like I was having an out of body experience as my hands strangled the life out of my cousin.
Dom’s hands pulled me away, at least they tried. “He’s the only person who knows where she might be!” he hollered.
His words caused me to loosen my grip just enough for Alex to break my hold. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he wheezed out. He started coughing as he doubled over in an attempt to catch his breath. “You could have killed me.”
Dom stood between us. His large form served as a barrier between Alex and myself. Not that my brother’s body was going to stop me. Nothing was. I needed to hurt something, and Alex was my target.
“Where the fuck is my wife?” I yelled. Dom reached out and grabbed me. He attempted to push me further back, but I wasn’t budging.
Alex had come back to the house, his head bleeding, and Ivy nowhere to be found. “You were supposed to be protecting her!”
My breathing was coming out in short pants as my panic grew.
“I told you,” Alex said. “Her father got the jump on me.”
I lunged forward once more, but Dom grabbed me. “Let’s take a breath here,” he said.
I didn’t want to take a breath. I wanted my cousin to pay for the fact that my wife wasn’t in my house, where she should have been. “You’ve been undermining me since that first night at the club. You’ve got your head so far up your ass that you can’t see the danger you put Ivy in.”
Alex was still coughing, but the color was returning to his cheeks. “She’s with her father,” he reminded me. “It’s not like the Russians took her.”
“A father who hasn’t seen her since she was a little girl.” When I realized that Ivy’s father was the one who was stalking her, I started digging further and further into the man, and I hadn’t been happy with what I found.
Alex was rubbing at his throat. “She didn’t want to come back here,” he told me. “She’d worked herself into such an upset that she fainted.”
I took a step forward, “And why was that? She was fine this morning.” She had been more than fine. We’d had sex right up until I’d been called away to handle a problem for my brother. There hadn’t even been a hint that something was wrong.
Alex looked away from me, and I immediately knew that he was hiding something. It was his tell. Despite everything, Alex struggled to lie to my face. “What do you know?” I asked. “And think twice about what you say next because if you lie to me, I will make sure that your wife becomes a widow.”
Alex was my cousin, and for years, he’d been my best friend, but I wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of him if I needed to. That was the thing about this life. You soon learned that not all bonds were sacred. My marriage to Ivy was. She’d come through for me when I needed her to, and that loyalty meant something to me.
The fact that I couldn’t imagine my life without her was something I wasn’t ready to explore yet.
“Ivy was at the doctor’s,” Alex said.
I remained quiet even though I felt as though my heart was starting to pound in my chest. “Why?” Dom asked.
“Because she’s pregnant,” Alex said.
The heart that had beat in my chest came to a thudding halt, and I felt my mouth instantly dry. Whatever I expected, it hadn’t been that. Ivy had been ill for the past week. I thought she might have had a stomach virus, but now, it all made sense.
“And she was running?” Dom asked.
Alex nodded. There was a sadness in his eyes that I didn’t want to examine too closely. If I did, I would have to consider why it was there, and doing so, would cause me to consider things that Ivy had pointed out about my own upbringing.
“She didn’t say much, but she was freaking out. She didn’t want to come back to the condo. She was running when we ran into her father.”
My anger was white hot. This new knowledge changed things. Ivy wasn’t just missing now, so was my unborn child.
“Her father said she’d fainted when she saw him.”
I furrowed my brow. “What? And you just left her there?” I knew that I was going to regret my decision to put Alex in charge of Ivy’s protection, but I had thought it was because my cousin was going to overstep. I never expected that he would put her in danger.
“I didn’t just leave her.” He gestured to his head. “He hit me with a bike chain.”
I snorted. “Was that when you realized he wasn’t on the up and up?” I asked, sarcastically.