A creak sounds outside the door. Another follows, and another.
It’s footsteps on the floorboards. Since it’s not coming from the front entrance, I know it’s not Zakh or Malik, so it must be someone else who’s already here.
Readying my gun, I get up and charge through the door. Whoever the fuck is here, and isn’t supposed to be, is going to die a very painful death.
I move out into the hallway, looking around frantically to see who it is but find nothing.
When I turn around, something sharp enters my neck; then there’s a tinging pain that feels like I’m being stung by a bee.
I touch the spot and feel… a fucking dart?
I pull it out and look at the sharp needle at the end, quickly realizing when spots speckle my vision that it’s a tranquilizer. Like the kind our enforcers use when they want to bring people in for interrogation. Before my mind can truly register what’s happening, my arms go numb then limp at my side.
This can’t be an ordinary tranq. I’d be out like a light by now if it were.
This is something else. Something worse.
Ice spreads from my neck to my shoulders then shoots up and down my body.
The gun falls from my hand, along with the dart, and I drop to my knees on the hardwood floor.
Seconds later, I’m completely on the ground and my vision blurs.
Those footsteps sound again, but they sound different this time. Like heels click- clacking against the floorboards.
At first, I’m not sure if I’m thinking that because my brain has turned to mush, but when Mira comes into my view wearing six-inch heels and a white fur coat, I know what I heard was right.
The smile on her face suggests I’m about to receive more answers I won’t like.
But that smile… that sinister smile painted on her thin red lips as she watches what might be my last moments tells me everything I need to know.
It’s like a punch to my gut and truth without words slapping me in the face like the hostile wave of a tsunami. One that devastates my mind when I think of Anastasia. She's supposed to be with Mira.
We both look at the dart, and that smile of hers grows wider, becoming the kind of triumphant a conqueror of nations would wear.
“It’s a special blend I had the labs concoct for me.” Her accented voice is dripping with power. It’s no longer meek like it was months ago when we met and she appeared to be the grieving wife. “I got them to mix Deadly Night Shade along with a lower dose of etorphine and a phenothiazine, just so I could speak to you. I didn’t want you to just hear me, I wanted you to listen.”
“It was you, wasn’t it?” I can barely speak. My mouth is hardly moving as the words spill out.
“Yes. It was me, dear boy. I am the Mark.” She laughs.
“You’re the Mark?” A pang of shock slams into my chest. I thought she was going to say she worked for the Mark. I never expected it to be her.
“Consider yourself lucky. Only a handful of people in my establishment, like Uther, know that. Everyone else assumes I’m a man. A powerful mafia boss with all sorts of wicked ideas up his sleeves. They never expect the psychiatrist, or the woman who does bake sales at her local church, or the organizer of the floral arrangement club at the country club. They certainly would never expect it to be Mira Volkova, wife of the recently departed Evgeni Volkova.”
Fucking hell. I don’t know how I missed this. During my entire time here, I never went soft, not once, but she blindsided me.
“Why would you need to become the Mark? Your family is wealthy.” I can’t understand why she’d need to build an establishment based on shit like human and sex trafficking.
“That wealth was never for me. It was for my husband. The same husband who only married me to please his parents and fulfill his duty to the Knights.” She grinds her teeth, and the vein in her neck tightens. “I sound like I hated him, but I didn’t. Not the way you think. The poison I slipped him wasn’t supposed to kill him either, but Viktor gave him too much. I just wanted Evgeni out of the picture so Viktor could take over. We needed the wealth from the Volkova empire after losing millions in a deal that went wrong.”
“You fucking bitch.” Her, the bitch, and her son. At least my instincts were right about Viktor. He was involved, and she just covered his tracks so everything looked legit and switched the focus to Uther.
“The fucking bitch is what you have to become when you live in a world of villains and monsters who own you. I was promised to your father from birth. Just like Anastasia, my parents bread me to love him. But the difference between us was, I was madly in love with your father. Madly and deeply. That was never a lie.” A tear runs down her cheek, and she quickly wipes it away. “It hurt me to no end that he never loved me, not even when I thought things were good between us. He never stopped loving your mother and grieved for her, and you, his bastard son, right up until he slipped into that coma. I found him looking at these mere hours before. I didn’t even know he had them.”
She reaches into her bag, pulls out a stack of pictures, and throws them down beside me so they scatter.
They’re all of my mother and me. Pictures Mom must have given my father. There are some of her holding me on a chair when I was too young to remember, and some of me as a baby. The others are a mixture of me when I was older and a bunch of my parents when they must have been teenagers.