“Bingo!” He sniggered. “You’re smarter than Adrik. He still hasn’t figured out who I am.”
I recalled Adrik dropping to his knees when he’d received a text right before the explosion earlier, his expression filling with shock.He knows.
Oh, Adrik. I’m so sorry.
“Because you’re his little brother,” I whispered. “He adored you. He would never believe you would do something so evil.”
Damien snorted, his gaze hardening. “I should have been thefirst personhe suspected. He left me with that asshole! He promised he’d come back for me, but henever did! He abandoned hispack, something a wolf shouldneverdo. Now he’s going to pay for what he did. And it starts withyou.”
I gulped. Started with me,how? What did Damien have planned? He obviously wasn’t all there in the head, a gleam of insanity in his eyes. How did I try to reason with an insane person? And what did I have to do with his vendetta against Adrik? Why had he attacked me at my show in Chicago, trying to kill me?
“Why?” I choked out. “Whyme?”
“Oh.” He waved at me dismissively. “It’s a long story. You Popovs were the reason my family suffered so much.Your fatherwas the reason our papa started beating on our mom and the reason Adrik left in the first place. So, I figured it was only appropriate that I retaliate in kind, by taking out Alexei’s precious daughter.” He tittered.
He blamedmyfamily—myfather—for his misfortunes? How was my father to blame?
“How did my father make yours beat his wife and cause Adrik to leave you?”
Damien snarled. “Because your father fired him! Papa started drinking after then and smacking Mom around. He complained over and over again how the Popovs were to blame, howAlexeiPopov had accused him of stealing when they didn’t pay him enough as it was, so he deserved what he took. He made me promise I’d help him get revenge against your family. That’s why I tried to kill you at your concert. You weren’t supposed to live, but no matter, I can use you to play a game with Adrik now.” He snickered again.
My stomach churned. “But why would you want to hurt Adrik? He’s your brother.”
He huffed. “When I saw him at the L.A. mansion that night, I was so shocked that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. There he was, my long-long brother, alive and well. I couldn’t believe he’d joined the Bratva. That was the ultimate betrayal. How could he abandon me for the very people who’d ruined our family? That was when I decided to make him pay. I might have forgiven him for abandoning me if he’d had a good enough reason, but there isno good reasonfor joining forces with the enemy. He’s not a wolf anymore. He’s just a pig, like you Popovs. And as the last remaining wolf, it’smyjob to hunt down and eliminate the pigs.” He let out a high-pitched, maniacal squeal that made me cringe.
How could this crazy guy be Adrik’s brother? He wasnothinglike Adrik, who was sweet and kind and gentle and considerate. And it hit me hard in that moment how much I truly cared about Adrik.
He’s special, the only one who truly gets me. He thinks I’m gorgeous. He doesn’t care that I’m partially paralyzed. Or weird.
My heart warmed. Could Adrik be my person, my other half? Mysoulmate?
Emotion clogged my throat. Tears welled in my eyes.He’s the most amazing person I’ve ever met. He makes me feel good about myself. I don’t care about his scars. I care about the wonderful man underneath.
It would be all too easy to fall in love with Adrik Volkov. I think I was already halfway there. I wanted to tell him how much I cared about him, how much he truly meant to me.
But first, I had to deal with his crazy, psychotic brother.
Oh, Adrik.This was going to kill him. I’d gathered from the little bit he’d told me about his brother that he cared deeply for Damien. I wished I could shield him from the truth, but I suspected he already knew. Adrik had mentioned that his mother had Alzheimer’s, so it wasn’t inconceivable that Damien had inherited some kind of mental disorder from her. Mental illness tended to run in families.
I would try to get as much information out of Damien as I could and hope to talk him out of whatever it was he had planned.
“Even after Adrik risked his life to save you from the dog attack, and ended up badly scarred in the process, you still want to hurt him? He’s a hero! What if circumstances prevented him from coming back for you when he promised?” I couldn’t reveal the story Adrik had told me about his imprisonment and the freak show as it wasn’t my story to tell.
Damien snorted, his gaze filling with hate. “He broke his promise to me. He left, and he never came back. I waited for him. For years, I waited! But he abandoned me and joined the enemy!”
I lowered my gaze. I needed to proceed with caution. I needed to get him off the subject of Adrik and onto something that made him less hostile. I decided to start off with a compliment, hoping to stroke his ego and get him to open up.
“So, you’re obviously pretty crafty. I have to wonder, how did you find us here, and how did you get inside the property?”
He stared at me with a strange glint in his cold black eyes that made my pulse spike. Then, as if someone had flicked a switch and turned off the deranged Damien and released the half-normal one, he chuckled. “Oh, it was all really easy. I came back and left my phone at the front of the Popov estate hoping Adrik would pick it up and bring it inside, which, of course, he did. I knew they would check it for spyware, which they did. But what theydidn’tknow was that I’d installed an undetectable software that is activatedaftera security scan for harmful aps, so they wouldn’t know it was there because it didn’t show up in their scan and it wasn’t activated untilaftertheir scan.” He sniggered. “The Popovs are smart. I’ll give them that. But I’m smarter.”
My head spun. What was he saying?
“So, you put some kind of spyware or something on the phone?”
“Yep. It enabled me to hear the conversations that went on around the phone without their knowledge. I learned from their conversations that they were taking you to Lake Tahoe, so I just sat back and watched as you left, then I headed to Tahoe the next day and began staking out the place, watching the house with binoculars. But you guys were sneaky. You didn’t come outside at all, and at first I thought maybe you’d fooled me, that you hadn’t really gone to Lake Tahoe, that you’d somehow figured out I’d been listening in and that they took you somewhere else instead. But then one night I spied one of the guards hiding in the woods and I knew you had to be there. So, I kept watching, and then I got lucky when I saw you through a window with binoculars.” He cackled. “So, I began planning how to get inside. I sent you those texts to get you scared and to make the Popovs send in reinforcements. Then I took out the guard in the woods and found another one close by. Got him, too.” He nodded, a proud gleam in his eyes. “Right before the new guards arrived, I installed a tiny camera at the front gate just above the keypad, so when Adrik went to punch in the code to let them in, I was able to see the code. I wrote it down, and as soon as everyone was occupied, I snuck up to the gate, punched in the code, and was inside.”
I scrunched my brow. “Not possible. The motion sensors would have detected you and the cameras would have picked you up.”