“I thought we’d eat, take a little walk, and then you’ll rest,” he said. “We don’t want you looking quite so wrecked when Kirill shows up for you, do we? The last sight he sees before I put a bullet in his brain is how well I’ve treated his little soulmate.”
“He isn’t dumb. He’s hardly going to charge in here with guns blazing. It’s obviously a trap.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Mallory. Kirill, Viktor, everyone I’ve ever met has underestimated me. Kirill will think that since he worked out the location of this place, he will surprise me. He’s worryingly predictable,” Nikolai said, shoveling another piece of pancake into my mouth.
My stomach lurched, rolling inside me, and I turned my face away as I chewed.“Stop. I think I’m going to be sick.”
Nikolai raised a lazy eyebrow at me. “I thought you’d have a stronger tolerance for sedatives, seeing as my brother had you dosed before you knew he’d found you. I was sure you’d have built up some resistance by now.”
“He what?” I asked, unease worming through me. Fucking Nikolai. Everything he said was a perfectly designed bomb waiting to go off and blow the things I’d thought were real to pieces.
“He had Rafael Navarro drug you after your shifts, so he could come and creep on you while you were passed out.”
As those words sank in, the nausea in my belly erupted, and I turned my head just in time to puke on the floor.
Nikolai’s chair scraped back as he stood. “Blyat, suka! Quit throwing up, or I really will kill you.”
I rested my forehead on the table, remembering those mornings when I’d felt groggy and half-dead, wandering around my apartment, paranoid that someone had been in there. I thought it had been Henry. I was so fucking naïve.
“Do you have a problem with vomiting? You need probiotics or something?” Nikolai demanded.
Something inside my miserable chest cracked at his annoyed tone. I started laughing. This situation was so demented and unreal. A confirmed killer was asking if I needed a probiotic to keep food down.
“Look, Mallory, as much as I like a nice descent into madness, keep it together. We’re just starting this thing.”
Nikolai directed his lackeys to clean the floor, and I slumped in my chair to find him putting a glass of cool water to my lips.
“Spit this on me, and I’ll force you to eat the rest of my mama’s pancakes before taping your mouth shut, understood?” he warned.
I nodded, too weary to fight him. I sipped the water.
He watched me, his dark eyes tracking across my features. Putting the glass down, he tucked my hair back even as I turned my face away.“You need to get cleaned up, and after, we’ll talk. There’s no point in turning yourself inside out worrying about Kirill, Mallory. If you knew the things he’d done, the things he is doing to you right now with hundreds of miles between you, you wouldn’t bother getting upset over his impending fate.”
“Why do you hate him so much?”
“I don’t hate him. Not at all. He might know me best in this whole world, but in the end, I’m just a soldier, and orders are orders,” Nikolai said quietly.
I stiffened as cold shivers crept over my skin. “You mean your father asked you to do this?”
“My father ordered me to shoot you in cold blood and leave you in Kirill’s bed,” Nikolai said.
I swallowed hard as my pulse roared in my ears.“So, what are you doing? Why are we here?”
Nikolai turned his eyes away from me to a picture hanging on the wall. It was an oil painting, clearly amateur, but Nikolai looked at it reverently.
“You know, before she died, Irina, my mother, went almost completely mad here alone. The isolation stole her mind, and losing me, of course. Viktor killed her mind long before her body. I’m starting to think he’s doing the same to Kirill and me.”
That revelation stilled me, and a tiny, persistent flicker of hope flourished in my chest.“Why let him? He couldn’t stop you and Kirill together.”
Nikolai sighed, leaning against the wall and crossing his inked arms over his broad chest. He wasn’t as huge and intimidating as Kirill, but few were. He came close, though, and there was a supple grace about movements that screamed predator to my hindbrain.
“That was never going to happen from the moment Viktor ordered your death.”
“But you didn’t do it. You brought me here instead,” I urged.
Nikolai grinned, but it looked sad somehow. “Regardless. I know my brother. Bringing you here was tantamount to declaring war against him. Now, go and lie down. You’re sick. I can’t call a doctor up here, and the last thing I need is to give Kirill a body back.”
A man came up behind me and pulled me up, and Nikolai watched as I was led from the room.