Chapter 60

Nikolai

I was so fucking pissed at my father I wanted to tear him apart. I should have killed that motherfucker yesterday. I knew I shouldn’t be so casual about patricide, but that bastard deserved it. I couldn’t believe he took Hannah’s sister. Even though he’d only had her less than an hour, I cringed at the things he could be doing to her. Fuck.
I met up with Drago at the warehouse. I saw the usual bunch of guys and realized that my dad lost the loyalty of nearly all his men. That must have driven him crazy.
“Okay, what is the plan? Where is he? Does he have anyone helping him?” I demanded, anxiety mounting by the minute thinking of Hannah’s young sister with my fucked-up pervert of a father.
Drago was smoking a cigarette and the speed in which he was sucking smoke into his lungs revealed his level of stress. “He’s only got Piter with him now that we have Sergei.” Piter was my father’s driver and lackey. He had always been hard to read, but if he was with my father now, I guess I knew where his loyalties lied.
“Where the fuck is he?” I asked again in aggravation.
“I was able to access a hacker friend of mine. He hacked into your father’s phone and was able to activate his GPS. We’re tracking him now, but we have to think of a way to get to him without the girl getting hurt.” Drago shot me a pointed look. I knew he was only pulling his punches because of Emmy. Otherwise, they would have blown the fucking car up and been done with it.
“Drago, something’s happening,” Alexei, another man in the organization, sitting behind a laptop called over to Drago. We both ran over to where he was pointing at the computer screen. “There, look where he’s going.”
I took a close look at the streets he was on and felt my heart stop. “Fuck. What the fuck is he doing there?” I asked, looking at Drago. His features were pinched, and a grimace of displeasure tightened his brow.
“Why the fuck is he at Katya’s? You have Sergei, right, Drago?”
“Yes,” Drago hissed, staring at the moving dot on the screen. “We have to go, Nikolai, now.”
 
*****

Hannah

I ran into Katya’s house, not sure if I should be crying over Emmy or over Nikolai. I decided I just didn’t have the capacity to worry about Nikolai in light of Emmy’s kidnapping. And if he decided to break up with me in the middle of my sister’s kidnapping, fuck him.
I walked into Katya’s foyer and went into the large room on the left. It was a big, comfortably furnished living room with large, soft looking couches and a big, stone fireplace. I saw Katya lounging on one of the couches, playing with her phone. She looked up at me, lines of stress showing on her face.
“Oh, Hannah, I just heard about your sister. I’m so, so sorry!” Katya wailed, popping up from the couch to give me a hug.
“It’s not your fault, Katya. I know they will get her back,” I said with confidence I wasn’t really feeling. I sat down on the couch next to Katya, not sure what to do with myself in my captivity. I was pulling out my phone out of habit when another man walked into the room. He had mahogany-colored hair that was nearly shaved on the side, but longer on top and pinned me with gold-green eyes. He was probably only about six feet, but he moved with the wiry grace of a panther. He had a lean body, but I could see the muscles of his biceps flexing under his t-shirt. Honestly, he could have been a model; he had that broody hotness that looks good in magazines. However, when I took a closer look at his face, I realized his expression surpassed broody, and fell more in the range of frightfully intense.
Katya’s head turned as she followed my gaze and her expression brightened considerably. “Ivan, please come here and meet Hannah. Hannah is a new friend of mine I met through Nikolai.” She shot me a teasing look and said, “She’s his girlfriend.”
Ivan walked closer to where they were sitting, and while he didn’t exactly smile, his severe expression lightened up a bit. “Is that so? So, it’s your sister that Yuri has right now?”
I felt tears burn my eyes at the reminder. “Yes,” I choked out.
Ivan simply nodded. “It’s being handled, Hannah,” he said in a flat tone that I guessed was supposed to be consoling, but only reinforced how stoic he seemed.
“Hannah, this is my brother, Ivan,” Katya said as her eyes sparkled with tears. I was taken aback; I hadn’t known that Katya even had a brother. She’d never mentioned him and neither had Nikolai.
“Brother?” I questioned.
Katya smiled and nodded, reaching up for Ivan’s hand. He allowed her to take it but didn’t look overjoyed about it. “Yes, we all thought he was dead. He’d been in hiding for nearly two years and with Nikolai’s father being…removed,” she stated awkwardly. That was one euphemism for assassination. “He is able to come back and be part of the organization again.”
“Nice to meet you, Ivan,” I said with ridiculous formality, given the circumstances. He nodded his head at me in greeting and walked toward the bank of windows at the front of the house.
“Where has he been?” I whispered. Katya’s smile dropped a bit as she shot her brother a glance.
Katya’s luminous gaze moved back to me. “I don’t know,” she whispered sadly.
Ivan’s cell phone broke up the awkward moment.
He put the phone to his ear and his slightly softened expression vanished, replaced with a hard, angry scowl. “Why the fuck would he do that? Jesus Christ.” Ivan looked back out the windows at the front of the house. “Yeah, I got him. He’s here.”
Katya and I exchanged looks of confusion as we both got up and looked out the window. There was a Lincoln Town Car with darkly tinted windows sitting at the end of the walkway that leads from front door to the circular driveway.
“Wh-what’s going on?” I asked fearfully. “Who is that?”
“Yuri,” Ivan bit out, putting his cell phone away.
“Why is he here?” I asked hopefully. Maybe he was here to give up my sister. My sister was twenty feet away. I started to sweat, feeling the need to run out there and pull her into the house.
As if Ivan was reading my mind, he stood in front of me. “No, Hannah. We’ll get her back. You’ll only cause more problems if you go out there. Don’t even think of it,” he said sternly.
Katya came up beside me and put her arm around my shoulders. “They’ll get her, Hannah. You’ll see,” she quietly assured me.
Ivan grabbed a gun from the back of his pants and pulled back the slide on it. I wasn’t sure what his plan was, when I was distracted by someone getting out of the car. “Look,” I said.
The driver got out and slowly walked up the walkway toward the door. He moved warily, his eyes darting around looking for threats, knowing that walking up to this house could be fatal.
He got to the door and Ivan quickly opened it and pulled him in. Ivan slammed the guy against the wall next to the door, and while holding a hand at his throat, Ivan put his gun to the guy’s head.
“Hello, Piter. What the fuck is Yuri up to?”
Piter gasped in shock. “Ivan? I thought…thought you were dead.”
Ivan gave a cold smile. “Not quite. Now answer the question.”
Piter’s eyes swung over to where we were hovering in the doorway of the living room, then back to Ivan’s hard, cold stare. “He wants the girl. He wants to do a trade for her.”
I gasped. Was he talking about me? “What? Why me?”
Piter looked at me in confusion. “Not you. Her,” he said nodding his head toward Katya.
Katya was the one gasping now, a look of horror and fear transforming her features. She looked between Piter and Ivan in incomprehension.
Ivan looked even more homicidal than before, which I didn’t think was possible. He pressed his hand even harder against Piter’s windpipe. “Are you fucking crazy, Piter? I’m not giving my sister to that motherfucker. Why does he even want her?”
“She belongs to him. He paid your father for her,” Piter gasped out, clearly not thrilled at having to impart this bit of information to the increasingly angry Ivan.
“What? Paid for me?” Katya rasped, her hand rising up to her chest as if to rub an ache there. “My father sold me to Yuri?”
Piter merely nodded his head, struggling for air under the crushing pressure of Ivan’s hand.
“What happens if she doesn’t go?” Ivan questioned, although he looked like he already knew the answer. We all did.
“He takes the other girl and leaves. Forever. No one would ever see her again.”
I heard a loud cry. When everyone’s gazes swung in my direction, I realized it had come from me. “No, you can’t do that. She’s only a kid. She’s only sixteen,” I cried, tears streaming down my face. It was taking all of my willpower not to storm outside and rip open the car door to get my sister out of this mess.
Ivan looked at me, and for the first time, I saw an emotion on his face.
Regret.