Inked Adonis: Chapter 49

I screech to a halt behind Myles’s car and leap out.

“Goddamn,” he says, “you got here fast.”

Did I? Time has taken on an unknowable quality in the last twenty-four hours. It’s been weeks since I saw that video of Nova. Months since I’ve seen her. Years since I’ve trusted her. Centuries since fear wasn’t choking me from the inside out.

Every step forward is a slushy, hazy slog. I turn towards the rundown car dealership in front of me. Even for Ilya, this feels low.

“Fucking Wisconsin?” I spit on the pavement.

“Intel says it went out of business a year ago and Ilya scooped it up for pennies on the dollar right afterward,” Myles supplies. “He’s been using it as a safehouse for the last six months or so.”

I scan the boarded-over windows and the caved-in roof. The place should be demolished. No—dismantled, burned, and salt should be sown into the ground it stands in.

The thought of Nova trapped inside this concrete coffin makes me fucking sick.

“Is he in there?”

Myles shakes his head. “But there are six men inside. Whether they know we’re here, I have no fucking idea.”

I don’t give a fuck if they know. Let them prepare. Let them arm themselves to the teeth. I’ll still paint these walls with their blood.

I swallow down the bile inching up my throat. “And Nova?”

“Inside, too, we think.” Myles scrubs at the back of his head. “Sam, I watched the video. I saw⁠—”

“I know what you saw.”

My in-flight entertainment on the journey from Moscow was that video on a constant loop. Again and again and again, I watched it, dissecting every moment, looking for some sign that it was doctored. Some hint of why Nova would be with her father. Why she would betray me.

“What’s the play, then?” asks Myles.

I pull out my gun and check to ensure the magazine is loaded. “We move in.”

Myles grabs my shoulder, pulling me to a stop. “You’re gonna walk in there guns blazing? That’s the plan?”

“I want this shit over with,” I growl. “Now. Not later.”

I want Nova away from my brother.

I want to see her alive and breathing.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt fear like this. But realizing Nova was in the hands of my brother—all my power, my connections, my money and skill, didn’t mean a damn thing. They were useless to me.

I need her back in my possession so I can think straight.

I’ll deal with the rest once she’s safe.

“Are you worried we can’t take them?” I ask.

Myles stiffens. “No, but⁠—”

“Good. Then shoot first and ask questions later.”

With a sigh and a mutter of something I don’t care to decipher, he reluctantly follows me towards the dealership. The men he arrived with fall into step behind us. A storm of Bratva firepower, coming to fuck up my brother beyond all recognition.

I intend to do the most damage myself.

I’m the first one through the unlocked side door. Sneaking in on silent feet, I follow raised voices to the back of the dealership where the body shop used to be. The air smells musty, mechanical. Dust stirs in the wake of every footstep.

The weight of my Glock is familiar in my palm. The hunger for violence even more so.

I inch down a hallway until I see a group of men clustered around a tabletop balanced on a transmission jack. They’re playing cards, so lost in the game that no one is watching the door.

Myles and I exchange a glance.

We could’ve blown through the front windows and these fuck-ups still wouldn’t have known they’d been infiltrated.

The men are deep into a heated argument, one of them screaming about playing another round. I want to tell him to save his breath. In a few seconds, the last thing on his mind will be this losing hand.

But he doesn’t deserve the mercy of a dignified end to his life. Let him bleed out over a mismatched pair of jacks and threes.

I round the corner and let my bullets fly.

Two men are down by the time Myles joins me in the doorway and takes down another. Their blood is already seeping into the cement floor before their comrades get their attention oriented in the right direction. I waste no time in putting the other idiots out of their misery.

It’s over as quick as it began. Gunsmoke and cement dust spiral up in the air, making the silence all the more apparent.

“‘Shoot first, no one left to ask questions to,’” Myles quips under his breath. “Looks like that was everyone.”

I don’t admit that I might have been a little hasty. That I let the bloodlust get to me.

But inwardly, I’m regretting not keeping at least one of them alive for questioning.

I give my men a jerk of the chin. “Search the place, but be alert. There might be more rats hiding in the woodwork.”

But there aren’t.

The dealership is silent now. Utterly empty. Still, I cling to hope that Nova will be here. That she’s alive.

“Nova?”

My echo, faraway and hollow, is the only response.

“Sam!” Myles calls from down the hall. “Over here.”

I jog towards him, stopping in the doorway of a small room, empty except for a cot in the corner and a small table. A drained water bottle rests on the table alongside a sandwich covered in flies.

She was here.

I feel the certainty of it in my chest, as sure as the next thud of my heart.

I circle the bed and come to a stop. At the end of the mattress, crumpled in a heap on the floor, is a red sweatshirt. I pick it up gingerly, shaking out the wrinkled cotton.

Printed across the chest: “Paws and Enjoy the Little Things.”

I bring it to my nose and inhale her honey-vanilla scent.

But only for a moment. I tear it away from my face before I look weak, before I feel weak. She’s already done enough to me. Worked her way so deeply into my heart that it’s like she was always there.

And look what it’s cost me.

Even still, I can’t bring myself to drop the sweatshirt. I can’t force myself to leave it behind. I don’t want any part of Nova left in this hellhole.

“So she was here,” Myles surmises.

“But she’s not anymore.” Fury burns through my veins, searing me from the inside out. “Ilya must have taken her.”

Myles shakes his head. “Not personally. I have eyes on him. He’s in the city, meeting with Leonid as we speak. Nova isn’t with him.”

I spin and kick the metal bed frame as hard as I can. It goes clattering into the wall and my foot roars with pain, but I don’t give any mind to either thing. The bed is worthless and the pain is grounding—I welcome them both.

“Then where the fuck is she?”

I’m seething. Boiling. I could rip this place apart brick by brick and it wouldn’t be enough.

Myles reaches a hand towards me, but stops just out of reach. Like even he is afraid to touch me right now. “We’ll find her, brother. Everyone is on this job right now. She won’t escape.”

What if there is no escape?

What if she’s already gone?

I poke around the corners of my mind, trying to decide if I can believe that. And… no. If Nova was dead, Ilya would’ve lorded it over me. He’d already be presenting her broken body in a slideshow to our father, patiently waiting for his treat and a pat on the head.

If she was dead, I’d know it. I’d feel it.

Myles’s phone rings, shattering through the silence in the room. “It’s Dmitri.”

He strides away from me to take the call from one of his men in the city. His voice stays hushed.

I tighten my fist around Nova’s sweatshirt and wait, trying to force myself to think about this rationally.

But there’s no such thing with Nova. She’s blurred all the lines, unwritten all the rules I’ve always followed. She refuses to be tamed.

And I love her for it.

Which is why there’s every chance she is betraying me and I was to blind to see it. There’s every chance I’ll find her, only to be forced to make the decision to kill her for betraying me.

I just slaughtered five men in the other room without a second of hesitation. I won’t lose any sleep over their rotting bodies.

Why should I lose sleep over hers?

Then I imagine Nova’s golden-brown eyes looking into mine as I press a gun to her head.

It’s what my men expect of me.

It’s what my brother would do. What my father would do. What Katerina would do.

But would I?

“Thanks, Dmitri.” Myles hangs up and turns to me. “Hope Levy just rented a car fifteen minutes ago and drove out of the city. She’s headed our way.”

The image of Nova at the end of my gun disappears. But the sickness it inspired lingers.

I clear my throat. “You have eyes on her?”

“Two men tailing her as we speak,” he confirms.

“Good,” I grit out. “Wherever she goes, that’s where we’ll find Nova.”

And then I’ll discover if I’m strong enough to do what needs to be done, or if loving her has made me weak after all.