Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106159 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 531(@200wpm)___ 425(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106159 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 531(@200wpm)___ 425(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Natalya for weeks, and don’t think I’m not looking. I stalked the courthouse halls responsible for overturning her conviction, then camped outside her family’s estate for weeks on end like my hand wasn’t itching to pretend her mother had a bounty on her head.
Natalya is nowhere to be found, and it has me grateful I crossed every fucking T and dotted every I when we married in the chapel in the foyer of the hotel.
Today is our first day of court-appointed mediation. She can dodge me left, right, and center, that is her God-given right, but if she wants to remove my last name from her given name, she must come out of hiding.
I can’t wait to see her again.
You can’t ignore a connection like ours when it is exploding in front of your face.
“You ready?”
I grab my coat from the rack before spinning to face the voice. Maksim will always be the cocky bastard of our duo, but his attitude has been as lackluster as my moods for the past three months. He feels guilty about my misery, and so he fucking should.
When I couldn’t deny the pull I felt for Natalya, he made my life a living hell. He taunted me relentlessly about wanting daddy’s leftovers and constantly questioned how it felt knowing I was horn-dogging over the same girl our father had fucked. He even sent her the severed hands in an attempt to scare her off, which sent her running to me again, more lustful than ever. When that failed, he targeted her with the dead-animal trick that usually has expats fleeing back to their home countries. He just royally fucked up when his goon targeted the wrong room.
His non-stop taunts screwed with my head so well I almost walked away from the other half of my soul for the second time. There was just something about Natalya that kept drawing me back in. Neither a million assignments nor a workload that would usually kill a man could keep me away. I was constantly checking in on her until Maksim tricked me into making my watch known.
I was snowed under in an instant.
Even as she did something as simple as measuring me for a pair of pants, her magnetic pull convinced me that the past doesn’t matter and that only our future counts. There was just one matter I struggled to get past.
The idea of her with my father.
The rumors that circulated before that eventful night wouldn’t quit playing on repeat in my head. I pictured Natalya with him. Under him. Kneeling before him.
At one stage, I even smelled him on her.
But eventually, I learned that the biggest lies are the ones you tell yourself.
I didn’t agree with Maksim’s request for me to woo an annulment out of Natalya because my face makes ladies weak in the knees. I wanted an excuse to confront her because that was the only way I’d find out the truth.
Natalya had been portrayed in every way possible except the right way.
The people who talked her up as a money-hungry wench didn’t see the woman who sneakily took the electric bill from the mail slot to pay it before her roommate could see it, or how she made out the groceries were one-tenth what she paid. They described the opposite of what I witnessed when I let my watch be noticed, and Maksim saw it too, but he had a harder time admitting it since Natalya has the controlling share of his company.
He needed her to be the baddie because if that was how I saw her too, I wouldn’t throw myself into the fire to save her.
Henry’s retort was on par with how he responds to any breach of mafia law. He is the boss of all bosses because he doesn’t settle a dispute lightly. His punishments are swift, fair, and usually more financially ruining than life-taking.
I knew he’d come after me when I told Saka to release the answers I’d provided years ago on the private forum he used to seek evidence of Natalya’s innocence. He’d only given them to the prosecutors handling Natalya’s case. He never made them public knowledge, because the details given would have proven that my father was taken down by a professional killer—a title I’ve held for the past eighteen years.
There’s hardly any difference between my old profession and my current one. I kill people for a living, but instead of getting paid a measly forty thousand a year to eradicate the world’s scum, for the past eight years, the government officials who once thought they owned me pay me tens of thousands for a couple of hours of work.
I’m not picky with my targets, but the reason for the hit needs to be valid.
There was no validity to the multiple requests I intercepted with Natalya’s name on them. They just wanted her dead, no cause given.