Merciless Union by Faith Summers
42
Lucca
His full name is Miska Belyakov.
Age: 58.
Profession: mortician and motherfucking dog with links to the black market organ trade.
It’s eleven at night, and there the fucker is walking out of his beachfront apartment with a two-dollar hooker who looks like she’s stoned. The girl couldn’t be more than sixteen, and she stumbles across the boardwalk and almost falls into the sea.
He catches her and steadies her, practically carrying her until they get to a parked car.
Miska deposits the girl, and the car drives away.
As it does, and he starts walking back to his apartment, Aiden and I step out of the shadows we concealed ourselves in.
Maksim and Eric are in the car we came in, and we have another car with five of my men in case we need them.
My damn mind has been numb since I saw this fuckers face yesterday morning, and I’m tearing up inside.
Miska glances over his shoulder at us and starts speeding up down the boardwalk. He looks back again, this time searching our faces in the moonlight. That’s when he runs with his fat ugly ass practically falling out of his joggers.
I pull out my gun and shoot him in his leg, sending him right to the ground.
He wails with pain holding his leg but still trying to pull himself along. As if that will actually work.
We get up to him, and I deliver a kick to his gut that makes him spit blood.
Before he can recover, I grab his face and snarl like a hell beast, then slap him on his cheek with the butt of my gun.
“Please don’t hurt me,” he begs. “I don’t know anything.”
“Oh, but you do, Miska.” I grab his face again while Aiden stands on the other side of us with his gun aimed at Miska’s head.
“What do you want?”
“You know my face, and it’s not from recent years.” I’ve thought about how to ask this question all day. Now that my heart is whispering the truth, I know exactly what to say. But I want details. “You have family, Miska.”
The instant I say that, his eyes widen with terror. “Please don’t hurt them.”
“I’m amazed you have a wife and three kids under ten, and yet you fuck around with underage girls when your family is visiting the grandparents.” We know this man’s details, from who he fucks to what he ate for breakfast this morning. Now it’s time to hear the important answers I’m searching for.
“Please don’t hurt them, Merciless.”
“I’ll spare their lives if you tell me what I need to know.”
“I’ll tell you. I will.”
“How do you know Damien?” I ask, and his body goes rigid.
He searches my face, and there’s a newfound terror in his eyes. “Everybody knows Damien.”
I shoot his other leg, and he howls with pain.
“Don’t fuck with me or think I’m some fucking asshole. Tell me how you know him.”
“Through Pasha. I met him through Pasha. Damien did private jobs for him many years ago, but he calls on him every now and again for favors.”
I glance at Aiden. “These private jobs, what are they?”
“It was about the secret, Lucca. The secret Gina Delatorre discovered. It was about that in the past, and it’s about that now. But I don’t know specifics. I never know specifics. All I know is Damien’s allegiance was always to Pasha after he made him a Brigadier.”
“Pasha made Damien Brigadier?” I never knew that.
“Yes, he did, and that meant he owned him. Damien hates Raphael with a vengeance, but Pasha had Damien help him clean up the mess whenever he could.”
I try to keep my shit together. That means exactly what I feared, that Damien knew about the hit list long before I told him. He must have known many other things too.
What about Timothy, though?
“What sort of mess are you talking about?” I ask, getting back on track to what I want to know most.
“Dealing with the people who discovered the secret.”
I nod because we’re getting fucking closer to what my heart is telling me.
“What were you doing at my home fifteen years ago? You were with him. Both of you came together, and I was there in the same room as the bodies of my family. You remember, don’t you?”
He nods slowly. “Yes. I remember.”
“Good, now tell me why you were there.”
“We were there to collect the bodies.”
My hand goes limp, and the gun almost falls from my grasp. “Collect?”
“Damien couldn’t do it. Because your father was his best friend, he couldn’t be part of the massacre, so he organized the group who went to kill them, and I went with him in the morning to collect the bodies. When he saw you were alive, he couldn’t kill you, so he kept you. Grigori went to his home and saw you there after, and it made it difficult to kill you.”
I straighten up, feeling bile burning through my stomach.
That was it.
That was what my heart was telling me, and the voices of the ghost were screaming in my head to avenge them.
Those words right there are the truth.
“I don’t know anything more. I was there to harvest the organs of the children and the—”
I end him with a bullet to his head, and I walk off, not knowing where I’m even going.
Aiden rushes up to me and grabs my shoulder.
“I can’t talk. I can’t. I just…” I keep walking, and he allows me to.
I walk in the dark, finding the road we drove on to get here, and I keep walking.
Betrayal stings every nerve in my body with every step I take.
Damien.
It was him.
It was him who organized my family’s massacre. Fucking Damien.
Then he acted like he was some kind of entitled god.
I feel sick. I thought of him as a father when it was he who killed mine, and the fucker took Miska to harvest the organs of the children.
He’s talking about my little brother and sister.
Damien.
He used me. I was a puppet to him, and I know that’s just half the story. There’s still more to find out because something is still going on.
* * *
I walk home and find Aria waiting for me. This time she’s in the sitting room with the piano. She’s curled up on the sofa by the display unit, reading a book.
Gulliver’s travels.
Just the sight of that book stirs memories of my family.
She gets up and rushes over to me, catching my face.
“What happened to you?” she breathes.
“It was Damien. He did it. He’s the reason my family is dead.”
“What?”
“He organized the massacre. He was my father’s best friend. He organized their deaths.”
I dip my head and no longer feel sadness.
What I feel now is rage—the darkest rage.
It’s coming from the hollow where my soul used to live.
“Everything changes when the sun comes up, Aria.”
I’m going to kill him.
