Savage Heir by Jagger Cole

37

Not with a bang,but with a whimper. That’s how this world ends.

I’m vaguely aware that it’s been… actually I don’t know. It’s either been a day or a week since Tenley pulled herself away from me. But I do know I’ve spent almost the entirety of my time since then stewing and getting as fucked up as possible in my room, alone.

It’s midday as I slump shirtless onto one of my couches. I’m hungover, and I plan on flipping that to “drunk” as quickly as I can.

I reach for a mostly empty bottle of who cares, when suddenly a manila folder slaps down on the coffee table in front of me. I blink, half jolted and half annoyed before I slowly raise my eyes to the person who just startled me.

“You’re an asshole,” Lukas grunts.

I glare at him.

“That all you got?”

He rolls his eyes. “I mean Jesus fucking Christ are you an asshole.”

His mouth thins as his eyes narrow.

“But you’re also sort of my best friend.”

I blink. My jaw ticks. I keep glaring at him.

“Sort of, huh?”

“It would help if you could actually throw a punch.”

I grin. “Pussy.”

“Bitch.”

He nods at the folder. “That’s for you.”

“What is this, a peace offering?”

“No,” he shakes his head and points at it. “No, that’s your Hiroshima.”

My brow knits. “Huh?”

“You want her back?”

I roll my eyes. “Misha’s been barking up this tree for the last week—”

“It’s been two weeks, actually.”

Shit.

I glance around my room, seeing it for the first time the way Lukas is probably seeing it. I frown. Jesus, it looks like the Rolling Stones decided to become hoarders in here.

Trash, food delivered from the dining hall, empty liquor bottles, streaks of cocaine, and heaps of disgusting ashtrays litter the room. Smoke hangs like a foggy mist.

“Let’s cut out the part where you resist my advice because you’re an asshole so we can get to the part where I just talk some fucking sense into you.”

I glare at Lukas as he narrows his eyes at me.

“You want her back.” He nods at the folder. “That’s going to do it.”

“She doesn’t—”

“Will you just read it?”

I grunt as I look down and open the folder. But suddenly, I am very, very interested.

Holy shit.

It’s a whole file of Patrick. But not the golden boy of Oxford Hills Patrick. This is a Patrick that makes my jaw clench.

My pulse thuds as I skim the photographs of him entering seedy looking places in what looks like Manchester. Pictures of him grinning with scared looking girls—clearly working girls—under his arm at pubs.

There are photographs from police reports—close-ups of blackened eyes, busted lips, and bruise-covered bodies.

And then, there are hand-written accounts, signed, dated, and co-signed by legal representation.

“What the fuck…”

“He makes a big show of going into Manchester all the time to play Mother Theresa,” Lukas grunts. “The soup kitchens, the halfway houses for girls.”

There’s a dark, manic looking fury that starts to creep over Lukas’s face. I’ve always thought I’d seen the darkness in him plenty of times. But for the first time, it’s scaring me.

“He prefers the sex workers. But they’ve all blacklisted him after he put enough of them in the hospital. So he’s started in on the girls in those halfway houses—the ones trying to claw their way back from addiction, abuse, sex trafficking…”

Lukas’s eyes look fucking demonic.

I’m getting there, fast.

“How…”

He looks away. “I sort of know the signs, so I started poking around in Manchester; asking questions.”

“Lukas—”

“Look, this will nuke the motherfucker. You should use it. If you don’t…”

His eyes get that pure darkness in them again that sends a cold feeling up my spine.

“Whatever you did to get all this—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I shake my head. “Thank you.”

He shrugs. “You might be an asshole, but you’re kind of my favorite asshole.”

I grin as I stand. I go to hug him, but he makes a face.

“Ilya it’s been two weeks. Take a fucking shower.”

I standin the near darkness, staring at file folder on my desk. Lukas isn’t wrong, of course. This would destroy Patrick. And in doing so, yes, it would shatter that fake media shit with him and Tenley. It would also nuke his father’s presidential bid.

I know that’s the root of her staying clear of me. I can read the politics written on the wall. She’s cut me out, because they’re using her father and his career—and hers too, probably—as leverage. Destroying George North’s run for the White House would erase that leverage.

I close my eyes

Except, this folder is also something else. It’s leverage.

Blowing something up sends a message. But if you don’t blow it up, and just keep your finger on that switch forever, you are that something’s, or that someone’s God.

I could push this button and end Patrick. Or, I could pass it to my uncle, and the Volkov Bratva would literally own the next US President.

My eyes swivel to the bottles of alcohol sitting on the cart in the corner. But I groan. That won’t solve this for me.

That won’t tell me the answer.

My uncle sighsheavily when I’m done laying it all on the table.

“For the love of a woman…” he exhales into the phone. “That is one lesson we don’t teach when you learn the ways of the Bratva, is it?”

I shake my head, sitting back in my chair in darkness of my room. “Guess not.”

“Silly, isn’t it? Because power, strength, brotherhood… all of it crumbles under one soft look. One pair of lips.”

Yuri chuckles quietly.

“There’s a Helen of Troy launching a thousand ships in someone’s life every single fucking day, isn’t there?”

He sighs again.

“This file…”

“Use it. Destroy him.”

I blink as I sit up. “I… Yuri, if we held this—”

“For what?”

I frown in confusion. “You’re seriously telling me to not hold the next President of the United States by the balls, and to use this now?”

“Ilya, Ilya…” Yuri says gently. “You will have all the power and money in the world one day. You will wear this crown, and you will command an empire that you will make even bigger and more powerful than it is now. I can promise you that. But…”

He sighs.

“But none of that will buy you love or happiness. That is rare, believe me on that. And why else do we do any of this?”

I slowly shake my head.

“Pull the trigger, Ilya.”

When I hang up, my skin is throbbing in the darkness. A surge of hunger and fury rises in me.

The wolf hunts. But I’m not hunting for prey anymore. Because she never was my prey. That’s the problem.

The whole time, she’s been a wolf too.

Thatis what I’m about to hunt for: not prey.

My mate.