Page 79 of Savage Proposal

My lips thinned into a line. The chance of Volkov being here was slim: he wouldn’t go anywhere without some kind of security detail. “What do you want to do,cugino?” Elio asked.

“We need to make sure that he’s not here,” I said. “If he is, we’ll handle him.”

“And if he’s not?” Samuel asked. He had been quiet the whole time; his sole focus was on the task at hand. “It’ll get back to him that we were here.”

“I want him to know.”

With that, we got out of the SUV and, sticking to the darkening shadows as best we could, we made our way around the building to the back door of the club, which looked entirely too flimsy. “It doesn’t seem worth breaking out the lock-pick,” Samuel muttered as he took the tools out of his back pocket. “We could just kick it in.”

“I’d rather not get shot immediately, thanks,” Elio muttered. He and Damian were standing with their backs to us, keeping their eyes peeled for movement.

Samuel grumbled under his breath as he began to click each tumbler into place. It took all of twenty seconds, and he finished with an annoyed scoff. “This is just laziness,” he muttered. “Can’t be damned to put in a good lock.”

Elio snorted. “Did you want them to make it harder?”

Samuel looked at my cousin, glaring. “It’s the principle of the thing,” he said. “It’s sheer arrogance to assume that no one would ever do this.”

I stilled. Artemwasarrogant, especially with how sloppy he had become recently, but what if it wasn’t just that? What if whatever he had planned was coming to fruition? “Keep your eyes open,” I barked as Samuel climbed to his feet. “We won’t be caught off-guard.”

Stepping to the side of the door, I eased it open. The room beyond was pitch black, and it smelled of dust and mildew. No one had been here in a long while. “I don’t like this, boss,” Renaldo said, and I agreed with him.

Something wasn’t right here. “Let’s burn it,” I said.

“Why bother?” Elio asked. They had all relaxed when it became obvious that there was no one inside, but I couldn’t. “Artem doesn’t care about this place.”

“Yuri sent us here for a reason,” I said. “This wasn’t just bad intel: this place isn’t unpopular, it’s fucking abandoned.” They wasted my time, and I would not let it stand. “Burn it to the ground.”

We had brought the materials to light a fire from the weapons cache at home. We could make it look natural, but I wanted Artem to know what I had done. We dumped accelerant outside of the building; it would be better if we got it inside as well, to make sure that it would burn, but I wasn’t sending any of my men in. Just in case.

We stood back and watched as the flames caught hold, growing bigger and bigger. The fire had swallowed one wall of the building when two men came running out of the front. I felt a nasty smile spread across my face.

Just like I thought.

CHAPTER 49

Isabella

If I kept chewing on my fingernails, I was going to make myself bleed. “You’ve got to stop watching the clock,” Amalia said softly. I looked across the kitchen counter at her, and she offered me a wobbly smile.

I couldn’t reciprocate. “How long do these types of things usually drag on for?” Hours ago, Lorenzo, Elio, and Damian had left with two guards that I hadn’t been introduced to, and every other second I panicked with the idea that something had gone terribly wrong, and we were one phone call away from tragedy.

Jesus, you’re being dramatic. But I couldn’t help it. There was a squirming tangle of anxiety in the pit of my stomach that was only getting worse the longer Lorenzo was gone.

“Elio was gone for three weeks once,” Amalia said. “I still don’t know what he was doing, and I don’t really want to know, but by the time he came back, I kept him strapped to our bed for two days straight.” She smirked, but her gaze was far away, as if she were lost in a fond memory.

“I don’t think I can feel like this for three weeks,” I muttered, pressing my hand against my chest, as if it would ease the tightness there. Amalia practically cooed at me, and I had never wanted to slap someone so much before. “It’s not funny.”

The smile on her face disappeared, and her eyes grew somber. “I know,” she said and reached across the counter for my hand. “It doesn’t get any easier; you should know that now.”

I wanted to take my hand back, tell her for the umpteenth time that Lorenzo and I weren’t anything…but the vice in my chest choked off the argument. “How do you handle it?”

She squeezed my hand. “You look forward to when he comes back through that door,” she said. “You hold on tight while he’s here.”

Headlights bounced through the windows and stretched along the wall as a vehicle pulled up the driveway. Both of our focus immediately went to the door, and after holding our breath for what seemed like forever, that door finally opened.

Elio stepped into the kitchen first. He had a cut on his eyebrow, and a bruise blooming on his cheek, but mostly, he looked to be in one piece. He smirked at Amalia. “You were waiting for me,tesoro?”

“Upstairs,” she said simply. “Now.”

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