Page 49 of Deceptive Vows
I forced my attention to the warehouse ahead.Not the time. Not the place. But I couldn’t stop myself from training my gaze on her again.
“Lex and I will flank west,” her brother Dimitris said, his voice low and clipped as he and her other two brothers emerged from the second car behind us. “We’ll take the east side. Eyes sharp, no heroics.”
Lex nodded, his lips a tight line, while Dimitris crushed a cigarette under his boot with a muttered curse. The guy was a walking ashtray, but I’d seen his type in Krysha—steady hands when it mattered. They peeled off without a word, disappearing into the maze of shipping containers and skeletal cranes.
I adjusted the suppressor on my Makarov, the weight of it grounding me as I fell into step beside Thea. “I’m not one to back down from a fight, but something isn’t right.”
She turned, close enough that I caught the scent of her—gunmetal and something faintly sweet. Her eyes locked with mine, challenging. “Yeah, I’ve got the same feeling, but if we can save those women from living one more night in a nightmare, it’s worth the risk.”
The words hung betweenus, and I nodded before I’d even processed the recklessness of what we were doing.
My man was still chasing Marco’s client list—names that’d tell us who’d pay for flesh at that auction—but it was slow going. Marco was a snake, coiling tighter every day, and I’d bet my left hand he’d picked this timing to keep us scrambling. The fire had been a warning shot, and now we were willingly walking into a trap. “I know. Just… stay alert.”
“I will,” she snapped, slipping around a stack of rusted barrels. “Move.”
I swallowed a growl and followed, keeping low as we hugged the shadows. The warehouse loomed ahead, a hulking beast of corrugated steel with boarded windows and a sagging roof. Two floodlights buzzed above a side door, casting jagged pools of yellow across the cracked asphalt. A single guard leaned against the wall, his silhouette bulky with muscle and boredom, a rifle slung loose over his shoulder. Amateur. Krysha would’ve had him gutted for standing that exposed.
He didn’t carry himself like a typical Wolf. This man was sloppy and undisciplined. I glanced at Thea and found her already reading my thoughts with a slight nod. The silent communicationsent an unexpected wave of satisfaction through me. It was dangerous, how quickly we’d learned to read each other.
Thea crouched behind a rotting pallet, her breath a faint cloud in the cold. “One guy. Too easy.”
“Or too dumb,” I murmured, scanning the perimeter. No cameras, no second patrol, just the river lapping at the pilings fifty yards back, its oily sheen reflecting the moon. “Cover me.”
Before she could argue, I slipped forward, silently, the suppressor’s barrel glinting faintly as I closed the distance. The guard didn’t even twitch until I was on him—my arm snaked around his throat, cutting off his air before he could yelp. He thrashed, boots scraping the pavement, but I tightened the hold until his body went slack. If we managed to get the upper hand tonight, maybe I could get him to talk later.
Thea was at my side in seconds, her knife already out, the blade catching the light. “You didn’t kill him?” She nudged the guy with her foot.
“Maybe he’ll have a loose tongue,” I shot back, dragging himbehind a dumpster.
I patted him down—keys, a pack of smokes, a burner phone. No immediately visible sign of a tattoo. Perhaps he wasn’t a Wolf. Maybe he was one of Marco’s men. I pocketed the phone and nodded at the door. We’d check out the phone when we were in a safer setting. “You’re up,tyomnyy angel.”
She didn’t even acknowledge the nickname, just pulled a pick from her cuff and worked with the lock with practiced ease. The door creaked open, casting a sliver of dim light into the night, and we slipped inside, the air shifting to a damp, metallic tang that coated my tongue.
The warehouse loomed like a cavern, heavy with shadows that hung between stacked crates and tarped machinery. The temperature dropped ten degrees inside, the concrete floor radiating cold through the soles of my boots. Dust motes danced in the few shafts of light that penetrated broken windows, and each breath tasted of metal and mildew. A faint hum buzzed from deeper in—generators, maybe—vibrating subtly through the floor, while the drip-drip-drip of a leaking pipe marked time somewhere in the darkness. Voices drifted, low and muffled, bouncing oddly off the high ceiling.
I noted a second exit visible from our position at the loading bay on the far wall.
Thea tilted her head, listening, then pointed left toward a rusted catwalk bolted to the wall, its metal grating honeyed with corrosion. I nodded, and we moved like ghosts, boots silent on the concrete, our breath held between us.
We climbed halfway up the catwalk, some twenty feet above the main floor where we were partially concealed by a support column. The voices sharpened, echoing from behind a tarp-draped partition thirty feet below us. Two men argued in clipped Russian, their shadows stretching long against the makeshift wall. I caught “shipment” and “Friday”—three days from now—and my gut tightened.
When I tensed at a specific Russian phrase about “merchandise,” she squeezed my arm in silent question. Another moment of wordless understanding that shouldn’t have come so naturally.
The catwalk creaked slightly, and we both froze. When one of the men stepped past the edge of the partition into the pool of weak light, I felt her tense. He was stocky, balding, with a scar bisecting his eyebrow, but it was theunmistakable tattoo peeking from his collar that obliterated any doubt I might have had.
“—telling you, Marco better hope his plan works,” Ugly growled, lighting a cigarette. “Do you think the brother, Gabriele, has any idea?”
The second guy, taller and wiry with a twitchy eye, snorted. “Nyet. Gabriele rules like Sergei. If he had knowledge a coup was coming, Marco would be dead.”
Marco wasn’t just working with the Wolves to get rid of Krysha and Thea’s family, he was making a play against his own brother. The pieces clicked together—Marco was using the Gray Wolves to clear his path on both fronts.
Thea’s breath hitched beside me, barely audible. Two names had stood out to her. She tapped my arm, jerking her chin toward the partition. I followed her gaze—through a gap in the tarp. I glimpsed a row of metal cages, rusted and bolted to the floor. Empty, but the implications sank claws into me. This was the staging ground. The women weren’t here yet, but they would be.
“We need that phone,” Thea whispered, pointing to the taller man with a phone peeking out of his back pocket. “Numbers, dates—something.” Of course, I knew she wasn’t referring to the one we’d taken from the guy out front.
I already had the one from the guy outside, but she was right—we needed everything. I pulled the burner from my pocket… It was a cheap flip model, no lock, and I scrolled through the call log—three numbers, all local, one tagged “S.” Sergei, probably. Before I could show her, a shout cut through the air, sharp and pissed.
“Oi! Who’s up there?” Ugly’s voice bounced off the metal ceiling as he spotted our silhouettes against the faint light. His cigarette dropped, and his hand fumbled for the holster at his hip.
