Page 38 of Wild Heart
I pinched it between my fingers and studied it through a curious gaze. “And then what?”
“You train them. You rip them apart and reconstruct them until they’ve become the kind of monsters you trust to watch over our boys.”
“You want me to build a team of bodyguards?”
“I want you to take a bunch of feral, likely psychopathic men and discipline them enough to pose as bodyguards.”
I grinned around my cigarette.
The drive bit into the flesh of my palm when I closed my fist around it.
“Nobody can protect Toby better than I can, but you’ll make it clear to them they’ll do their damnedest to try. There is a very slim margin of freedom I’m capable of offering him, and I intend for that margin to be barricaded with people who understand their job is to die if they have to.”
Hell.
The steadfast thrum I heard was somehow linked to my chest, sounding each time my lungs compacted. Each breath that left my lips then differed from all the ones that came before it.
My world had condensed in the last few weeks, tightening into a space just wide enough for a five-foot-four butterfly. He wore his bloodied wings and tear-streaked glitter like a goddamn work of art, and everything that surrounded him was dull.
Meaningless.
The lengths I would go to protect him couldn’t be defined or measured, but the plan Ben built came pretty fucking close.
“It'll be months before I trust any of those motherfuckers to even take a breath of Toby’s air.”
“Oh, I sure as shit won’t be letting Marcos out my sight for the foreseeable fucking future, but this?” I held up the drive. “This makes my dick hard.”
“Break them, Ivan. Put them in the ring and break them like you did me.”
Ben was my last opponent—the last man to lose.
Fourteen years ago, I beat the everlasting shit out of him, then he came back and offered me a hundred grand to do it again.
Any jackass could fire a gun or carve a blade, but there was something so supremely satisfying about beating a man to death with nothing but sheer strength and overboiled rage.
Ben had always been pissed off, but he was louder in his anger than I was, cunning in a sharp sort of way. I beat at him until he lost all semblance of self-control, and then I taught him how to dial it back—how to hold rage at the tip of his finger and remain apathetic toward shit too fucking mundane for a beating.
He was still shit at that last part.
“This ranks as top priority, but I won’t strip you of other responsibilities.”
“I wouldn’t fucking want you to.”
“Good.” He stood. “Time to take your thumb out of your ass, Koslov. We’ve narrowed down a location for Delgado.”
ChapterTwelve
Ivan
“Solnyshko?”
The air was void of noise, but it was heavy with his presence. Like palms on my skin, I felt him as though he was in front of me, draped across my upper body with a desperation only I could ease.
He was here.
Somewhere.
The deadbolt made a heavy noise when I turned it, echoing through my apartment like a weak clap of thunder. An absence of light brought an ugly, putrid taste to the back of my throat. I wasn’t a stranger to shadows, but Marcos preferred a sliver of light—a minuscule beacon that proved there was nothing lurking in the corners he couldn’t see.
