Page 73 of Exacting Vengeance

Gently, as if she had all the time in the world, she set the can on the coffee table, then went to the door and opened it. Beautiful blue eyes that had once looked up at him with the deepest passion and longing he’d ever known, glared daggers at him. “Please have someone bring over the things I left at your house. Now, I’d like you to leave.”

Their gazes locked hard. Every muscle tightened with the restraint it took not to throw her over his shoulder and haul her back to his house to keep her under lock and key until Yuri was sentenced to life in prison where he could rot for the rest of his life.

“Everything okay in here?” Deke asked, confusion on his face.

Sending Victoria one last look, Kyle stepped into the hallway. “Let’s go.” He didn’t say another word. Not as he charged down the hall, or took the stairs to the ground floor, or as he stormed across the street to where Jack waited, leaning against the hood of his Explorer.

“Where is she?” Jack asked.

“Not coming,” Deke said.

“Kyle?” Jack came around the SUV. “What’s up?”

Unable to speak without shouting his aggravation at the top of his lungs, he rested both hands against the SUV’s roof rail.

Having a relationship with Victoria had been doomed from the start. He should have left it that way, because that’s exactly where it was now. Over.

Before it had really begun.

“Dammit!” He slammed his fist on the roof, leaving a dent in the metal. Wisely, his brothers hung back, letting him blow off the steam and frustration he needed to vent.

He hung his head, forcing himself to accept the inevitable.

It wasn’t meant to be. There was nothing he could do to control the fallout of the past, but he couldn’t leave Victoria alone and unprotected. That, he could control.

He turned to face his brothers. “There’s been a change of plans.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

"Where have you been?”

Yuri sneered and extended his middle finger at the cell phone clipped to the Escalade’s console. Mudak. Nikki really was becoming an asshole.

“It has not gone unnoticed,” Nikki continued, whining like a little girl, “that you have not been present for big meetings. You’re pissing me off.”

Yuri tapped the ashes from his cigarette into a paper coffee cup, being careful to keep the glowing tip below the dashboard. Go fuck yourself. “I’m working on something.”

“Now that Boris is in prison, you need to be present for all business meetings. So, tell me, my friend, what are you working on?”

Friend?

For the last six years, his friend had been on the outside—free—while he’d been stuck in prison. Not once had Nikki visited him there. Now his so-called friend’s voice was beginning to grate on his nerves worse than those federal prison guard dickheads. He hadn’t come to New York for the honor of being treated like pig shit.

Before answering, he took a drag from the cigarette, inhaling deeply into his lungs and holding it there to steady his anger before blowing it out. “All you need to know is that it is something very lucrative. But there are many details to be worked out.” Because things had just become trickier.

The security guy was gone, but now there were two federal pigs watching the front and back doors to Vika’s building. He could smell a fed a mile away.

“There is a rumor,” Nikki rambled on, “that Vika is here. Somewhere.”

“What?” Yuri straightened. “How do you know this?”

“You would tell me if you found her, yes?”

“Yes, of course, my friend.” He took another drag on the cigarette, watching one of the feds get out of his SUV and go to the front door, checking to see if it was unlocked.

“Where are you staying?” Nikki inquired in a suspicious lilt. “I set you up in a nice apartment, all expenses paid until you get back on your feet, but you haven’t stayed there. Not once since Boris’s trial.”

Yuri narrowed his eyes as he looked in the rear- and sideview mirrors. “Have you been following me?”