Deceitful Vows (Marital Privileges #2)

77. Andrik

77

ANDRIK

“ I don’t give a fuck what Henry said. Find my wife!”

I slam down my phone as if it is an old-style rotary phone before smashing it with my fist. Henry has an army of millions because he is a fair man. He looks at the evidence to ensure his decisions aren’t based on the wizardry men in our field often use to get their way. His verdicts are swift but accurate, hence Zakhar, Mikhail, and I making it back to our compound relatively unscathed. But I’ve yet to hear the outcome of Zoya’s mistake.

Henry knows she threatened Dr. Sidorov, and that a sternly worded email is sometimes all you need to motivate a coward, but he wouldn’t issue a ruling without first speaking with Zoya.

I pleaded with him to let me accept the consequence of Zoya’s mistake, that she wouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t pushed her so hard.

Nothing I said got through to him, so I shifted my focus to Maksim.

He is as stubborn as me, and just as unhinged, so I knew the perfect way to get him to listen.

I used his wife against him.

I told him that she’d never forgive him if he took away the one person who kept her standing when her entire world crumbled beneath her feet, and how Zoya didn’t solely sell her eggs for herself. She also did it to buy Nikita textbooks and fund the first round of medication her father’s incarceration could no longer fund for her grandfather.

I told him he wouldn’t have a wife to defend if it weren’t for my wife.

He seemed to pay attention, but our conversation was hours ago, and not a single member of my team has laid eyes on Zoya since.

I flatten my palms on my desk just as Konstantine says, “I found a way in.” His fingers fly at a million miles an hour. “Where do you want me to look first? I won’t have access for long. Henry’s hacker is good.” We had to go around the federation’s system since it no longer exists.

Henry doesn’t just dismantle an organization. He wipes their existence from the history books.

“The Chrysler Building. That’s where Mikhail dropped her off.” My eyes go wild when we see inside the building for the first time in months. Maksim’s security is usually too high to infiltrate. “There.”

My heart thrashes against my ribs when Konstantine freezes the image of Zoya sprinting through an underground parking garage. Her face is ashen, meaning the tears tracking down her cheeks can’t be missed.

“Get the plate, then add it to the traffic cam database.”

“Fuck,” Konstantine groans. “I’m out. She booted me.”

Shockingly, I keep a cool head. “Try again. While you do that, I’ll seek another access point.”

The click of a safety on a gun being flicked off sounds through my ears when I enter the room next to my office. Zakhar is still sedated, but I’m not here for him. I need the man seated across from him who survived the federation’s implosion by the fine hairs on top of his head.

The secret service agent in the corner of the room re-houses his gun when he realizes who is approaching our current serving president. He knows I am no fret to my grandfather because if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t exist either.

It wasn’t solely the public’s admiration that kept me alive. It was also my grandfather’s. He loved my mother from afar for years, so in turn, some of that affection shifted to me when I was born.

He rules with an iron fist, but just like Henry, his rulings are fair. He couldn’t stomach me being torn from his clutches as numerous of his children were during his prime, so he agreed to be the federation’s puppet on the promise that my lineage would be buried as strenuously as his son hid his one and only true love.

My father let them take my mother. He hid Mikhail’s.

The knowledge pisses me off until I recall what the outcome could have been if he hadn’t loved Mikhail’s mother more than mine.

When my grandfather’s rheumy eyes lift to me, the shame in them reminds me of the reason for my visit. “I need access to White Eye.”

“I don’t have access?—”

“You do,” I interrupt, my tone stern. “You might have been puppeteered as well as the rest of us, but you had to input every code, speak every word of their vocal access passwords. You have access; you just need to bring back the fear. The notoriety. You need to continue trying to return our family name to the glory it once held.”

He nearly corrects me when I say our , but my hand thrust at Zakhar halts his words.

“He won’t survive this without her, Andrik.” I use his middle name on purpose, knowing his fondness of me may be the only way I will chip through his stern exterior. “A boy needs his mother. I know this more than anyone. Give him the chance to show you he can be great by having the guidance of both a mother and a father.” I lower my eyes to his pinkie finger, balking when his family crest ring is nowhere to be seen. Its disappearance fuels my campaign. “We’re not robots, Grandpa. We can love you without fearing you.” An unexcepted pocket of emotions hits my voice when I murmur, “She could have loved you without fearing you. You just never gave her the chance. Don’t do the same thing to Zakhar.”

His wet eyes lower from his translucent hands. He stares at them with a brooding silence that displays he is a man of great power. He wants our family name to have the respect it once held. I truly believe that. He’s just fighting demons decades older than mine.

“Please,” I murmur, not below begging if it ensures Zoya is returned to me safely. “You didn’t do all this work to let your family down now. Help me find her. Help me find my wife.”

He stares at me for barely a second before he flicks his eyes to the secret service agent standing guard in the corner of the room. “Fetch my briefcase.”

“Mr. President?—”

“Now!”

I inwardly fist pump when his stern rumble leaps the agent into action. He races for a briefcase my grandfather is never without before placing it on the end of Zakhar’s bed not used by his tiny frame.

After dismissing the agents from the room, he squashes his thumb on the finger scanner and then murmurs, “I had to do something. I couldn’t let him die.” More tears fill his eyes, showing a side of him I’ve never seen. “I didn’t play by their rules for decades to let them kill your mother’s only grandson.” He raises his eyes to me. They’re still glistening with wetness, but the deluge does little to hide his determination to return the respect his family lost centuries ago. “So I made them pay.”

When he opens his briefcase instead of revealing the access code that will allow Konstantine to hack into any security system in Russia, he hands me a simple USB drive.

I stop considering the importance of the microdrive when he mutters, “Give it to Henry. He will grant you access to anything you need once he opens the file inside.”

I have questions. Many of them. But since I don’t have time, I kiss his cheeks without the begrudged groan any affection usually forces from me before sprinting for the exit.

I almost make it into the clear when my grandfather calls my name—my real name. “Andrik.” He waits for me to face him before he says, “Tell your father I’m sorry, and make sure he knows the truth.” He lowers his eyes to the USB drive. “Everything you need is in there.”

“No,” I reply, shaking my head, unwilling to do his bidding. “He needs to hear it from you…”

My words trail off when he makes sure there’s no possibility of him facing his mistakes head-on. He raises a gun I didn’t realize he was holding until now to his head and fires one shot.

“No!”

The scream didn’t come from me. It came from someone behind me, and the familiarity of her voice has me spinning so fast my legs almost buckle out from beneath me.

Zoya is standing across from me. Her hair still has a tinge of red coloring from where she split her head, and her clothes are two sizes too big, but I would recognize those curves anywhere. And that face… fuck .

Her wide eyes drift from my grandfather, slumped over the edge of Zakhar’s bed with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, to me. I assume her cheeks whiten because she’s never seen a dead body before, but remorse pulls her in another direction.

“I’m so sorry.” She strays her eyes around a mansion now in ruins. “This is my fault. I caused this. I?—”

“No,” I cut her off, my one word as fast as the steps I take to bridge the gap between us. “This is not on you, милая . ” I weave my fingers through her hair nowhere near her wound and breathe in her scent before aligning our eyes. “This was never on you.”

“But—”

“No buts. No ifs. Life is too short for doubts.”

She is as stubborn as a mule. It is one of the things I love about her the most. “I?—”

“Do I need to take you over my knee, милая ?”

I should have known lust would force her from her stupor state before anything else. It blazes through her veins, making her hot, but before I can pretend the casualty of our battle isn’t in the thousands, a childlike voice interrupts us this time.

“Daddy.”

Zoya’s pupils blow wide before her motherly instincts kick in even with her being unaware of her connection to Zakhar. She races into this room and places herself between him and a scene that will scar him for life before his eyes are halfway open.

“You can’t open your eyes yet, Zak, or you’ll ruin your surprise.”

He swishes his tongue around his mouth to loosen up his words but keeps his eyes so tightly shut that wrinkles spread across the bridge of his nose. “You got me a surprise?”

“Uh-huh,” Zoya lies before gesturing like a badass mafia boss for me to remove the dead man at the foot of the bed. “But I forgot to wrap it, so I need you to keep your eyes closed for a little bit longer. Okay?”

“Okay,” Zakhar replies as Konstantine assists me in carrying my grandfather out of the room. The doctors Henry ordered to monitor Zakhar’s recovery do nothing but stare. I’m not even sure one of them is breathing.

“We’re almost ready.”

Zoya grunts and groans while using some of the supplies we left the hospital with to clean up the brain matter splattered across the bottom of Zakhar’s bed.

Now is not the time to admit this, especially since I am hiding the body of the man who saved my life in the closet of my son’s room, but I’m hard as fuck.

I knew Zoya had the gall to take down a kingdom, but I had no clue it extended this far.

“Okay.” She breathes out heavily when I return to the room before she scans the stark confines. Henry’s crew destroyed ninety-eight percent of this compound, but Zakhar’s room is basically untouched. His control shows you can be a man of mass power without being heartless. I plan to mimic his constraint as I rebuild.

After snatching up a clean bed sheet from a stack of many, Zoya curls it around her shoulders before giving Zak permission to open his eyes.

He does, albeit a little hesitantly. He is still in a lot of pain, but he’s willing to endure it for the chance of sneaking in some sweets before dinner.

When his eyes land on Zoya to silently demand she cough up the sweets he’s seeking, she throws out her arms and jumps in the air. “Ta-da!”

Zakhar clicks on to her ruse faster than me. I’m not surprised. He is as smart as his mother. “You’re my surprise?”

“Uh-huh.” She steps closer to his bedside, kicking away the gun my grandfather used to kill himself. “I know there is a bit of a difference in our ages, but age-gap romances are all the rage right now. If you can overlook my future wrinkles, I can pretend you’re a lot taller than you are.”

Zakhar sounds disgusted when he asks, “You want to be my girlfriend?”

Unsure of the cause of his suddenly dour mood, Zoya hesitantly nods. When it whitens his cheeks more than the mammoth operation he undertook thirty-six hours ago, she says, “I thought that was what you wanted, Zak?”

“I did, but…” He takes a moment to consider a nicer approach. When his pause for contemplation leaves him empty-handed, he hits Zoya with brutal honesty. “That’s a little gross now.”

Zoya’s shocked huff is drowned out by Mikhail’s chuckle. It is the chuckle of a man who no longer has a bullet in his stomach but is still feeling the effects of going against an army alone. “Tell me about it, bud. I’m still traumatized, and she didn’t make me.”

Gingerly, he enters the room, brushes shoulders with Zoya, and then playfully ribs her out of her frozen-in-shock state.

After taking in three sets of admiring eyes staring at her, she murmurs, “What am I missing?”

Since Zak is too young to know tact, he breaks the news I’m dying to share with her first. “You’re my mommy!”

Hours ago, that confession would have added a timer to her head.

Now, it ties her to me for life.

Thank fuck.