Kingmakers, Graduation

40. Adrik

40

ADRIK

S abrina hijacking our materials is a big fucking problem.

First, she’s not just stealing from me anymore. Yuri Koslov wants to put a bullet in her head. Second, this is a direct attack on my business. Not price-manipulation and market-flooding—she stole from us. Which means we’re going to war.

My feelings for Sabrina over the last six weeks have vacillated from regret to all-consuming rage. I’ve never been angrier at someone in my life. To position herself as my enemy and rival, after everything we shared …

I spend hours fantasizing about the dark and depraved things I’ll do if I ever get my hands on her.

Yet even in my most murderous moments, I can’t stand the thought of her catching a bullet from one of Yuri’s men.

So when Koslov demands that we retaliate against Krystiyan Kovalenko, I tell him I’ll handle it myself. I order the Wolfpack to strap up, and we drive over to Krystiyan’s compound in Rublyovka.

All six of us are in the SUV. Hakim and Chief wait in the car. Jasper and Vlad come into the entryway, but Krystiyan’s men won’t let them any further.

Jasper wants to stay with me. In fact, he barely agrees to let me go on without him.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I’ve got it covered.”

Alone, I follow Krystiyan’s lieutenant into what I can only describe as a villain’s lair.

It’s a dramatic room painted charcoal gray, with floor-to-ceiling drapes, a roaring fireplace, and an actual Siberian bear rug frozen in a futile roar beneath the legs of a throne-like chair.

The rest of the seating is more conventional. Sabrina sits on a perfectly normal couch, Ilsa on an easy chair. They both look tense and pale.

Krystiyan is the only one comfortable, because he’s the only one foolish enough not to understand what’s happening in this moment.

He thinks he’s in some triumphant position. Four of his men around him, mine out in the hall. Sabrina at his right hand, like a queen taken in conquest. Ilsa her knight, sitting next to her, elbows on her knees, fist under her chin, silent and watchful.

Krystiyan actually grins, lolling in his ridiculous chair. Teeth almost as white and straight as an American, a heavy gold bracelet dangling from one wrist, nails manicured, wearing a $6000 suit. Every inch the king .

I’m in jeans and boots. Same jacket as ever. Same hair. I doubt I’ve changed to Sabrina’s eyes. The differences are buried too deep—a poison spreading below the surface where no one can see.

Sabrina is completely altered. If I believed it were possible, I’d think Krystiyan had been torturing her. I’ve never seen her so drained of light. She’s a fading photograph of what she once was.

And yet there’s still a desperate, fragile beauty I feel compelled to save, like a painting that might be restored, or a ring that could be dug up and cleaned and made to shine again.

“Adrik,” Krystian smirks, “I was wondering when you’d come to see me.”

Without even glancing in his direction, I say: “I’m not here to see you.”

I haven’t taken my eyes off Sabrina for one second since I walked in this room. My stare burns into her, lighting her on fire. I see the color rising up her neck into her cheeks, like a temperature gauge. The longer I stare, the hotter she gets.

I take three long strides toward her. Krystiyan jumps up from his chair, stepping in front of me to intercept.

I put one hand on his shoulder and slice across his throat, opening a gash as thick as a finger with the razor-fine blade of the knife Sabrina gave me.

Whatever Krystiyan intended to say is cut off short, his vocal cords severed along with everything else. There’s nothing but whistling silence as he raises his fingers to his neck, his face blank of anything but surprise.

He sinks forward, landing softly on his knees .

The room is utterly still. Krystiyan’s men haven’t moved an inch. They stare at me impassively. Watching their boss struggle and drown without lifting a finger to help him.

All is silence but the pattering of blood from the tip of my knife to the floor.

I look Sabrina dead in the eye.

“Baby…you are really starting to piss me off.”

Krystian topples over behind me. Sabrina’s wide and startled eyes flutter from his body to his men, still unsmiling, still unmoving. Hardly seeming to register their boss on the ground.

“You’re wondering why they don’t do anything? Let me explain it to you. You see that one behind you there? With the earrings? That’s Denis Radmir, we went to school together in St. Petersburg. The one beside him is Yev Tamila. They know who I am. They know that if they even think about firing a bullet at me, Jasper will come and hunt him down and cut his throat a month, six months, a year later. And if Jasper doesn’t find him, Vlad will. Or Andrei. Or Hakim. Or even fucking Chief. All these men know that. That’s the difference between a brother and a hired gun.”

I see the sick paleness that comes over her, realizing that she really didn’t see this coming. Realizing how much she doesn’t know.

Ilsa regards Krystiyan’s body on the floor with no surprise at all. I could never have done the same to Sabrina without Ilsa intervening, because she wouldn’t have left her so unprotected to begin with. She stays right by Sabrina’s side.

Ilsa understands how quickly the balance of power shifted .

Krystiyan has no family, no pull beyond his cash. The loyalty his money bought died the moment I cut his throat.

Ilsa’s shoulders lower like a sigh.

I’m still holding the knife, my thumb brushing against the inscription Sabrina wrote for me in another time, another world.

You. Always You …

There’s only ten feet of space between us. The closest we’ve been in six weeks. An agonizing, eternal amount of time.

I can feel her heart beating across that space. I smell her scent, high and sharp with adrenaline. Her pupils are pin pricks, her lips damp.

I could take two more steps to reach her, but she’s tense and trembling, a rabbit on the grass—if I take a step toward her, she might bolt.

“You’re done,” I tell her. “It’s time to come home.”

She stares at me, white as death, eyes flat and metallic.

“Never,” she whispers.

The air is full of the iron smell of blood.

It’s Kovalenko’s, but it feels like it’s Sabrina and me who are cut. We’ve hacked at each other again and again. We’re in some kind of contest to prove who has the stronger will. For us to be together, maybe one of us has to conquer.

We’ll keep hurting each other until someone begs for mercy.

I point at Sabrina and I make her a promise: “Come at me again and I won’t pull any punches. ”

I close the bloody knife and put it back in my pocket.

Krystiyan’s men don’t speak a word to me. Denis Radmir simply nods as I pass.

I leave the house, the Wolfpack behind me.

The car ride back is silent.

Jasper drives, one hand on the wheel. I see him sneaking glances at me out of his peripheral.

“You okay?” he says at last.

The weight of what I just did is already crashing down on me. I’m replaying every word, every glance between Sabrina and me. Already feeling that it was all wrong, all fucked up.

I don’t know what I should have done … but not that.

I can’t answer Jasper. All I can do is shake my head once.

Another long silence.

Then, grimacing, Jasper says, “For what it’s worth … I miss her too.”

We all do. The mood in the house has been dismal the last six weeks, and not only because of me. You don’t realize how bright Sabrina shines until the light goes out.

The day she left, Jasper agreed with her. He was afraid to tell me the truth.

Yet another thing for him to feel guilty about. And another thing that shows me how blind I can be.