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“CAN’T YOU WORK ANY faster?” I demanded, as the doctor hovered over Mauro and tried to remove the bullet from his shoulder. Mauro winced, biting back the pain that I knew he had to be feeling right now.
“I’m going as fast as I can—”
“Not fast enough,” I warned him, pacing back and forth in front of the armchair in my apartment as I waited for him to finish up.
Mauro and I had just made it back from the attack on Nikita’s building, and I was still reeling from the mess of everything that had happened. Where the fuck was I even meant to start? The chaos that had unfolded was still cluttered in my mind, and I couldn’t sort through any of it until I was able to speak to Mauro about what he knew.
“I’m not even a doctor, I’m a vet,” the guy protested. He was the same doctor who had removed the bullet from me, the one Mauro had managed to come up with to take care of my wounds.
“Yes, and you owe us big time,” Mauro growled at him through gritted teeth. “So get that thing out of there before we double your debt.”
He went back to work, and I watched with concern. I knew the wound might not have looked immediately dangerous, but Mauro was an older guy now and if we weren’t careful, he could wind up with a serious injury.
We had gotten out of there in one piece, that had to count for something. I just needed to understand what the fuck had happened to cause my own men to turn on me like that. Were they working with Nikita? Why had Mikhail seemed so confident in the way that he had spoken to me? Did he know Mauro? Did Mauro work with him at some point in the past? I needed answers, but until we had Mauro safe again, I couldn’t focus on getting them.
The doctor hunched over the wound and reached in with a pair of tweezers, and finally managed to yank out the bullet – a spray of blood followed, dribbling down Mauro’s back, and he grunted with discomfort.
“How does it feel?” I asked him.
“Fucking painful,” Mauro replied, though he was doing his best not to let it show on his face. He never wanted anyone to see weakness in him, I had known him long enough to be aware of that. The doctor pressed a sterilized swab against the wound until the bleeding started to slow down, and then carefully papered over it with a dressing that would keep it safe for the time being.
“That should be it,” he told us, straightening up again. His hands were still shaking as he put away his equipment.
“Thank you,” Mauro replied. “Now, leave us. I need to talk to Andreas.”
The doctor didn’t need telling twice, and he practically sprinted to the door to get the hell out of there before anything else could happen. Mauro turned to me, and I saw him press his hand to his stomach.
“Did you get caught again?” I asked him, nodding to the pressure his fingers were applying. He shook his head.
“It’s not important.”
“What do you mean? We need to get the doctor back in here—”
“Andreas, I don’t have much time,” Mauro told me, urgently, and the tone to his voice made me stop dead in my tracks. Much time for – for what?
“Did you get hit?”
“Listen to me,” he ordered as he sank back on to the chair behind him. “I – I don’t have long. I need to tell you everything.”
“What’s everything?” I asked. His face was paling, and he closed his eyes. I could see blood leaking through his fingers, a sure sign that it was serious.
“I’ve been working for someone else,” he admitted. The fact that he wasn’t looking at me seemed to make it easier for him. My heart dropped in my chest.
“What do you mean?”
“The FBI,” he confessed, blurting the words out as though they came from some place deep inside of him. “I’ve been – I’ve been with them since the start.”
My jaw dropped. There was no way – Mauro? I had been working with him for years, so had my father. We had trusted him with so much, and now...
“Listen to me!” he barked, seeing me drifting in front of him. “I – I was working with your father to try and get him out of the business. I started out trying to take him down, but as more time passed, it became obvious that I should pivot him to something legit. That way, I could keep his connections without losing his status.”
He took a deep, ragged breath. I was too stunned to say anything.
“We thought we could make this work, but the Serbians have always been there to pull him and you back in,” he continued. “We wanted to get you out, get you both out, but they – they’re never going to let that happen. You’re their scapegoat, and it’s going to stay that way as long as you keep engaging with them. Nikita—”
He caught his breath again, groaning with discomfort, and I planted my hand over his to try and stem the flow of warm blood. It was useless. Why hadn’t he let us treat him? Was he already too far gone?
“Nikita took Nadia to Serbia. We’re sure that he’s going to try and marry her, so that he can consolidate his power,” he explained. “He thinks that he’ll have beaten you if he marries her. I don’t know what he’s going to use to make sure of it, but he’s not going to hold anything back to make sure he gets her where he wants her.”
I felt physically sick at the thought of Nadia with that man. No way was I going to let that happen. No way.
“How do you know this?” I asked him, urgently. I knew time was running short. I didn’t want to waste a moment of it. Mauro shook his head.
“We have agents working with the Serbs too,” he explained, his voice starting to fade. “They told me – they’ve been keeping up with what’s going on there, passing it back to me.”
He reached out to grasp my arm, smearing my skin with his blood. His eyes were starting to get hazy and I knew I didn’t have much time left with him.
“You need to get her out of there,” he continued, as best he could. “They’ll come back to New York to get married, and you have to be ready when they do.”
“Ready for what?”
“War,” he replied. “All-out war. If you want to stop Nikita and save Nadia and her father, you have to be ready to go to war—”
He coughed violently, spraying a mixture of saliva and blood over the couch. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I was going to lose him. This man who had been there my entire life, I was going to lose him – right after I found out that he had lied to me about pretty much every single thing that had marked out our life together.
“Listen to me,” he urged me. “You can win this. You just have to be ready to take him on. He expects you to fold, but you don’t have to. You can fight. You can beat him. You need to. It’s the only way the Serbs are going to stop. Get rid of Nikita, cut off the head, and you can end them for good.”
“I need you there with me,” I told him urgently. “Mauro, you know I can’t do this without you—”
“You can,” he breathed back. “I know you can. You’re more capable than you think. I’m just...”
He trailed off. His eyes were starting to grow distant. He was losing his grip on reality. How had he gotten hit and I hadn’t noticed? How had I let this happen? How hadn’t I known about his... about his real affiliation?
“I’m going,” he admitted, finally. I shook my head.
“You can’t,” I snapped at him, almost angry. “You can’t, Mauro, listen to yourself. There’s too much left to tell me.”
“I have notes, you can find them,” he explained, voice raspy and distant. “You can talk to the agents who were on my case, they’ll tell you as much as they can...”
I wanted to shake him, but I knew it wasn’t going to work. He was an old man now. An old man who had spent most of his life trying to help my family, even if we hadn’t known it at the time. I could feel the tears catching at the back of my throat, tried to swallow them down, but there was no point. I had to find a way to bring him back, even as he was drifting from me.
“Mauro,” I pleaded with him, but he shook his head.
“My part is over,” he told me, and there was a sudden serenity to his voice, as though he had utterly accepted what was going through his mind.
“You can’t leave me to do this alone,” I begged him. He closed his eyes again.
“You’re stronger than you think, Andreas,” he assured me, and with that, I watched as the last vestiges of life dripped out of him. The blood that had been dribbling from the wound in his side started to ease up, the flow slowing as his heartbeat faded away to nothing, and I knew I had lost him.
I had lost the one connection I still had left to my father. The one person who had been there through all of it. The one person, apparently, who had been lying to us all of this time, keeping back the truth when he should have been sharing it.
I stared at him for a long time, just sitting there on the ground in front of him. Was what he had told me true? Could it be? I was sure there had to be something more to all of this, something I was missing, but for now, all I had to go on was what he had told me.
And what he had told me was that there was good reason to be worried about Nadia. That I would have to step up and make sure she didn’t get snatched by Nikita. Did he really want to marry her? The thought of his hands on her was enough to make me feel ill, but I ignored it. I had to act fast.
If there was really war on the way, I had to be ready to ride at dawn. And I would be. Just as soon as I had laid Mauro to rest – and just as soon as I had found out how much of this story that he had told me was true.
