Kieran quickly discovered that the reason there was no guard on duty at the open gates was because Rory was lying on the floor of the security booth, eyes staring sightlessly up at the ceiling, a fatal bullet wound in the center of his forehead.
Kieran turned to stare down the driveway toward the house. The usual lights left on inside the house were no longer on, and he couldn’t see any movement—
He couldn’t see any movement!
And he should have been able to see at least one of the men he had left patrolling the grounds front and back of the house.
Dear God…
Kieran jumped back into the SUV, totally focused on the house as he accelerated the vehicle and the gravel crunched and then flew up from the back tires.
He reached the house quickly before putting the vehicle in Park and jumping down onto the gravel.
He instantly saw the men who should have been guarding the front of the house. They were down, both with a bullet wound dead center of their forehead.
As no one had reacted to his arrival or was answering his radio calls to them, he could only assume that the three men at the back of the house had met the same fate.
The front door of the house was wide open, the darkness inside mocking him, daring him to enter.
He spoke briefly to Liam over the radio before entering the house. “Three men confirmed down, three presumed dead. I repeat, we possibly have six men down. Approach with caution.” He didn’t wait for his brother’s reply before ending the call.
He chose to leave the lights off rather than look for the main switch and turn it back on. Instead, he took a small but powerful flashlight from his pocket, gun in his other hand as he entered the house. Adrenaline pumped through his veins as he moved stealthily down the darkened hallways toward Marco’s nursery.
The nursery door was closed, and there was no sound from inside the room.
Remembering the three dead men outside, probably six if the men at the back of the house had met the same fate, Kieran was terrified of what he was going to find inside the nursery.
His hand shook slightly as he gripped and then turned the handle, quietly and slowly opening the door.
The beam of the flashlight allowed him to see that Marco’s crib was empty and so was the room. No one was hiding behind the small dresser and changing table either, which was the only other furniture in the room.
Marco was gone.
Janina too.
Kieran’s legs buckled beneath him at the magnitude of that discovery, and he collapsed inelegantly to the floor beside that empty crib.
He hadn’t cried since his father hit him when he was twelve and broke his arm. He certainly hadn’t cried a single tear at the bastard’s funeral some years later. He wasn’t going to cry now either, but staring at that empty crib and room, Kieran felt the sting of those unshed tears in his eyes.
They weren’t for himself—although he had no doubt Leon was going to kill him for this.
No, his emotion was all toward the missing baby boy and the woman Kieran—
He froze as he heard what sounded like a whimper.
He quickly rose back to his feet, gun at the ready as he once again looked about the room. There really was nothing to see, no place to hide—
Other than behind the open door!
His movements were once again stealthy as he took the three steps back to the open door, lightly gripping the handle to swing it slowly closed.
He barely had time to register Janina crouching behind the door, Marco held tightly in her arms and starting to fuss and the reason for the whimper he had heard, before she rose and launched herself at him.
Kieran barely had chance to put down the gun and flashlight in time to wrap his arms about her, careful of Marco between them as he held her. She buried her face against his throat, her tears wetting his skin.
“I heard something outside, strange popping noises,” she sobbed.
“Gunshots through a silencer,” he explained grimly.
Her eyes widened. “Is anyone hurt?”
“Just tell me what happened after I left,” he encouraged gruffly.
Now wasn’t the time for Janina to hear that, in all probability, six men had been gunned down in cold blood, that even now, their bodies lay outside where they had fallen.
“The lights went out,” she continued breathlessly. “I didn’t know—didn’t know— I pressed my ear against the door and I could hear someone outside in the hallway, the softness of their footsteps and the sound of their breathing. I quickly grabbed Marco and hid behind the door. Hoping—oh God, hoping that someone would come and help us—”
“Marco!” A frantic Carla burst into the nursery. Her dark gaze darted everywhere in an instant, from the empty crib and then to Marco still held tightly in Janina’s arms. “Oh thank God. Thank God!”
Kieran released Janina so that she could hand the fussing Marco into his mother’s arms.
Leon burst into the room to gather both his wife and son tightly against him as the main lights were switched back on. “Thank you,” he told Janina shakily. “Thank you, thank you.” He held one of his hands out for her until she joined in the hug. He glanced at Kieran over the top of his wife’s head. “We’ll talk about this shortly.” There was none of the previous warmth in his voice.
Kieran nodded before quietly leaving the room.
He couldn’t have been happier that Leon and Carla had their beloved son back in their arms, and his own relief over Janina’s safety was huge.
But right now, he needed to find the person responsible for gunning down six of his men.
He had a feeling that if time hadn’t become a factor, namely that Leon and his entourage of bodyguards had been arriving home shortly, Marco and Janina would probably be dead too.
Just as he believed the shooter outside the restaurant and the one here on the estate couldn’t be the same person. There hadn’t been enough time for them to get to the estate ahead of them, let alone have the time to kill six men. Or, once they entered the house, to go to the main security room and disable the alarms and security cameras.
Which meant there were two shooters.
If Leon didn’t have him killed first for incompetence, Kieran vowed to find and destroy both of them.
Janina looked, but there was no sign of Kieran once Leon and Carla had calmed down enough to have Marco’s crib moved into their bedroom so that he could sleep beside them for the rest of the night. They had refused to move to the security bunker on the grounds. Even so, Janina doubted either parent would be happy to allow their son out of their sight for the foreseeable future.
Janina knew she wouldn’t in the same circumstances.
Leon waited until his wife and son were calm before excusing himself to go and talk to his men.
Carla reached out to grasp one of Janina’s hands. “Stay here in the main house tonight.”
The last thing, positively the last thing Janina wanted, was to be on her own. But not returning to the house she was sharing with Kieran somehow seemed…disloyal.
She hadn’t missed the steely edge in Leon’s voice earlier when he told Kieran the two of them would “talk shortly.” Leon was obviously furious that his wife and son had both been in danger tonight. Understandably so.
But to even think of blaming Kieran for that was wrong, because surely it had to be the threat against Janina that had put them all in danger.
She believed it was.
Which meant she had to leave and take that danger with her.
Except she wasn’t quite sure where to go or how to get there.
She didn’t doubt that either Zoe or Paul would take her in, if only for tonight. But if she went to one of them, she would only be putting them in danger too.
A hotel, then. Just for tonight. Tomorrow, she could start to look for somewhere of her own to stay.
She’d also need to call a cab to get her there.
Would a cab come all the way out here at almost one o’clock in the morning?
Of course it would, especially if she offered to pay double for the cab driver’s time.
Money wasn’t a problem. Not only had she saved most of her money from when she worked at a hospital in Moscow, but her father had settled a large amount of money on both her and her sister when they reached the age of twenty-one. Not that Marisha or Janina had touched any of it, aware that their father’s fortune came from his dealings as head of the bratva in Moscow.
But this was an emergency. The sort of situation that didn’t allow for Janina’s squeamishness about where her father’s money came from.
She called the cab and told the driver to wait a quarter of a mile down the road from the main gate, before quickly walking through the grounds to the house where she was staying with Kieran.
Kieran wasn’t there, and it didn’t take Janina long to pack up her few belongings. She would call him, and Leon and Carla, tomorrow, and explain why she’d left without saying thank you or goodbye.
No doubt one or all of them would raise objections, but Janina had no doubts this was the right thing to do.
For them, if not for her.