Logan didn’t say anything. Just because he had the credentials didn’t mean it was right that he had this job. Why him? There were no answers down that road, no matter how many times he traveled it. Only questions and a whole bunch of shit.
Shit that messes with your head. He’d spent plenty of time on the why me? bullshit when he’d come home alongside coffins draped in flags. Alongside men with injuries far more life-altering than his own. When he’d come home.
Diya Molov smiled as she looked at the image on the screen, but the smile was one of sad memories, not joy. She wiped at an errant tear under one eye and forced herself to look past her own feelings.
She was happy for her ex-fiancé, despite the fact there was a new woman on his arm in the photo. It wasn’t his fault their world had been torn apart, any more than it was hers. When her family died, something inside her had died with them. In that moment, her life had been irreparably altered, and there was no going back. She’d had to abandon all she’d known, all she’d loved. To give all of it up in search of justice.
None of this had been fair to either of them, but she wanted his happiness, above all else. She wanted at least one of them to be able to continue to live happily.
Well, that wasn’t true. She wanted to avenge her family’s deaths above all else. Then she’d be satisfied to die along with them. To slip from this world to whatever it was that waited on the other side. On to join her family. Her beautiful baby brothers and their smiling faces. Her mother and father.
Her hand went to the locket on her neck, where she carried pictures of her brothers’ smiling faces. Little cherubs.
They had been ten and twelve when her father’s enemies murdered them, but in her mind’s eye they would always be chubby cheeked and pudgy legged children, running toward her for sticky kisses. Throwing dirty arms around her after a day playing in the yard at their family home.
Hearing a noise outside the room, she clicked the window closed on her laptop and turned to face the door. Yoshi entered quietly, as he always did. He wasn’t a leader, but he was a damned good soldier.
She understood why her father had kept him so close all these years. Aside from the family connection, that is. Yoshi Bogolomov was her cousin, son of her father’s long deceased brother, but he was also loyal and true. He would have gladly died alongside her father had his delay getting to the house the night of the attack not been unavoidable. And now he served alongside her as she sought vengeance.
He came with her from Russia to New York City, after they buried her family. New York was where they had begun to collect the information they would need to complete their task. It was where they were calling in markers her father held, to seek the justice denied to her family.
“Yoshi,” she said quietly. “You have news?”
He came and knelt before her, pulling papers from his back pocket. “I’ve located the two who are no longer overseas. Stone is one of them. He was injured and is living in Connecticut now.”
Diya tilted her head to the other chair in the room as she took the photos from his hands. She glanced at the images of one man before dropping them on her desk in exchange for the pictures of Logan Stone.
The one in charge of the ambush against her family. Rage washed over her as she saw the life he lived. The photos showed him entering a large office building, enjoying a life that shouldn’t be his. A life he didn’t deserve.
The injustice of it steeled her resolve. One simply cannot erase an entire family from the face of the earth and expect to move on. But, Stone hadn’t erased them all. He’d left her alive and that would be his mistake. He underestimated her. And she would take advantage of that fact and make him pay.
“Should I make arrangements?” Yoshi pulled her out of her head and back to the present with his question. She knew what he was asking. Did she want him to arrange for their deaths?
She didn’t. Not like that. It would be too easy to rely on the connections her father had built over the years. To call on the favors owed her father and his empire, and have the man and all who were there with him that night killed efficiently and without fanfare.
“No. Each of these men must pay a much higher price than the simple cost of their lives. They need to suffer as we have suffered, Yoshi. To have it all taken from them. Everything they love. All they value. They need to see it all destroyed. Then, and only then, will they die.”
Yoshi nodded as Diya looked back at the images in her hand. “We start with Stone. He is responsible. He led them and it is he who must pay first. Find out everything. Where his family is. Who his loved ones are. If he has a dog, find out. I want to take it all from him.”
She glanced down at the photos again and turned one toward Yoshi. In it, Stone and a woman stood together by the same building Stone entered in the previous picture. “Who is she?”
“I’m not sure yet. Could be someone he works with, but they’ve been seen coming and going from the building together a number of times.”
Diya murmured, and then handed the photos to Yoshi. “Find out if she’s more to him. If so, she’ll be taken away.”
Yoshi nodded and left the room, slipping out as quietly as he’d come, and leaving Diya alone to remember all she’d lost. All Stone stole from her.
Chapter 4
“It’s surreal, isn’t it?” Zach Harris asked as he sat on the couch next to Logan in Jack’s living room.
The others were on the opposite side of the large room, half of them sitting or standing near the couches by the fireplace. The others spilled over into the kitchen where Jack’s housekeeper was holding court while she and her boyfriend, Roark, cooked.
Sam had told Logan that Roark wooed Mrs. Poole for years before she gave in and started dating him recently. The man doted on her, following her every command in the kitchen with a smile that had love-sick-puppy written all over it.
Logan turned and grinned at Zach, the man who’d been his best friend growing up. He knew if anyone understood the odd feeling he had, surrounded by friends on a Saturday afternoon, it was Zach.
And surreal was right. Unreal. So far away from where he’d spent the last twelve years of his life. Zach had served overseas a long time ago. A much shorter stint than Logan’s, but he understood. He knew what it was like to try to come home. To try to be normal again.
As he watched the others across the room, part of him envied their ability to make a home, a family. To bring children into this world. As much as a piece of him craved just that, he had to wonder if it was right to bring children into this world. A world that had shown him unspeakable cruelty.
He envied them their innocence in that. The blind ability to see only what they knew, here in front of them. Then his eyes turned to Chad, who held his young daughter above him. He tossed her up in the air, bringing squeals forth with each toss. Chad had seen what Logan had. He knew the evil the world bred, and he’d chosen to have a child.
“Something like that,” he said in answer to Zach. Surreal was right.
“You hanging in there?” Zach asked.
Logan grunted a response. It was as close as the two of them would get to talking about their feelings.
“How’s Sutton? You like it there?”