Page 4 of Wreaking Havoc
There was a handle sticking out of him.
He looked up at the workman, as if another person could help make sense of the situation—the workman who was now gazing at him with an intensity that no ordinary person should be looking at him with.
Something clicked in Sascha’s brain. “Did you juststabme?”
He might have been embarrassed at his pouty tone at any other time, but his armhurt, goddamn it.
“Not where I intended,” the man muttered. Then he pressed a palm into the handle sticking out of Sascha’s limb, raising hisvoice to be heard over Sascha’s scream. “We have a message for your brother.”
Sascha’s scream trailed off into a whimper, his gaze drawn to his arm again. The stupid suit was darkening around the knife in a telltale pattern.
Oh God, that was blood, wasn’t it?
His vision started growing mercifully fuzzy at the edges. “Well, you picked the wrong way to go about it,” he sniped, his words already slurring. His head was beginning to feel too heavy to hold up. “You should know I faint at the sight of—”
And then everything went dark.
2
Sascha
Two months later
The thing about adorable Maine tourist towns was that apparently half the town shut down for the off-season.
Sascha stared at the “Closed for Winter” sign on his favorite coffee shop—the only one he’d found that knew how to make a decent espresso—his lower lip pushed out into a pout.
Well, what the hell was he supposed to do now?
Five minutes later, his answer was apparently the Bakeshop, a bakery Sascha had passed almost daily the past six weeks here but had never entered because he could already tell from the sidewalk that it was most decidedlynothis scene.
There weredoilieson the counter, for God’s sake.
But as he peered in the window now, he could see a coffee pot percolating behind the pastry case, so he was going to have to brave the doilies, wasn’t he?
The aproned teen behind the counter, all round cheeks and bouncing curls, smiled brightly at him as he entered. “Morning!”
“Morning,” Sascha replied, maybe a little sulkily, but what did it matter? No one here knew him for who he was. He could be as sulky as he wanted, damn it.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. Sascha ignored it for the tenth time that morning. “You don’t happen to have an espresso machine hiding back there, do you?” he asked without much hope.
“Nope. Sorry. Marjorie doesn’t like them,” the teen answered, as if Sascha was supposed to know who Marjorie was. Sascha didn’t even know whothisperson was, except his name tag said Seth, with a little “He/Him” underneath. “But what we’ve got is freshly brewed.”
“I’ll take a large cup, then. Very large. And—” Sascha perused the pastry case, which didn’t look nearly as despairing as he’d first assumed “—one of those chocolate croissants.”
“Coming right up!”
God, he was perky. Weren’t teens supposed to be sullen assholes?
“We don’t usually get many tourists off-season,” Seth pointed out chattily as he grabbed the croissant from the case, further proving Sascha wrong.
“I’m not a tourist. I live here.”For now, was the part Sascha left unspoken.Until Ivan deems it safe to return.
Which would perhaps be sometime in the next million years.
Seth’s eyes widened in apparent delight. “Oh! You’re going to love Seacliff in the winter. Gets real cozy. And don’t worry, there’s still a ton to do. Cross-country skiing…”
Sascha wouldnotbe doing that.
