Page 58 of Wreaking Havoc
Sascha rubbed a hand over his eyes. “He’s been trying to reach me while I was sick. I said something stupid to him before getting feverish. Let me…”
He ran upstairs to where he’d left his phone charging overnight before glancing at it as he hopped down the stairs. “You think he knew they’d figured it out? Or…”
There were a number of voice mails from Ivan, but Sascha didn’t want to touch those. He looked at the texts instead.
Answer the phone, Sascha.
You’re testing my patience.
You want to play games? I can play, baby brother. Get the guest room ready.
Oh fuck. Sascha checked to see when the last text had been sent. Yesterday.
He cleared his throat. “Um, Alexei, maybe you and Jay should be heading back to Colorado?”
“What? Why?” Jay looked back and forth between them. “Is it because I wanted to copy your robe? I don’t have to get the exact same one.”
And of course just then there was a knock on the front door.
Alexei gave him a small smile, seeming to already know what was on the other side. “It’s fine, Sascha. It’s a reunion long overdue.” He put a hand on Jay’s shoulder. “He can’t hurt us. Not really.”
Sascha’s stomach twisted anyway. He was stuck in place for a long moment. He should change, shouldn’t he? He looked to Kai. No, he wouldn’t change. He was fine the way he was.
The knocking grew more insistent.
Sascha went to the front door, Kai right behind him, opening it to a face he knew better than his own. A face very similar to his own, although Sascha had never quite managed the icy cold of Ivan’s eyes.
Ivan must have come straight from the office—he was wearing a tailored black suit, one he wore with the ease Sascha had always been incapable of. He wasn’t glaring—he wouldn’t, not when he could be equally terrifying with no expression, his face a smooth and forbidding mask. “About time,” he said in a clipped voice. “What the fuck are you wearing?”
“A bathrobe.” It took everything in Sascha not to fidget with the damned thing. “I’m surprised you don’t have a key.”
“I misplaced it.” Ivan’s eyes tracked behind Sascha’s shoulder, and Sascha knew without looking that Kai was back in human form. “Who’s this? You hired your own muscle? Is that what your hissy fit was about?”
“I sent you one text,” Sascha sniped. “I don’t think that counts as a hissy fit.”
“You froze me out after.That’sthe hissy fit. Let me in, Sascha.”
Sascha stepped back from the door with a sigh, Kai hovering over his shoulder like a forbidding guardian angel.
Ivan stepped inside, and his gaze flew immediately to the entrance of the kitchen, where Alexei was standing, Jay just behind him. For the briefest moment, pure shock crossed Ivan’s face, making him look relatively human. Then the cold mask descended again. “Alexei,” he said flatly. “You’ve returned.”
“Sascha needed me.”
“I see.” Ivan glanced at Sascha, his expression unreadable. Sascha felt a complicated rush of shame and defiance. He knew his brothers were at odds, and always had been. And he knew they both loved him, in their own ways. That Ivan loved him as best as he was able, and it wasn’t exactly his fault that his best had been stunted beyond belief by their upbringing.
And he knew, without a doubt, that Ivan would see this as a betrayal—Sascha turning to Alexei and away from him.
“Ivan, I—” Sascha started to say.
The slightest tensing of Ivan’s shoulder was the only warning before his hand was in his suit jacket and he was pulling out a gun, firing two shots into Alexei with no hesitation.
And then, for the second time in twenty-four hours, Sascha found himself behind a wall of leather.
16
Kai
Kai was in front of Sascha in an instant, his wings blocking his human from view. Blocking him fromharm.
