Red. (Den of Mercenaries #1)(79)

“And now they won’t be a problemanymore.”

Not for her. Nor Jimmy. Nor anyone else that was being hustled by the pair of brothers.

In mere weeks, Niklaus had solved another problem for her.

He had always been rather good at that.

“Do you have another job?” she asked as he set her back on her feet, gazing up. “Are you leaving again?”

She might not have known what jobs he had been on before, so she hadn’t seen the beginning or the end, but now she was right in the middle of it.

“Not if I’m staying with you.”

She smiled. “What exactly are you asking?”

His lips tilted up into a smile that made her heart ache with happiness. “A few nights, or all of them. Your choice.”

She had never been able to resist him, not then, and definitely not now.





Epilogue





“There a reason you needed to disrupt my day, Volkov,” Niklaus asked as he joined his brother in his McLaren, already pulling on his seatbelt though they had yet to pull off.

He didn’t trust anyone’s driving but his own.

“I owed you a debt. An apology was never good enough, so I had to do something else.”

Niklaus just stared at his twin. “What the f*ck are you talking about?”

Mishca didn’t respond, merely putting the car into drive and pulling away from the curb. If Niklaus wasn’t already confused as to what was happening, it only got worse. Not only was this out of the ordinary for him—they had mended bridges though they still didn’t go out of their way to be around each other—but he was driving, and as far as Niklaus could tell, he didn’t have any of his muscle trailing them.

If it was anyone else, Niklaus might have thought that he was being taken to his death or at the very least an ambush. Though the McCarthy family was taken care of, and the man Niklaus had been tasked with finding was in the wind, he still had a meeting with the Kingmaker to tell him everything that had gone down.

He wouldn’t put it past his handler to orchestrate this just to f*ck with him.

Except, they pulled over at a brownstone in a suburban neighborhood where there were people out walking their dogs, jogging, or other such things.

Mishca still didn’t explain as he killed the engine and climbed out, fully expecting Niklaus to follow behind him. His curiosity piqued, he did.

Producing a key, Mishca unlocked the residence, stepping out of the way with a nod of his head for Niklaus to go ahead of him.

“Are you going to explain, or do you want me to guess?” Niklaus asked as he walked in, the scent of freshly painted walls greeting him.

The space was fully decorated in warm neutrals, and looked lived in already despite how new everything looked. He heard voices coming from what he thought was the kitchen, Reagan he could tell, and Lauren from the soft laughter. And somebody else, but he couldn’t make out the voice.

“What, you bought me a place?” Niklaus asked. While he would never admit it aloud, the place was pretty nice. “Sorry, Russian, I don’t need it.”

“Not for you,” he said pocketing his keys. “Someone else.”

“Then who—”

The question was answered when his gaze moved to the three people that were walking in from the doorway across the room.

“I didn’t need all of this.”

“We know,” Lauren was saying, “but you deserve this.”

The woman Lauren was talking to was tiny, probably shorter than even Alex, with silver hair neatly smoothed into a bun at the nape of her neck. Wrinkles were abundant in her face from a lifetime of laughter and hard work. She had kind eyes, ones that had never looked at Niklaus with anything other than love and acceptance. While she had never hid the fact that she had adopted him—though she never told him the full story as to who and where he came from—she had never treated him as anything other than her son.

His mother, a woman he hadn’t seen in years, stood across the room from him.

It almost felt like his chest was breaking open.

“Mama?”

Malvina Antakova looked to him then, her face splitting into the softest, but most honest smiles he had ever seen. He could just see the tears in her eyes as she crossed the floor towards him.

He was halfway to her when he stopped and dropped to his knees to make up for their height difference.

Since his training, Niklaus had feared he didn’t know if he was capable of tears, thinking it had been beaten out of him, but as he felt the arms of his mother close around him, he could feel the lump in his throat, the sting in the back of his eyes.

“Syn moy—my son,” he heard whispered above him, the words taking him back to early mornings in the Florida heat as he happily went along with her to a job not wanting her to be alone.

Or the nights when it was just the pair of them at home, sitting in the living room with pizza, even though she hated the taste of it.

But she ate with him, because he enjoyed it.

Laughed with him when he needed it most.

Loved him when no one else would.

“I didn’t believe him, you know,” Malvina said pulling away after a moment, lifting her hands to cradle his face. “How could you have been okay after all these years?”

She looked between them, Niklaus and Mishca. “The resemblance really is uncanny. Catja would have loved to see her boys together again.”