Savage Hearts (Queens & Monsters #3)(96)

Cancer. Oh, no. He was so nice to me. Thinking of our dinner, I say absently, “You mean successor.”

“Excuse me?”

“A protégé is in the process of training. A successor takes over where someone leaves off.”

Sloane says, “She has a thing for words. Just keep going.”

“That’s it.”

Pulling myself together, I say, “What’s the good news?”

He gets a mysterious glint in his eye, like he has a secret. “How do you know that wasn’t the good news?”

I look at Sloane.

She says, “Seriously, honey. Look at that face. You’re taking your life into your hands.”

“Thank you, sis.”

She smiles at me. “You’re welcome.”

“All right…let’s just say Malek and I now have a mutual friend.”

I frown. “You mean the guy Mal visited in New York to get information about how to find you?”

Declan goes very still. He says slowly, “What guy?”

“Some guy named Kazimir. I heard Mal say the name over dinner with Pakhan and asked him about it later.”

His stillness turns to stiffness. Murder flares in his eyes. Through a clenched jaw, he says, “Kazimir told Malek how to find me? So he could kill me?”

Sloane whistles. “Oh, he’s gonna be in so much trouble.”

“What am I missing?”

Grimacing, she glances at me. “That’s Nat’s fiancé.”

“Whoa! Hold on! What the fucking-fuckedy-fuck?”

“Kage—Kazimir—is the head of the Bratva here in the US.”

I can feel my eyes bulging out like a cartoon. “And Nat’s engaged to him?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll fill you in later. Right now, I think the three of us need to get on a conference call.”

Declan roars, “I’m not getting on the phone with that bloody arsewipe!”

Sloane pats his chest. “I meant us three girls, honey.”

Sputtering in fury, he says, “You’re not talking to Natalie! I forbid it!”

Sloane kisses his cheek. “That’s cute.” She holds her hand out to me. “Come on. The sooner we can sort this out, the sooner his blood pressure can get back to normal.”

We leave Declan behind in the room, shouting something in Gaelic that doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with his blood pressure.





45





Riley





I spend two hours on the phone with Nat and Sloane, starting off by saying, “Okay, explain this all to me like I’m a toddler.”

I get a story that makes my eyes cross.

Nat’s former fiancé, David, who went missing on the day of their wedding years ago and who everyone presumed was dead, was actually a Bratva accountant named Damon who embezzled money, turned on his bosses, and went into the witness protection program. With a new identity, he moved to Lake Tahoe, where he met Nat. Fast forward a bunch of years, he’s gone missing, and Nat is still in mourning.

Except then this hot stranger Kage moves in next door, and Nat’s dormant mourning ovaries jolt to life like reanimated zombies starving for brains.

Brains being a euphemism for the exceptionally hot dick Kage is packing.

But Kage, being cagey, hides the fact from Nat that he’s really the assassin sent to locate Damon and all the money he stole from the Bratva, then kill her.

I mean, it’s understandable he omitted that pesky detail, right?

It would be a deal breaker for most girls.

But Nat, also being cagey, figures out who Kage and her ex really are—wait, there’s another assassin in there somewhere who shows up to kill her because Kage failed to do it—and she heads off to Panama to find Damon, who was never really dead in the first place, just waiting for her to find him from a secret message he left in a painting. He skipped town on their wedding day because the FBI told him the Bratva had discovered where he’d been hiding.

Except by the time Nat finds him, he’s married to some other lady.

Who also doesn’t know his real name or that he was in the mafia.

Anyway, Kage and Nat get past all the thorny I-was-sent-to-kill-you business and move to New York together. Then, of course, Sloane has to go visit her bestie Nat in Manhattan, because the number of millionaires per capita is higher there than anywhere else in the US.

When I ask Sloane how she knew that, she says she looked it up.

Shocker.

So Kage sends a private jet for Sloane—I swear, these gangsters and their private jets—and Sloane heads to New York. Just as she steps out of the car at Nat and Kage’s building, however, Declan roars up with the Irish cavalry to kidnap her on orders from then-boss Diego who wanted information about Kage and a shootout that went down at some Mexican restaurant in Tahoe where both Irish and Russians were killed and Sloane was the cause.

Then Diego dies—supposedly but not really—and Declan becomes the new Mob boss.

I know. I could hardly follow it, either.

But I did follow the part where Declan got a lot more than he bargained for in a kidnappee, because within a few days, Sloane had his whole crew eating out of her manicured hands and him wrapped around her pinky finger.