pulled a whiskey bottle from behind the bar, the same bottle of Saluzzo Reserve that Nico had opened for me the day of the stool sex. Dimitri yanked the cork out and drank straight from the bottle. With a disgusted twist of his mouth, he launched it at the wall behind the bar, shattering it.
I jumped at the sound, my hand automatically covering my belly in a gesture of protection.
“These fucking Americans and their rotgut whiskey,” he roared. “I’m so sick of this motherfucking country!”
I wanted to scream, “Then leave it! We don’t want you here!”
But I knew it probably wasn’t wise to upset an already deranged, and possibly homicidal, man.
He reached around the bar again and snagged an expensive bottle of vodka. After chugging down several drinks, he sighed. “Much fucking better.” He pointed to me with the bottle. “What do you say we bring your father out for this next part, da? Or should I say…our father.”
Had I just heard him correctly? He couldn’t have actually meant…?
Dimitri truly was insane.
He murmured something I couldn’t hear to one of the byki. The bodyguard stomped across the taproom, past me, and through a door that led to the room where the liquor was made and stored. The humongous copper vats were back there, whirring away as they distilled the alcohol that would eventually be served in this very room.
Moments later, the byki returned, dragging a limping man with him. He dropped the man to the floor like a sack of potatoes, mere feet from me. It was clear the man was injured and maybe not even fully conscious because he barely made a noise when his body hit the hardwood floor with a resounding thud.
The byki yanked off the black hood covering the injured man’s face before returning to his position by the door.
A scream rose up my throat and filled the room when I got a look at the captive’s face.
Dimitri glowered down at his boss. “Hello, Batya.”
I didn’t know when my feet started moving again, but I suddenly found myself back downstairs, facing the nervous looking members of my family.
“She’s not here,” I rasped, feeling numb. “She’s supposed to be here.”
“What happened, Nico?” Mom placed her hand on my shoulder. “Where did Lexi go?”
“We had a fight,” I said in monotone voice that even I didn’t recognize. “I thought she was working with Dimitri behind my back. I—I told her I was giving her back to Sergei.” I stabbed my fingers through my hair. “I called her a liar.”
And now she was gone.
I couldn’t believe she just fucking left.
Mom’s face paled. Her hand trembled as it covered her mouth. “Nico…you didn’t. You made her leave?”
I skated over her odd reaction when a thought occurred to me.
I had GPS trackers on each of my cars, in case some moron decided to ever try and steal one. The same technology had proved life-saving when Stefano Esposito kidnapped Jasmine in one of Cris’s own cars. He’d been able to pinpoint their location by that GPS signal. If Lexi had taken one of mine, I’d be able to easily track her down.
I opened the app on my phone that allowed me to access the security cameras around my property, hoping I’d see footage of her driving off in the Audi she’d been using. But when I rewound the recording from the past couple of hours, I was swamped with a fresh wave of dismay.
“She left in a goddamn cab.”
Throwing me the bird as a final parting shot in a classic Lexi move.
Nothing I didn’t deserve. In fact, that was the very least of what I deserved.
“Where would she go?” Jasmine hurriedly asked.
I shook my head. “I—I don’t know. Everyone she knows in this country is in this room. Except for—”
I dropped my phone.
FUCK.
“Dimitri,” Dad finished for me.
“She doesn’t know he’s behind all of this.” Fear coiled in my stomach like a poisonous snake. “He’s roaming our streets while she’s out there all alone. Hell, she may have gone right to him. He could already have her!”
Not to mention, Raphael—the mafia boss with a giant vendetta against my family—was traipsing the earth as a free man. Obviously, he’d never been kidnapped, never been tortured. God knew what kind of plans he’d been making since his escape.
Lexi was out there among killers with a bright red bullseye on her back.
I had never wanted to beat the shit out of myself so badly in all my life. And I’d been at war with myself for