Chad's Chase (Loving All Wrong Book 2) (37 page)

I didn’t need to look. I’d already deduced that much the second Chad exited the car.

I raised my gun at him. “I’ll gladly pick up the slack where he falters.”

Yet somehow, I couldn’t pull the trigger without Chad’s consent. If he was unwilling to kill the man who ruined his life, what if I killed him and then he ended up resenting me. I was barely forgiven for killing his aunt. What would it do to us if I pulled the trigger on his father?

My love for him had me putting revenge on the back burner, even if it meant my death. I couldn’t do it.

Rafail waved a hand in the direction of the doorway. “Sambo, come get your Byrd in its cage before I end up breaking my promise.”

Lowering the gun, I looked over at Sambo who had pushed away from the door jamb and was moving toward me. “Promise? What promise?”

“Oh, you did not know?” Rafail said, bringing my attention back to him. “Sambo and I made a deal. He leads me to my son, I do not kill you, and he gets to keep you for himself.”

“What?” I swung my gaze back to Sambo, who was right beside me now. “Does Org know you’re double-crossing him?”

Stupid question. Of course he didn’t! Neither did that dead man behind the couch who I was now realizing was Sambo’s partner. Org didn’t know, so he wouldn’t be coming to ‘save’ me.

Fuck.

“He is in love with you,” Rafail informed me. “So like you, lovely Byrd, he has allowed his heart to choose his path—albeit the right path this time, yes?”

“I thought I told you to stay in the car, Jhay.” This was from Chad.

I whirled around and found he was still kneeling by Clementine’s body, his eyes on her wide, vacant ones.

“Are you seriously just going to sit there and let him kill you?”

“He’s my father.”

“Oh, so you just kill the people you love and pardon the people you hate?”

Nothing. He just kept staring at Clementine.

Rage had me pointing my gun at him. “Why don’t I just complete my assignment by killing you my fucking self, huh? You’re a
waste
. A waste of my fucking time.”

Glancing up at me now, he responded, “I hate you.” So quiet I almost missed it.

“Fuck you, you fucking coward!!!” I shouted, repositioning my aim above his head right before I fired off all the rounds in my gun, a fusillade of shots blasting through the wooden wall across the room.

Even when the clip was empty, I kept pulling the trigger out of anger.
Click. Click. Click
. While Chad just watched me with that ever-calm expression of his, completely unfazed by the loads of bullets that’d whizzed mere inches above his skull. He never even flinched. The sonuvabitch was so resigned on dying. How could someone be so at fucking peace with death?

To Sambo, he said, “You wanted her. Now get her the fuck out of here, and keep her safe. Or even in death I’ll find a way to fuck you up.”

Just like that, he was passing me off to another man. No more “it’s me, or no one.”

I regretted becoming straight. This kind of fickle shit didn’t happen with women.

Sambo started to close in on me, but I whirled and butted my gun against his temple, and he reflexively knocked the thing from my grasp. Spinning in the opposite direction this time, I drove the back of my elbow into his jaw, hoping for a crack. But Sambo was built like a brick house, he wasn’t that easily defeated.

I had to initiate a
real
fight. So I rammed a back-kick to his shin, and we engaged in a good old combat. In which I had to whip out everything I’d ever learned in fight training. Best believe I was beating Sambo down. He might be big and ostensibly indomitable, but he didn’t have half the tricks and agile dexterity I had. Which meant I was winning ten points ahead, wounding him in the small places he didn’t know to protect because those small places had big impact.

I had him. On the ground. My legs locked tight around his thick stomp of a neck. Just about to flip my whole body over so I could easily break his neck, when I was restrained from behind in a sleeper hold.

The powerful, masculine arm tightened, but not to kill me, only to ease me into unconsciousness. And with each breath that got blocked from passing through my lungs, I drifted, and drifted, until the darkness won.

As Jhay’s body went limp in his hands, Chad gently released her. Hurting her, he hated it. Would punch himself in the face if he could. But the girl was a fearless wild wasp.

She’d been beating the useless muscles off Sambo, and Sambo was a big man.
Big
. Two times Chad. Frankly, he was embarrassed for the guy. No grown ass man with two sagging balls and a dick should allow themselves to get beat down like that by a woman—well, not unless they’re deliberately allowing it to happen, for amusement, entertainment. But muscle-man Sambo here had been giving it his all. And still lost.

Scooping Jhay up in his arms, her pretty head lulling to the side, her lush pink lips parted, Chad looked down at the man still sprawled flat on his back, rubbing his neck, his face bruised on both sides. Quietly, patiently, he waited for Sambo to scoop up his shit-kicked dignity and haul his pathetic ass up off the floor.

When Sambo was finally on his feet, Chad transferred Jhay over into his arms. “Get her out of here. My father is not the best with promises. If I die while she’s still here, I guarantee you he will kill her
and
you.”

He heard a disapproving sound travel from his father’s direction, but he didn’t look.

Sambo stilled, as if waiting to hear Rafail refute Chad’s words. When Sambo waited long enough for a refutation that would never come, he tipped his chin, then turned and left with Chad’s heart in his arms. They might be enemies, love the same girl, and want nothing more than to see the other dead, but where Jhay was concerned, they both wanted her to come out of this alive. Not because of Org, but because they were both madly in love with her.

Sambo was the one who’d spent years scouring the earth for evidence on whether Jhay was dead or alive, as ordered by Org. He was the one who discovered she was indeed alive, living right under Org’s nose, in his domain, working for Chad’s father. Somewhere along the line, he’d gotten obsessed with Jhay. Which Chad certainly wouldn’t blame the guy for.

Jhay Byrd was a fucking stunner. A rare, colorless diamond, who had absolutely no idea of her worth, or her power. She had no idea how cock-achingly daring her walk was. How heart-arresting that part-smile, part-smirk thing she unwittingly did all the time was. How sexy her fearlessness was. How much of an escapism her eyes were.

She was aware of none of it.

But Chad was.

And apparently so was Sambo.

Chad had detected the man’s obsession the second he had met him. He’d known Sambo wanted what was his. And Chad knew well and good that when a man was set on a woman, he would go to any lengths to get her. Wary, Chad launched his own surreptitious investigation into Sambo, and he’d discovered the guy was dilly-dallying with both Org and Rafail to see which man would give him a benefiting deal that would win him Jhay in the end.

Rafail had won, of course. But that’s because Rafail studied people, searched their minds, learned their cravings, then with a serpent tongue, told them what he knew they wanted to hear, manipulated them. He made promises he would never keep. He lied, he betrayed, he killed.

Sambo was a fool.

Back on the one-way yesterday, Chad had known there wasn’t a second shoot-out. He’d known Sambo was balancing both Org’s and Rafail’s orders. Playing his cards. Testing.

They were all playing their cards.

Chadrick Niiveux normally had control within every inch of his life. It had taken some time to learn exactly how to do such an impossible thing, but as of five years ago, his life usually played out the exact way he sketched it. Like a bestselling book turning into a big screen movie, coming to life.

He’d mastered creating settings and scenes in his head, manipulating people like marionettes to dance right into his traps. Then watch it all play out to a T.

Although he’d pretended to take orders, acted oblivious to the duplicities, teased Sambo with Jhay to lure Rafail here, what Chad never sketched in his plan was Clementine’s death, or Ricardo being found. For the first time in five years, Chad’s sketching got smudged.

He’d envisioned this scene; him standing before Rafail in mock surrender, Sambo thinking he’d won with Jhay…but the setting was supposed to be at his place in Russian Hill. Not here.

Amazing how one small deviation could ruin everything. He’d never planned on sleeping in Los Altos Hills last night. He should have gone home. But he’d wanted Jhay to reconcile things with her brother and his wife.

Now, his chessboard was shambled, and things were heading way fucking south.

He failed.

He fucking failed.

“That girl never ceases to amaze me,” Rafail said, long after, when Chad was still staring broken-heartedly at the open doorway Sambo had strode through. “She was an asset—for me, of course. It is a shame she was cursed by her birth. She cannot live. But you already know this, do you not?”

For the first time since Chad entered the house, he looked at his father. And it felt like he was looking at himself. He wondered if that was the reason he’d never been able to kill him. To kill him would mean to kill himself. Or maybe he simply hated him too much.

Heavy hatred seized his wills. And he rarely ever reacted. He was one twisted, backward motherfucker who deserved the death coming to him now.

“Not happening,” Chad said, calm, easy, settling.

“Oh, but it must, Chadrick,” his father returned, still sitting relaxed. Rafail pronounced his name in its right form, how it’s pronounced back home:
Kah-had-reek
. “You know if I die, you will supplant me. And if her father dies, she will supplant him. She will rule over you. But since I will be ending you in a minute, my position will still be mine. Then, with Sambo’s help, I will be killing her father next. Do you think I will let her supplant him and rule over me?”

Power.

Money.

Notoriety.

That’s all it has ever been about for Rafail Niiveux. Failing to see that Chad couldn’t care less about power. Care less about who will rule over who in The Organization. He didn’t even want to inherit his father’s seat. He never asked for it. But his father had named him as his inheritor without his permission.

“Have your way, kill me. But Jhay’ll not die, father,” Chad said, taking a step towards the devil, “or I swear to God—”

“What?!” Rafail exploded, shooting up from the couch, taking his gun out and aiming it at me. “What will you do, my
son
? Do you think you can save her like you did that ninny over there?”

Faster than Chad could react, Rafail swung his gun to Ricardo and popped a shot through his friend’s leg. Ricardo’s eyes instantly overflowed with tears, his cries locked in by the tape over his mouth. Body detained and restricted.

“You will not be able to save him again. You will not be able to save her. And you will not be able to save yourself!”

Anger. Rafail was a slave to it. For as long as Chad could remember, every irrational thing his father had ever done, he’d done it out of rage. He didn’t possess Chad’s skills, the ability to remain calm and unaffected even in the worst of times. Chad got angry, of course, he was a human, after all, but he’d trained himself never to drink his tea while it still had steam billowing from the top.

That kind of control was what kept him alive.

So, even though he felt every bit of Ricardo’s pain, Chad merely threw him and his bleeding leg a bored glance, as though it mattered not at all to him whether Ricardo lived or died.

He took another calculating step to his father, and at the movement, Rafail re-aimed his gun at him. Chad also didn’t miss the man’s slight move backward, his calves hitting the couch behind him, giving the poltroon nowhere to go.

Rafail was utterly afraid of Chad. Chad knew he was the man’s worst nightmare. But the irony there was that Chad had never, ever threatened to kill him.

Three times since he fled Russia, his father had called upon him for help. When he went behind The Organization’s back and broke the rules, became exposed and was endangered, Chad was the one he always called. And a cretinous Chad always went.

Lost all respect for him yet?

He had no idea why he did it. Because he hated the man with every breath he had within him. But inexplicably, Rafail Niiveux, his biggest enemy, was the only person Chad didn’t have the guts to kill.

There was a remedy for that now, however.

And that was the reason why Rafail was standing in front of him right now.

Chad had been ahead of everyone’s plans before they made it. Both Org and Rafail. Powerful as they were, he was smarter. He didn’t have their wealth and he didn’t have their influence, but he had game.

He was a field man. Hands-on. They were men in suits who gave orders from their expensive wingback chairs. Never pulling the trigger themselves.

The dead man behind the couch, Sambo’s partner, Chad had kidnapped his fiancée and two sons, used them as leverage to gain additional information on what was happening on both sides.

He’d known Rafail was coming, but had decided to keep that bit from Jhay. He’d been prepared for everything except Clementine’s death.

And that changed everything.

Calm as a silent river on a summer’s day, Chad locked eyes with his father, and he saw the second the man realized this wouldn’t be ending the way he thought it would.

Even though it was just him now, against five, possibly six. None of those men were in sight, but Chad knew they were there. It was an old trick meant to encourage bravery, only to be taken down by a hidden bullet. These men also were not from The Organization, and if Chad was lucky, they were as amateur as the shooters from the day before. Everything Rafail was doing was of his own accord. Personal shit. So he didn’t have the luxury of using assassins from The Organization.

This house, Chad bought it, so he knew it, every nook and cranny, all the possible columns and walls men could be hiding behind.