Page 20 of Stolen By the Billionaire
He awoke at three in the dark morning with his phone buzzing violently in his hand.
Adrenaline coursed through him, and Blaze was awake and sharp by the second buzz.
The phone’s screen read Logan Bell.
Speak of the Devil.
What the hell could Logan want in the middle of the damned night? “Robinson. What’s up, Logan?”
“What the fuck did you do, you stupid son of bitch?” Logan’s voice screamed from the phone.
“I beg your fucking pardon,” Blaze growled back at him and tugged the covers away as he swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. The wooden floor was cool under his bare feet.
“How did you find out about Sarah?” Logan yelled at him.
“Sarah who?” Maybe Blaze was still a little asleep.
Logan’s Brooklyn-Bronx brogue harshened his words as he yelled down the line. “Sarah Bell, you son of bitch! What did you do?”
Logan shouldn’t know anything about Sarah Bell or his private op.
Blaze rubbed his close-cropped hair, velvety on his palm. “Mary Varvara Bell, who took over your grandfather’s company, is blackmailing me.” Logan’s grandfather had run the White Russian Syndicate, which Blaze knew from his Top Secret military clearance and certain operations against the Cornelius mercenary group in Africa. “Sarah is Mary Varvara Bell’s niece. I sent a message.”
“No, you stupid asshole. Sarah is my goddamn sister!”
“You don’t have a sister,” Blaze said, his heart accelerating.
“I have fucking sister! What the fuck did you do?”
Blaze squinted in the dark room. “She doesn’t look anything like you. She’s small-boned and has a narrow face, brown eyes, and almost black hair. She looks maybe Italian or Black Irish or something. You’re straight-up Slavic.”
“Strong like bull, that’s me, but she’s my fucking sister.”
“You look just like the Ukrainian and Russian mobster kids at school. You have green eyes. Your hair is so light brown that it’s practically blond! There’s no way she’s related to you.”
“Genetics are a bitch, man.”
“In four years of boarding school and all the years since, you never once mentioned that you have a sister. I got the impression you were an only child who’d chosen your rich grandfather over your father in a family breakdown and been disowned for it. I thought Sarah Bell must be some third-generation cousin twice-removed that you probably hadn’t seen since you were a kid, if ever.”
“That is farm I grew up on in Iowa, and Sarah Nevaeh Bell is my little sister! And you didn’t send message, Blaze. You signed her death warrant.”
“I didn’t,” Blaze protested, shocked as hell.
“You thought you could threaten Mary Varvara Bell. No one threatens her. She put a hit out on my sister to prove it.”
Blaze was in the bathroom before Logan finished talking, pulling on a fresh uniform with no insignia or identification from a drawer in his walk-in closet and then scrubbing his teeth. “I’ll leave within five minutes.”
“You signed her fucking death warrant, Blaze! Mary Varvara will make sure she’s dead! And I can’t get to Sarah because I’m in goddamn Moscow!”
Blaze jogged down the staircase and barreled into the garage, grabbing supplies off shelves as he passed. “I don’t understand why Mary Varvara Bell is going after Sarah.”
Logan’s voice cracked when he said, “She’s pulling a Keyser Söze to show you and everyone else that she cannot be manipulated. When you threatened to hurt Sarah, Mary Varvara decided to kill Sarah to show that she has no vulnerabilities.”
In the driver’s seat of his car, he tapped the maps app on his phone and then slapped the underside of his car’s mirror. “What the hell? That was just a movie!”
In The Usual Suspects, the mythical organized crime kingpin Keyser Söze was reputed to have preemptively murdered his own wife and children after another criminal had threatened them.
The garage door drew up again behind Blaze.
