Page 16 of Ruined By Sin

TIMUR

Anger fuels every step I take as I walk away from Kira with my phone pressed to my ear. Morin had better have a damn good reason for interrupting my breakfast. I hadn't intended for things to go the way they did, but when she got so flustered that she tried to run away from me, I knew she was feeling what I was feeling.

And goddammit, that kiss would have felt perfect.

"What," I snarl, stalking through the living room toward my office.

"Boss, I'm shot," Morin chokes out. He sounds awful, weak and tired. And instantly, I feel horrible for thinking such angry thoughts.

"How bad?" I ask him, and I walk faster, finding my keys and wallet and shoving them in my pocket.

There's a pause for a second where I hear talking in the background and immediately recognize our family doctor'svoice. "You need to put that down," Levin grumbles, but Morin is a stubborn ass, refusing those orders.

"Bad, Tim... And Dracon didn’t make it."

"He'll call you back, Mr. Kuzin," I hear a female voice say, then the phone goes dead, but I'm already moving, rushing out my front door. If Morin dies, we'll lose our connection to intel within the Mirov family and we won't know when the threat is extinguished. I need him.

I race toward the clinic, thinking of Kira and the situation with Morin, but even as I push through the entrance and find Levin waiting for me, part of my head is back in that dining room. It was so magnetic. I didn't want to leave her, but I have no choice. Duty calls.

As soon as I round the corner and see the trail of blood leading up to exam room one, Dr. Levin walks out and scowls at me. I can see he's not pleased with this morning's interruption, but he will never complain to us.

"His left shoulder caught a through and through," Levin says. "It missed the subclavian artery by about half a centimeter. He's lucky."

"How lucky are we talking?" I'm breathing a sigh of relief as the good doctor continues.

"He'll keep the arm and full mobility if he doesn't do anything stupid for the next six weeks. But knowing him, I'd say the odds of that are slim." I can see based on the expression on his face that he's met the real Morin Melnik. Only someone who's met him would have this much disdain for his personality and temperament.

"Thank you, Dr. Levin," I tell him, though I don't really have to thank him. We pay good money for him to be on call round the clock. Besides, he's the best surgeon and practitioner in Perm and without too many details, we have so much dirt on him, he'll never get clean of us.

I push past him into the room and find Morin sitting on the edge of the exam table with his shirt off and his left arm hanging at his side. His face is pale, but he looks up when I walk in. The wound looks nasty too, oozing blood slowly, though I can see from the gauze everywhere and the puddles on every surface around him, it wasn't always just oozing.

"What happened?" I pull a chair over and sit in front of him. I don't know whether to be angry at him or have sympathy. He and Dracon were doing recon for a hit later this week, aimed at taking out Semyon or Victor Mirov, the heads of the family. I refuse to let him do anything else without fully understanding what we're getting into. The plan to take out the Mirovs didn’t change because Morin screwed up. We just have to be more cautious.

"It was a drive-by. We were parked outside the warehouse on Lenina, and a car came up fast from the south end. I didn't see it until the first shot hit the windshield." He pauses and works his jaw. "Dracon took two in the chest. He was gone before I could get to him."

Losing anyone, even a low-level grunt like Dracon, hurts. He wasn't immediate family, but our numbers are our strength. When we start getting taken out, it starts to feel like we'll be crippled. So we hit Mirov and they aren't gonna stand around putting up with us. They're hitting back harder, and not through the betting like we thought.

"You see who was driving?"

"Dugan Mirov." Morin almost spits the name out. "I saw his face clear as day before I went down. He was behind the wheel and he had at least one shooter in the passenger seat, but I couldn't make him out."

The kid is twenty-five and reckless and has been trying to prove himself to his uncle for years. If Victor sent Dugan to do a drive-by on one of our men, it means the clean hit wasn't as clean as he promised it'd be. Someone knows it was him and they targeted him directly.

I rub my eyes and lean back in the chair. This isn't gonna sit well with Roman, but by now he's probably heard. "What do you know about Dracon's family?" I have to get ahead of this and show my brother he can have confidence in my choices.

"He's got a mother in the south end but no wife or kids." He shrugs and winces as the movement pulls his shoulder. "I'll tell them, okay? You don't worry about it. I'll take care of them."

I grumble and rub a hand down my face, trying to not let my anger over the situation transmute into more anger at him. He's been injured trying to fight for this family. I owe him another debt.

"Ro won't like this..."

I expect some smart-ass retort, but Morin grunts and slides off the table and leans. The movement makes more blood ripple down his chest, but he keeps a straight face as he starts talking.

"I don't buy it, Tim. Something about that girl's story don't sit right. She was at a Mirov table eating dinner with Mirov people..."

I don’t care for the fact that he's questioning my research. Unlike my nephew, I've done my homework on this woman and I believe she is who she claims to be. So she's using a nickname. Lots of people do. If someone heard him calling me "Tim" instead of "Timur", they'd assume the same.

"She was a mole, placed there by Sergei to gather intelligence. I found her in the system, Morin. Kirianna Belova. The family connection checks out."