It had only taken mere days for her to recall why exactly she had missed him so much. She should have known better. Once should have been enough for her to know not to give him more, to be careful with her feelings and thoughts and dreams.
Her gaze landed on the bag, the lone item in the room that didn’t belong to the motel and she hadn’t brought along.
Maybe Niklaus had forgotten it in his haste to get away from her…
Before, she might not have looked, would have held onto it hopes that he would come back looking for it.
She would still hold onto it now, but not before she had a look inside.
Tearing at the zips, she tugged them down, pulling at the edges of it to look inside, and promptly blinked, just to make sure she was seeing correctly.
With a shaky hand, she reached in, pulling out one stack of twenty-dollar bills, another of hundreds, and even some in fifties. Reagan didn’t even realize she was dumping the money out of the bag as she tried to make of what she was seeing, but it wasn’t until she got to the change in the very bottom of the bag that she got an idea.
She could not have been sure, she had only mentioned it in passing, just an afterthought in the conversation they’d had, but as she sat at the table, counting each bill, tallying the numbers up in her head, and by the end of it, it felt like he had taken her breath away all over again.
$167,852.36 exactly…
This wasn’t a mistake on his part, but a goodbye.
He wasn’t coming back.
Part Two
Chapter Fifteen
2014
One year. Eight months. Twenty-one days.
Finally, Niklaus thought with some grim satisfaction as he watched the Russian and one of his men drag Jetmir through the freezer towards a hook that hung from the ceiling. Even as he struggled against their hold, a blindfold keeping him oblivious to his surroundings, he was no match for them. Not when he was bound.
How many days had he sat and fantasized about this very moment? How many nights had he lain awake, feeling like he was being suffocated as the days passed him by, and he had been no closer to getting his hands on the Albanian that was finally within grasp?
This was what he had been waiting for…
Mishca, with the help of his associate, had Jetmir strung up, his arms hooked into restraints, his feet dangling a few inches from the ground.
Helpless.
Snatching the barrier from his eyes, Mishca waited a moment, giving Jetmir a chance to focus on him, to take in his surroundings before he spoke.
“Hey,” Mishca said, smacking the man a couple of times to get his attention. “You’re going to want to focus for this.”
Jetmir, whose head had been slightly lolling on his shoulders, straightened, turning a glare on Mishca, the scar down the right side of his face pulling. “If you’re going to kill me, just do it!” Jetmir snarled as Mishca stepped away and turned his back.
Pausing mid-stride, Mishca faced him once more, canting his head to the side as his gaze flickered to Niklaus for a moment—Jetmir had yet to realize they weren’t alone.
“I’m not the one you should fear,” Mishca said with an air of casualness. Shaking his head, as though he almost felt sorry for the man, Mishca looked past him to Niklaus. “Don’t make a mess.”
The request was unnecessary. It wasn’t as though Mishca didn’t know what Niklaus was capable of. The man had made it quite clear he’d been keeping tabs on him.
By the time he finished with him, there wouldn’t even be anything left of Jetmir to identify.
With Mishca gone, the echo of the freezer door slamming shut still in the air, Niklaus got to his feet, circling Jetmir so he could finally face the one man he’d been tracking down religiously.
“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this,” Niklaus said as he started rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, rotating his head on his shoulders to stretch the muscles in his neck.
There wasn’t a day that had went by since Jetmir had turned his life upside down that Niklaus didn’t think of how he would make this particular Albanian pay.
The blood.
The sweat.
The tears.
No one could possibly understand just how much Niklaus had sacrificed to get them both in this room. And more was just how much of himself he had lost in the process.
Over time, Niklaus learned to shut off his emotions.
Tracking the Albanians before they had touched down on American soil, it was almost laughable that his contract had been up around the same time that Jetmir and his crew thought to take on the Volkov Bratva. And instead of signing another, Niklaus had taken his leave for a short time so he could get Jetmir alone finally.
And the funny thing was, the one other person that had made it possible for this moment to happen was one of the people Niklaus had vowed to kill, but that was how it worked sometimes in their world.
Enemies one day, allies the next.
Reaching up, Niklaus tugged at his mask, then tossed it to the side, pushing the sweaty strands of his hair back out of his face. When he took Jetmir’s life, he didn’t want any confusion as to why this was happening.