Shadow Alpha (2 page)

Gregori shook his head. “The Orlovs would be within their rights to take exception to such behavior. To a degree that there might be an all-out war between the two families, with Kat stuck in the middle of the battle.”

“So you want me to go to New York and risk making the Montgomery family the target for their enmity instead?” Dair eyed the other man scathingly; he may have distanced himself from his own family, but that didn’t mean he was going to deliberately bring the wrath of the powerful Orlov family down on their heads either. “There’s always the possibility that Sergei could be telling you the truth. That Kat had a small emotional breakdown after your father died, and is now recuperating.”

“Without first telling me where she is?” Gregori gave a scathing snort. “You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

No, Dair didn’t believe it. “So what do you think they’ve done with her?”

The other man’s jaw tensed. “That’s what I need you to go to New York and find out.”

Katya.

Little Kat.

A grown woman now, but surely still that sweet little girl inside?

Unless the Orlovs had managed to destroy all that innocence and sweetness these past five years?

“Okay.” Dair nodded decisively. “I’ll go to New York. And no matter how long it takes, I will find her,” he assured grimly. “Then what do you want me to do with her?”

“Ideally I’d like for you to bring her home.” Gregori’s breath left him in a sigh of relief, as evidence of the tension he had been under as he waited for Dair’s answer. “But the ultimate decision, as to whether or not she leaves, will have to lie with Kat.”

“And if I think she’s being…mistreated?”

The other man’s nostrils flared. “Then you get her out of there whether she wishes to come or not.”

“And if the Orlovs try to stop me?”

“Fuck them,” Gregori rasped. “If you think Kat is in danger then do whatever you need to do to get her out of there.”

Dair raised mocking brows. “No more worrying about what the Orlovs may or may not do in retaliation?”

“Not if Kat is in danger, no,” Gregori answered without hesitation.

“Okay.” He nodded again. “But perhaps the two of us need to come up with a plan that isn’t going to result in people lying dead and blood running in the streets.”

Dair could only hope, for everyone’s sake, that no harm had come to this man’s sister.

Sweet little Katya.

Chapter 2

“You have a visitor, Mrs.—Ms. Markovic.”

Kat didn’t show, by so much as a blink of an eyelid, that she had even heard the nurse speaking to her from the doorway of her private room at the clinic.

A clinic Sergei had brought her to several weeks ago, before leaving her here under the care of Nurse Palmer, and occasionally one or two of the security guards. They were Kat’s only contact with the outside world, apart from Sergei.

He very
kindly
came to visit her every morning; in fact he had only left her a few minutes ago, after spending his customary half an hour with her.

Kat was too inwardly agitated from that visit, as she always was, to want to be with or see anyone else right now. Most especially someone whom either Sergei or Ivan must have passed through the security she knew now surrounded her both night and day.

“Mrs. Orlov— Oh, I’m sorry! Ms. Markovic?” The nurse prompted again, deliberately so, knowing how much Kat hated to be called by her married name.

Kat still didn’t answer as she continued to gaze out of the window at the soothing garden and grounds; the high wall surrounding the property, as well as the fact that she was never allowed out in the gardens themselves, couldn’t detract from their calming beauty.

“Dr. Fairmont has arranged for Dr. Law to examine you,” the nurse informed her impatiently. “He’s from England.”

England? Kat felt a surge of hope at the mention of her homeland. A hope that just as quickly died. Her brother Gregori had no idea where she was, let alone what was happening to her. Sergei had seen to that. As he had taken away every other avenue of escape from her, by locking her away in this clinic. For ‘her own safety’, he claimed.

Kat was past caring now, had fallen into a state of lethargy that not even Sergei’s smugness or—

“I believe you may safely leave Ms. Markovic in my care now, Nurse Palmer.”

Something stirred in Kat’s memory at the sound of that huskily authorative voice. A hazy stirring of familiarity.

“There, you see, already Ms. Markovic feels more comfortable after hearing an English voice again,” that gruff—familiar?—voice added with satisfaction as Kat slowly turned to look at him.

The man Kat saw didn’t look familiar at all, dressed in a crumpled and ill-fitting three-piece tweed suit, his checked tie slightly off-center over his creased white shirt, the heavy dark-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose preventing her from seeing the color of his eyes. His dark hair was cut military short, revealing a vicious-looking scar at his right temple that didn’t seem to quite fit with his otherwise distracted-professor image.

Any more than that visual image went with the voice Kat had thought she recognized. In her memory that voice had belonged to an eighteen-year-old man, biceps and chest deeply muscled, his dark hair long enough to brush the collar of the dark T-shirts he favored, his face wickedly handsome, and his grey-green eyes full of flirtation and mischief.

There had been no scar at his temple, and he would certainly never have become a doctor, let alone one wearing ill-fitting tweeds.

The small ray of hope that had surfaced through the foggy haze clouding Kat’s mind had already died, and she turned away in disinterest to once again stare out the window into the garden, that sweet veil of apathy having fallen over her emotions, allowing her to retreat to that place where nothing and no one could hurt her.

Dair felt momentarily stunned—shocked—by the visible changes he saw in Katya Markovic.

It had taken him some days, after his arrival in New York, of watching and following Sergei Orlov, to ascertain exactly in which clinic and where Kat was ‘resting’. Then another week of checking and rechecking the facility’s security and staff so that he could come up with a plan that would allow him to get in to see and hopefully speak with her.

He had started that process some days ago by feeding his false credentials into the correct databases, as Dr. Daniel Law, doctor of psychiatry, with more letters of qualification after his name than Dair knew what to do with.

Next had come an even deeper look into the security of the facility, and the habits and lives of the staff that worked there, looking for that weak link in their system that would allow him access.

Dr. Clive Fairmont, the resident doctor of the facility, had proven to be that weak link.

Two weeks after Dair’s late night conversation with Gregori Markovic, he was as ready as he was ever going to be to pay a professional visit on Katya Markovic at the Harmony View Clinic, as Dr. Daniel Law. Conveniently on a morning when Dr. Fairmont, who had supposedly asked for the ‘consultation’, was off playing his usual weekly round of golf. A day when it was also known by the staff at the clinic that the good doctor was not to be disturbed, under any circumstances.

Dair had held his breath as his false credentials were checked once he’d stopped his hire car at the security gates into the clinic, and then again when he was quizzed, and those credentials checked again once he finally reached the reception desk inside the facility. Credentials he knew would pass even the most rigid scrutiny. Security, and learning all the ways around it and through it, was Dair’s job, after all.

But now that he was actually face-to-face with his ‘patient’, he wasn’t quite sure what to make of the Katya seated across the room.

As he had expected, she had grown into a beautiful woman. Even without makeup, the bone-structure of Katya’s face was such that she could never, would never, be anything but beautiful.

But that face was expressionless and far too pale and thin, her eyes appearing black as a starless night against that pallor. As for her hair, that glorious cascade of midnight silk that had once reached down to her slender waist, it was now cut boyishly short, a soft and silky cap shaped to her skull, emphasizing her slenderness, the bones clearly visible at the base of her throat.

What the fu—!

How had Katya Markovic ever gotten into this condition?

Why
had she?

Dair gave one last frowning glance at the apathetic woman sitting in the chair by the window, a blanket thrown over her lower body despite the heat of the room, before turning to the hard-faced nurse still hovering at his side. “I’d like to talk to Ms. Markovic alone—”

The nurse looked alarmed. “Oh I’m not sure Dr. Fairmont would—”

“Dr. Fairmont isn’t here,” Dair forced a conspiratorial friendliness into his voice, “so why don’t you take advantage of my visit and go grab yourself a cup of coffee?” he encouraged lightly. “I’m sure you could do with a little downtime, hmm?”

Her expression brightened at the idea of an unexpected coffee break. “Well if you’re sure…?”

“Very,” he smiled as he sensed the nurse weakening. “Ms. Markovic doesn’t exactly look violent.” The opposite, in fact. Katya looked almost comatose, and had so far shown no reaction to anything around her, or what was being said, apart from that initial glance in his direction.

“Oh she isn’t—unless you call her Mrs. Orlov,” the nurse added with a spiteful glance at the patient Dair knew she had been employed to care for exclusively. She obviously took a sly delight in tormenting Kat instead. “Then she needs restraining.”

“Then I’ll take care not to call her that,” Dair assured mildly—when what he really wanted to do was pin this woman to the wall with his hand about her throat and see how she liked being ‘restrained’.

He had seen this sort of behavior before, of course, men in the military who used the power of their rank or size to bully the men beneath, or weaker, than them. Luckily, in the area of the military Dair had risen to, the bullies were either conveniently ‘removed’ by the lower ranks, or relocated by the higher ones for their own safety.

He doubted that Katya had that luxury. Or that freedom.

“Very well.” The nurse nodded. “There’s a bell on the wall over there, if you should need assistance. And of course there are cameras in all the rooms, to ensure a patient doesn’t self-harm.”

Dair already knew that from the past week of surveillance and studying the security system. There were even cameras in the bathrooms, giving the people monitoring those cameras a free strip show of the patients every day.

“Very sensible.” He smiled as he politely but firmly held the door open for the nurse to leave, closing it behind her once she had stepped out into the hallway—before he forgot that he had once been an officer and a gentleman.

And through the whole of that exchange Katya had remained unmoving, unresponsive, apart from a single telltale blink when the nurse had deliberately referred to her as Mrs. Orlov.

What the hell had the Orlovs done to the Katya Markovic he had once known?

Dair quickly crossed the room to where Kat sat so utterly still and silent, before dropping down onto one knee beside her chair. “Katya? Katya, look at me,” Dair kept his voice to a low murmur and his face deliberately averted, very aware of the CCTV cameras in the four corners of the room, and their range.

He could easily have disarmed them, of course, but that would only have brought members of the staff running, so instead he kept his face at an angle that he knew would never give a clear, full-frontal picture of his face, and so make him more easily identifiable.

“Would you like to go for a walk outside in the garden with me, Kat?” he encouraged gently.

There was the briefest flicker of emotion in the depths of those dark eyes—hope?—before it flickered out again.

Which told Dair that Katya was still in there, at least, even if she was currently unresponsive. He just had to find a way to reach her.

The violence Dair felt, to punch his fist through a wall, or push someone out of a window for having reduced her to this state, would have to wait. Getting through to Katya, convincing her to trust him when obviously all trust had gone, was his biggest dilemma at the moment; he at least needed Kat’s cooperation to get her out of here. Retribution could, and would, come later.

Dair knew where every alarm and camera was situated, both in and outside the clinic. He also knew that the security was more geared to keeping the patients in than intruders out. If he’d been charged with the security here he would have done it completely differently. As it was, he was just grateful that the company responsible was nowhere near the high standard of his own.

There were also several guards patrolling the grounds, but only a few cameras outside, which meant there were parts of the garden they could walk in where they might be seen but wouldn’t be overheard.

And he badly needed to talk privately with Kat, if only for a few minutes, if his plan to get her out of here stood any chance of success.

He stood up. “We’re going for a walk outside, Kat— What the fuck!” Dair had removed the blanket from over Kat’s knees, intending to help her up onto her feet. Instead he could only stare down incredulously at the restraints about her ankles and wrists binding her to the chair, and so conveniently hidden beneath the blanket.