Under Fire (Love Over Duty #1)(92)

Aware that they wouldn't have long before somebody came to get them both, she hurried on with her questions. "But who are they, Ivan? And what do they want it for? How did they even know about it? Are they a rival drug company?" She knew they weren't. There was a huge difference between intercompany espionage and kidnapping. But she wanted to keep him talking. Six's words from their day on the beach came back to her. If you're alive, you can fight, you can think, you can even wait for someone to come get you. You'll come back from anything they can put you through. But there is no coming back from dead. That's as final as it gets.

Despondently, Ivan shook his head. "If only … " he said.

She needed more information, not abbreviated sentences. "Who are they, Ivan?"

He sighed. "I screwed up. And everything got so out of hand. Vasilii arranged it to get me out of trouble. I have money problems, and he was overleveraged. Development of our drug and others was taking too long."

She played along, pretending like she didn't understand. "I don't get it. Did he think somebody else could take the research and then get there faster?" she said, her voice rising in feigned frustration. "We'd only just started animal testing. It could be years before we had the formula right and got it FDA approved."



       
         
       
        

Ivan looked frantically at the door and shushed her. "They don't want the formula we hoped to create. They want the one we did. They want to weaponize it. Do you think Vasilii wants to be here?"

Louisa sat up and ignored the way her head spun again. Nausea roiled through her like waves, and she swallowed deeply. "You still haven't answered who they are."

"It's such a mess, Lou." His hacking sob echoed off the walls.

All out of patience, she stood and stumbled across the room to Ivan. "First, don't call me Lou." Six was the only person she would allow to call her that, and the man in front of her didn't deserve an ounce of her sympathy. The mess was Ivan's, even if it was now bigger than he'd ever intended. "You and I are not on the same side, even though we are in the same mess. Second, pull yourself together. And third, start from the beginning. Who is behind this and what do they want?"

Ivan started as if she had physically slapped him. As if it were a shock that she'd be so angry.

"What?" she asked. "Don't look so surprised. You have cost me my job, my sanity, and depending on how this all plays out, possibly my life, so stop being pathetic."

"Don't you see, Lou? We are on the same side. I'm up to my eyeballs in gambling debt at Lucky Seven Casino. I've been playing their high roller tables for a while, but it's way over my head, Louisa. Vasilii wanted to cut me off, stop fixing my screwups. Said I needed to stand on my own two feet and accept some responsibility for my actions."

Louisa's stomach flipped, and she wasn't sure she wasn't going to be sick. Whether it was the drugs or the pitiful look on Ivan's face that caused her to feel so ill, she wasn't sure. "So, what did you do?" she asked.

"Vasilii refused to bail me out this time. So what was I supposed to do?"

"I don't know," Louisa muttered. "Sell your house, your cars. Cash in some stock. Sell shares in the lab. Sell one of the patents the lab owns."

Ivan stood and paced, tugging his hands through his hair. "I knew the formula could be weaponized  …  so I  …  Well, I knew we weren't in need of it  …  and you are usually so focused on getting the next test ready that I dispose of the old samples."

"So you attempted to sell it?" she asked.

Ivan nodded, and created a small gap in the curtains to peer out of the window into the darkness. Terrified that Ivan would spot Six and his team and alert whoever else was in the house to their presence, Louisa made a pretense of standing and knocking the bronze paperweight to the floor as she stumbled. It was feeble, and she was no actress, but it worked. Ivan dropped the curtain and looked back at her as she picked it up again and returned it to the table. 

"I did and I took the money and cleared off my debts. And when you reported the sample missing, Vasilii questioned me about it. Hated me for doing it. Even offered to pay the money back to the buyers to make everything right, but by then it was too late. The Russians I had offered to sell it to through my godfather threatened us. They told me to re-create the sample."

For a moment she contemplated telling Ivan that help was on its way. Though she was pissed that he'd gotten them into this mess, the guy looked more terrified than she felt. But desperation could cause a man to do strange things, so she kept the information to herself.