Forty-Five
Brennan
By the timewe were storming the Bratva compound, my shitty day had turned full circle as the bad news just kept on coming.
Six guards had been mowed down by the Bratva.
And while they were family, and I’d mourn them, the devastation that wrought was nothing to the news that my wife had been abducted.
I’d broken promises today.
Camillewasn’tsafe.
Camille, as far as I fucking knew, might even be dead.
I didn’t like to think that I was an emotional man. I’d learned a long time ago that emotions made you weak. Sure, I had them every now and then. It was impossible to cut off feelings, impossible to freeze them. The only ones I let through on a regular basis were the love and loyalty I felt for my family, for my Ma, my crew. But emotions were a hindrance. They made you act out. Made you do stupid shit.
Case in point, O’Reilly.
I shouldn’t have killed him.
Should have turned him over to Da. Let him deal with that mess.
Instead, the ice man had melted, and he kept on fucking doing it. Had done ever since this Sparrow shit had come out.
And the worst thing of all?
I had feelings for Camille.
My nice, bloodless, loveless marriage of convenience, where I fucked her to get kids—something I’d blown out of the water that first day of being married—and we raised nice, future mobsters together was no more.
She wasn’tnice.
She wasn’tbloodless.
And she deserved all the love in the fucking world.
Those were the thoughts that rammed through me as I raised a gun and point blank shot one of theboyevikssurging toward me in the forehead. Blood spurted, coating me in it, but I ignored it, instead running through the gates that Maxim had blasted with a bomb whose provenance I didn’t want to know, and trying to kill as many of the Russian cunts as I could.
She and Victoria had been gone ninety minutes.
One and a half hours.
Who knew that was all it took to make a man realize the impossible?
Who knew that was all it took to know that my wife of a week was the only woman I ever wanted in my bed again?
Who knew that that wife had somehow burrowed her way into my frozen heart?
A week.
Seven fucking days.
Impossible.
But true, especially in the face of losing her.
I’d been quite happy to let the Bratva destroy themselves as they fought over their next leader, been quite content to stay out of it. Now my promise to Mariska was being fulfilled, the Bratva meant fuck all to me, and knowing that two sides would be trying to snatch the Pakhan’s throne, I’d thought in a month or so, there’d be a territory grab. The Irish could swoop in, adjust their territories, and everyone would be happy.