They might hate me now, but my sisters need me.
Three
Cammie
“Where are you going?”
I turned to my baby sister, Victoria, who was scowling at me from the doorway.
My bedroom was a thousand shades of puke—I meant, pink—as if Bratva princesses could only like this color—and once upon a time, I’d fit in here.
Exactly like Victoria did.
She’d just turned fifteen but looked like some kind of bizarre politician’s wife in a gray pencil skirt with a neatly tucked in pink shirt and pearls around her throat.
Pearls.
She was either a First Lady-in-the-making or an upper class secretary.
Who bought her clothes now that Mama was gone, I had no idea. I couldn’t see that slut, Svetlana, our new stepmother, going into the kinds of stores that stocked outfits such as this one. She dressed like a stripper who’d landed on her stacked heels in a pile of money.
A part of me wondered how she’d managed to snag my father who was notoriously marriage-shy after Mama’s death, but then, I really didn’t want to know how she’d hooked the biggest whale of them all.
Shuddering at the thought, I dropped my gaze from the vanity mirror and twisted around to look at Victoria and not her reflection.
Her concern was clear.
It was also warranted.
Just not today...
I wafted a hand down my outfit. “Can’t you tell?”
She frowned. “You’re coming back, aren’t you?”
As ifhe’dlet me run... I didn’t say that though. Just smiled at her. “Of course. I’m only going for a ride. If I don’t get out of this house, I’ll scream.”
Her nose crinkled in a way that told me she agreed. One hundred percent. But was too scared to admit it out loud.
That was the kind of household this was.
We were scared.
All the time.
From the outside looking in, the Vasovs were industrial tycoons.
But from the inside?
We were Bratva.
Scum.
Dangerous and endangered.
Living our lives on the knife’s edge, never knowing if today was our day to die.
Once upon a time, I’d thought it was only the men who had to subsist like that. One foot in the grave and the other foot in a jail cell, but it wasn’t just them.