Alex didn’t agree, and I caught his stare in the mirror. I didn’t say anything. The discussion between us was getting old. My cousin might want to play the role of the white knight, but his hands were covered in just as much blood as my own.
“My money will be a great incentive to her marrying me,” I told him. Ivy and her family were dirt broke. Her bank account had about two hundred dollars in it.
“I’m sure she makes good money at the club.”
“I’m sure she makes great money, but her brother’s treatments are draining them.” Her brother was the one part of Ivy’s life that turned my stomach. I was the youngest of three, but I’d always been a protector. It was why my father had trained me as an enforcer when we were younger. Typically, that role would have gone to Dom, who’d been the second oldest. But even as a boy, my father had recognized how fiercely I would protect the family. I recognized the same in Ivy, and I admired it for her.
She could have gone away and left her mother to deal with a dying child, but from the very little I knew, she hadn’t. It was something to be admired though many people probably pitied her for it.
“Don’t use her brother’s illness against her,” Alex said. “That’s low.”
“We need to use whatever we can,” I told him. I gestured across the street. “Because the Bratva’s found her.”
Alex jumped forward and squinted in the direction of Ivy’s house. We were only across the street, so it wouldn’t be difficult to spot us. But you’d have to know what and who you were looking for, and these two Bratva thugs clearly didn’t.
“Don’t recognize those two,” I said. “Do you?”
Alex shook his head. “They look low level.”
I nodded in agreement. You could always tell someone’s rank by their clothing. These men were dressed in oversized suits from the nineties that look like they’d been purchased from a low-end department store. They were young too. Probably not much older than Ivy.
Alex reached for the door handle. “We need to go.” I reached out and grabbed the back of his collar, hauling him right back into his seat like he was thirteen, and I was his angry mother.
“We aren’t going anywhere.”
He shrugged me off, and if looks could kill, he’d be in the process of hiding my body. “Dom gave strict orders,” he said.
“To keep Ivy alive,” I reminded him. “She’s alive.”
Alex looked like he wanted to throttle me, and I had to admit that I was enjoying his tension. These days his strings were much too easy to pull. It was almost sad. “The Bratva aren’t going to kill her.”
He shook his head. “You don’t know that.”
“I do,” I told him. “They aren’t going to kill her for the same reason that the police haven’t come to arrest me.”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“Because there isn’t a body.”
Alex blinked as he processed my words. He’d been so wrapped up in thinking about Ivy that he’d forgotten the obvious. “No one knows where the fuck Adrian is. It’s all just speculation at this point.” I shrugged and leaned back in my seat. I wasn’t worried. As long as Adrian’s body remained hidden, everyone would have to play nice.
“The new Pakhan doesn’t want a turf war anymore than Dom does. Not now at least.”
Alex looked like he wanted to argue, but I knew that he saw the sense in what I was saying. As far as the Bratva knew, Adrian could have run away.
“They could still rough her up,” Alex told me.
I smirked. “Oh,” I told him. “I’m counting on that.”
Ivy Hope was going to have to learn the hard way that there were monsters out there much more dangerous than me.