Rome didn’t meet me in the next minute. Or the next hour. No one saw where he’d gone after he’d said a few words to Bastian.
My monster had vanished.
25
Katie
We’d searched underground gang’s communications for hours; we’d sifted through security cameras in the club and watched footage in every which way we could.
Rome couldn’t have just disappeared. Something was fucking wrong.
Cade finally found footage through a phone he’d tapped in the club. It was illegal and not something I’d ever repeat, but I wanted to just about die when he told me he’d gotten something.
I almost did die when I saw the recording. We couldn’t identify the person that had drugged Rome or the men who’d dragged him away.
Yet I saw, just like everyone else who watched, that there was a gunshot to his side, I was sure of it. The camera angle only caught him flinching in the slightest, but the way the man held the gun to Rome’s side, it was obvious to me that he’d been wounded.
Drugged and shot.
If he wasn’t dead, he was near to it.
I called everyone. I sent Maksim out looking. I even drove to Ivan’s to find him gone. When I called him, he acted oblivious. His tone gave him away, though. I hung up and told everyone to focus directly on him. Most of the bratva was still inside the club. Most of them hadn’t acted with Ivan. Some had, though.
Some I would have to punish.
Just hours later, my phone rang again, and when I saw Ivan’s name, chills ran down my spine.
“Meet me where we always do, granddaughter. Let’s get this show on the road.”
I hung up on him and moved fast. I held back the Armanellis because it wasn’t their fight. When I got to the meeting place, most of the bratva had arrived. Everyone had been alerted in some way or another.
I may have earned the bratva’s respect or at least convinced them that I was as tied to the Armanellis as I ever would be, but Ivan had to accept that too.
He didn’t want to.
He stood in the center of the facility with all our eyes on him, gun in hand and a beaten and drugged Rome on the floor next to him.
He motioned me forward. I went fast and willingly. My life didn’t matter, but my baby’s and her father’s life did.
He smiled at me like we were a family, like he loved me, like we could make all this work. “Here is your choice. Choose me. Not him.”
He handed me the gun in my silence.
“You don’t pull the trigger, Katalina. You’ll lose the power. You’ll lose everything. This bratva won’t back a weak woman who’s susceptible to her emotions and her sexual drive.” He gripped the gun in my hand and pointed it directly at Rome. Rome swayed as he sat on the floor, his face marred with bruises, with dried blood, with pieces of flesh missing. They’d destroyed him in the past couple of hours.
They’d left him alive for this moment.
For me to end him. To bleed out the man who’d put me on the pedestal and given me the confidence to rule in the first place.
For me to prove to them all where my loyalties lay.
How do you choose between everything you love, everything you want, and everything you’ve dreamed of?
I’d wanted to think a queen wouldn’t have to. I’d wanted to think we had it all lined up. But deep down, I knew it wasn’t like that. During those moments that felt too good to be true, I’d wondered when it would all go to shit. I’d walked on eggshells, looking over my shoulder for the moment that would destroy it all.
It was this moment.
Surrounded by the men I’d tried so hard to lead, I saw it all for what it really was. “You never truly wanted to give up the bratva.”