“He’s touched Molly. He has to die. How he dies and how long his torture lasts will depend on what he’s done to her by the time we get there.”
* * *
I wentto see Viktor as soon as my blood had cooled. He called me into the sitting room of the showy house he’d bought in Brooklyn near Brighton Beach, home of the bratva. It was custom-built with columns and two snarling wolves, cast in stone, sitting by the gates. Money couldn’t buy taste; Viktor was proof of that.
Inside the sitting room, the housekeeper, Elisa, poured black tea into long glass cups and added lemon slices to the side. I waited until she moved away to speak.
“I wanted to speak to Nikolai. Is he around?” There was no point in showing my cards to Viktor. I had no idea if Nikolai was acting alone.
“He should be. He’s looking into that new business venture he’s interested in. Trafficking, such a normal word for something so—messy.” Viktor drank some tea and coughed.
Viktor had smoked three packs a day for as long as I’d known him. If I’d ever wanted proof that the man whose blood ran in my veins had made a deal with the devil long ago, it was that he remained robust in his old age.
“He led me to think you were the one interested in that,” I said, trying my best to act calm.
Luckily, the mask of cold indifference I’d honed over the years was easy to slip on. It had been tested in a hundred different ways in the brutal years following high school when I’d been an apprentice in my father’s dark school of violence and bratva life.
“Me?” Viktor jerked a meaty thumb toward himself and shook his head. “I told him we won’t make enough money that way, but he wants to stay busy. I understand him. I was like him once.”
That was why Viktor favored Nikolai for taking over the bratva.
“I’m your son, too,” I reminded him.
He nodded and shrugged. “In blood, yes, but in brains? You are your mother. If she’d stayed with me, maybe all our lives would have been very different.”
I paused, distracted for a moment by Viktor’s willingness to talk about my mother, Fiona. He rarely mentioned her name. After she’d run from him, with me in tow as a child, he’d blown through a procession of lovers. Surprisingly, I only had one half-brother with the number of women Viktor had gone through.
Viktor laughed at my expression. “You aren’t the only one capable of feeling for a woman, Kirill. I imagine I felt about your mother the way you feel about your Mallory.”
Molly’s name on my father’s lips always sent my heart into overdrive. It triggered my flight or fight response, and when it came to protecting Mallory, I’d fight every time.
Viktor watched as my fists curled involuntarily in my lap. “The real question is: do you love her enough to let her go?”
I stared at him, anger lashing inside me like a whip. I didn’t appreciate him comparing my lifelong love for Mallory with the shit show that was my childhood. That Viktor thought he had released my mother because he’d loved her enough to let her have another kind of life filled me with rage. He was recasting history to drive doubt into my mind. He didn’t know how impossible that was.
I’d have Mallory, and no one would keep her from me. I’d die to protect her, and if I failed, I’d die to join her. I wouldn’t live without her. That was one thing I would never allow.
“I’m not going to marry Sofia De Sanctis,” I told Viktor instead of the rant brewing in my head. “Call the deal off.”
“It’s too late for that, son. You’ve met. She isn’t objecting. It is known. Calling off now would cost us not only money but blood. Antonio De Sanctis would want a pound of flesh for embarrassing him, and he’d want it from you.”
“I don’t care. I won’t marry her.” I pushed my tea away and stood.
Viktor clearly had no idea what was going on with Nikolai. So, my insane brother was making a secret play for leadership. He wanted to bend me to his will by taking the one thing in the world I cared about. He wanted to bepakhan, and he was tired of waiting. Viktor was unaware that Nikolai was attempting to take the decision out of his hands.
“Kirill, son, don’t be hasty. This will have lasting repercussions. It’s unbefitting an heir of this bratva,” Viktor said heavily. It was the clearest he’d ever been in his warning. Marry Sofia De Sanctis, or forget being boss.
“So be it,” I tossed to him before turning to leave.
I wasn’t planning on waiting for him to announce my brother as his successor. I planned on killing him and taking the title. He and Nikolai could burn in hell for all I cared.
I left the house on 2ndAvenue and went to the car. My men spread around me, always watchful when we came to Viktor’s stronghold. They followed in the car behind as I told my driver to take us to the hospital. Max was my brother more than Nikolai had ever been.
I pulled out my cell and stared at the blinking dot that was Molly’s tracker discarded in the alleyway behind The Tower, found in a small pool of blood. Nikolai had cut open her hand to tear it out, and I’d dismember him for it.
What if he told her what you did to her? Maybe she won’t want you to rescue her . . .
I ruthlessly silenced the voice of my better self. I was no saint, but Molly knew that. Whatever it was, I could make her understand. We were cut from the same cloth, Mallory Madison and me. Besides, getting her back was the first problem. Getting her to forgive me would come later.