Page 69 of Angel of Light (Lords of The Commission: New York #5)

“They were watching us,” I said, the realization hitting me like a freight train. “They were here tonight. Taking pictures, waiting for the perfect moment.”

The silence that followed was deafening.

I pulled Alison into me, hugging her and comforting her as best I could.

“We’re going to find her, and when we do, we’re going to make them pay for taking her away.”

How was it that happiness always seemed to be in a hurry to bring back misery?

The celebration was abruptly over, and a new hunt was about to begin.

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THE RUSSIAN MONARCH - Sneak Peek

Chapter 1

Nikolai

Payback’s a bitch.

And so was the mother of all hangovers I could already feel coming on even though I still wasn’t done drinking.

Maybe it was the humidity of the abandoned train tunnel we were using as our overnight hideout until we could keep moving without a tail. There was this musty and damp odor that seemed to cling to my clothes as if the walls exhaled a mixture of earthy decay and old metal.

I’d been in here for over forty-eight hours, avoiding showing my face at the surface so no one recognized me. We still had at least another eighteen to go before we could get moving to greener fucking pastures.

My men didn’t care, though. They were in full celebration mode while I drank to forget and drown the impatience of reaching my goal. There was pain mixed in there somewhere, too, but I was better off passing it as ambition to get this deal closed.

Thank fuck it had a timer on it, and with what we had accomplished today, I had shortened my sentence by a huge chunk.

Kidnapping a Mafia princess and trapping her in a rusty cage was the best kind of leverage in a world like ours. Alison Battaglia was the last piece to Father’s little take-over plan and we had successfully snatched her before dessert.

“ Na Zdorovie! ” Dmitri yelled for what seemed like the hundredth time tonight, smashing his glass against Adrik’s. Kirill and Sasha followed their lead while I simply watched and laughed in scorn.

It wasn’t funny in the least. Ironic as fuck for sure, but I knew better than to find the situation amusing.

These presumptuous assholes thought this was a massive win just because we’d captured the queen of our downfall without pulling a single trigger.

But I wasn’t so easily fooled. Those bullets were coming, complete with each of our names carved in the shiny metal in true Italian Mob style, whether we wanted them to or not.

That was as far as predictability went when dealing with the Battaglias.

How, when, or where was a mystery. But they would come for her. Of that I was certain.

Tales of the wreckage left by the Mafia war that ended with Hiro Naoki’s death, the former leader of the Yakuza clan that attempted to invade Battaglia territory, had traveled the underworld like an infectious disease.

“Come, Nikolai. No limits tonight.” Adrik patted my back with more force than necessary.

“By this time next week, we’ll have taken over New York like your father planned.

Little Odessa will be ours again. You can get a penthouse in front of Central Park.

I hear they have a special garden for butterflies.

” There was drunken mockery in his tone that I knew meant no harm, but closing on a full bottle of Vodka down already, had my face quickly detouring to murder and losing the chipper grin in a heartbeat.

“Careful.” I warned, watching as Adrik pursed his lips and held his hands up in surrender knowing he’d dipped his foot in dark waters.

Adrik Laskin was my age, and just like me, he wore every one of his thirty-six years of Russian upbringing like armor. People repellent with no fucks to give.

He’d lost the ability to care right around the age of six when he watched his father rape his sister on top of the dining room table where he had sat having dinner not even half an hour before.

The boy in him died as soon as the corkscrew he got his hands on was buried into his father’s neck. He turned into a man a second later when he twisted it further to make sure the fucker was dead.

I should know. I was there that night, too, having dinner at my best friend’s house without permission from my governess.

We’d heard the muffled sounds, the low screams, and the scraping wood of furniture being pushed around. We thought it was a Bratva meeting that had gone south, and like the brave men we pretended to be, we peeked and held our breaths until Adrik couldn’t take his sister’s pleas for help anymore.

He jumped out of the shadows and killed his own father without hesitation.

“If I had only tried to fight him off her I’d be the one lying in that puddle of blood instead of him.” I remember him saying, and every time his conscience was hit with a wave of “what ifs”, I’d recite them right back at him like an uncontestable mantra.

The fucker deserved to die.

Sasha was thirteen at the time, innocent and beautiful in equal measure. She looked like a porcelain doll, with fair pale skin, and black, shiny hair. I used to fall into a trance watching her. How she danced with such grace on those pointy skin-colored ballet shoes of hers.

She was a lot different these days. The innocence was long gone, it died on the wooden surface of a dining room table. It was replaced by hate and somewhat of a psychotic glitch which made her fit right in with the rest of the guys.

The pointy ballet slippers were replaced by combat boots, her black hair was now a vibrant blue and those proper dresses gave way to leather pants and short tops with steep cleavages.

The dress she wore that night though, as proper as it had been, was forever tarnished. It was stained with blood that didn’t belong to her father. It was hers. Only years later did I understand that meant it was the first time he was doing that to her.

In my dreams, it was a loop though. A never-ending vicious cycle that no one could break. To this day I still see it happening under my closed lids, soundtracked by screeches of pain and pleas of mercy.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d heard those same screams bouncing off the walls of Volkov Mansion before my mother died. Maybe even after, too.

Father wasn’t pleased when someone called to report the dead body of one of his most loyal Brigadiers . Seeing me there, looming over the puddle of blood with a wet stain on the front of my pants had his wrath building tenfold.

It wasn’t so much that I had snuck out without permission, but more about my reaction to seeing a man being murdered right in front of me.

I was the son of a Pakhan. Fear had no business to pump through my veins.

Needless to say, both Adrik and I started what my father called the “Volkov Vor recruitment program” on the very next day.

His KGB background made for a tortuous military-like training that, mixed with his disappointment in his son, had more Bratva recruits falling through the cracks than in any other cell in the damn country.

Not me. Quitting wasn’t an option for a Volkov.

Adrik and I were sixes for years. The lowest rank in the Bratva chain, climbing the ladder in slow motion and forced back every now and then by the fierce anti-nepotism facade father liked to impose.

Fake as the veneers he had covering the hollow spaces in his cold smile, left by fights from his younger days.

It was an attempt to show others in the organization that their Pakhan was honorable and just. A fucking false mask and a sorry excuse to punish me every chance he could. Adrik paid the price right alongside me just for being my friend and refusing to rat out on me or quit like the others.

“I’m not staying in New York.”

“He’ll want you here, you know that.” Adrik lowered his voice, camouflaging his words behind the drunken shouts of the rest of our entourage and the shuffling of their feet on the gravel between the train tracks.

“ He can go fuck himself.”

“Winter is around the corner, it’s not like you’d go back to Russia.” I shot him another death glare as a cautionary warning. Drunk or not he was pushing my patience.

“Let’s just get the fucking job done and I’ll worry about my living arrangements when the time comes.” I grunted, putting an end to the conversation.

“Sure thing, boss .”

I grabbed the bottle from the makeshift table made out of a wooden crate and tipped another glass of pure Vodka down my throat. Closing my eyes, I relished in the burn that ran the length of my gullet straight to the pit of my stomach before scanning the tunnel.

“Where’s Dmitri?” The loudness had dimmed down significantly, making me notice the absence of the noisy fucker I had to babysit tonight. It wasn’t bad enough already that this damn place intensified a whisper with its echo, that dumb asshole still had to be shouting at the top of his lungs.

That’s where my headache is coming from.

“Ran off to check on our lovely prisoner. He’s used to fat men who smell like old sweat and vomit. He’s excited about tasting an Italian princess.” Kirill replied with a wiggle of his eyebrows for emphasis, oblivious to the sudden change of color in Sasha’s face.

I was sure mine was a matching pair, raised with the rhythmic pulsing of my jaw muscles, while Adrik’s turned purple in fury. Since that day, almost thirty years ago, there’d been an unspoken pact between us.