Page 3 of Beautiful Secrets

My mouth falls open. I turn, entranced, and watch him run away into the trees. And that’s when I see Lev, my bodyguard, headed this way at a walk.

He’s far away. Too far away.

I’m already running when Vanya appears, still slipping the sleeve of her dress up one arm.

Yuri lets out a terrifying growl. “You fucking slut.”

I don’t know what gets into me.

Vasiliev women—the women in any Bratva family—do as they’re told. They’re meek and obedient. Those that aren’t, regret it.

But when Yuri grabs my sister’s arm and raises his hand to her, I forget twenty-six years’ worth of upbringing and tradition and rules.

“No!” I dart forward and grab Yuri’s arm but somehow he still manages to backhand her. Vanya sags, Yuri’s grip on her arm the only thing keeping her on her feet. My sister is blond like me, but she wears her hair long where mine brushes the nape of my neck. Yuri wraps her long, white-blond hair around his fist and lifts his arm again, not even noticing that I’m trying to hold him back.

So I punch him in the kidney. Something I wouldn’t even know how to do if my bodyguard hadn’t shown me.

Yuri tilts toward the pain, but he doesn’t release my sister.

“Let her go!” I yell.

I snarl at him when he doesn’t listen, and throw a fist at his face when he turns to glare at me over his shoulder.

It does not land.

Yuri moves too fast for thought. Before I can blink, Vanya hits the ground with a choked sob, and I have a massive hand wrapped around my throat.

“You dare hit me?” Yuri’s words run together, his jaw bunching.

“No one hurts my Vanya,” I spit out, despite how hard my heart is hammering. “Not even you, you pathetic—”

He rams me against the side of the shed. Pain lances through the back of my skull, and my eyes squeeze closed reflexively. When they pop open again, Yuri’s face is less than an inch from mine.

“Your Vanya? She is mine,” Yuri growls. “Yet I find her here, with another man, when her honor is mine to take?Blyad!”

“Poshyel k chyertu!” I spit in his face.

He flinches at that, his lips curling with disgust.

From the corner of my eye, I see Vanya pushing onto her hands. She is shaking, but she’s not crying. She is strong, like me. Our other sisters are weaklings. She is the only one who would have dared defy father by looking for love instead of submitting to her arranged marriage with Yuri.

Just have to keep him busy enough for Vanya to run and call Lev. Although I am pretty sure my bodyguard is running. He must be, if he can see what’s happening. “Does it feel good, hitting someone who can’t hit you back?”

The pressure around my throat increases until air is no longer flowing freely into my lungs. I try not to choke—I don’t want to give him even the slightest satisfaction of knowing that he’s hurting me.

Yuri tilts his head the other way and scans my face with eyes the color of a winter sky. “She disrespected me. I will punish her as I see fit.”

“Loving someone isn’t disrespectful,” I croak weakly.

Something changes in Yuri’s eyes. “Love?” He barks out what I think is supposed to be a laugh. “You think love has anything to do with this?”

My hair snags against the rough wood slats as Yuri drags me to the side.

“I’ll show you love, Mika.”

I try and dig in my heels, but he’s too strong. Despite me trying to claw out his eyes, or yank on his hair, or get my knee into his groin, the dark shed swallows me a second later.

My back slams into something hard, cold, metal.