Page 7 of Bratva's Secret Girl

I shrink even further back to the wall and press my eyelids together. Every muscle in my body is tensed in the effort to make myself smaller. As though that will help.

I’m suddenly aware of the wet stickiness of the blood I’m covered with. It’s soaking through my clothes and to my skin. Cloying and with the copper stink of death that’s joined by the acrid tang from the guns.

The footsteps stop and even as I know I should look or try to run or fight, my body is trapped in the freeze part of fear. I’m about to die, and I can’t find the courage to look at whoever’s going to kill me.

A man exhales, and there’s another soft movement of clothing.

“Hayley.”

I can’t process the word, terror pulsing in me.

“Hayley.” A familiar, calm, low voice makes my fear ebb away. “It’s me.”

Maxim.

I peel my eyelids open and see my boss knelt before me, his grey eyes gentle.

“It’s safe. You’re safe.”

He has a gun in his hand. Behind him is a sea of blood.

4

MAXIM

Hayley glances over my shoulder and I tense, waiting for her to shrink from me, and what I am.

A monster. A killer.

A huge, tattooed man who has scraped his way up from nothing in a Russian orphanage, then in Greenwich once I was old enough to run away to what I imagined to be a city with streets paved in gold via the Bratva, and earned the role of trusted henchman, then eventually second-in-command of Greenwich. Then ten years ago killed that bastard and replaced him as the kingpin.

I steel myself, but the next moment, she has tipped forwards into my waiting arms.

The relief as I draw her slowly into my chest and she wraps her arms around my neck is unreal.

“Maxim… Oh my god. Where were you?”

My heart breaks. Fuck. I should have been here earlier. That stupid deal with Hampstead.

“I needed you. I thought…” She grips my lapels.

I wasn’t there at the moment she needed me. I believed I was keeping her safe from the ugly part of my life. The violence, the danger.

But it found her anyway.

“You came for me,” she adds in a whisper.

I switch to my mother tongue, and lose the words in her soft brown hair. “I’ll always come for you, malishka. I’ll always look after you.”

Hayley clings to me as I carry her out of the café. She’s covered in blood, but all I can see as I place her in the passenger seat of my car—a modest-looking thing with armour-plated doors and bulletproof glass that I use to drive myself to visit my girl quietly—is her fear.

That expression of terror hovers in front of my eyes, even as I climb into the driver’s seat and start the engine.

I think she’s in shock. Frankly, I might be too.

I tried to protect her from my world, and it came to find her another way. I was so fucking lucky. I could have lost her. Ten minutes later, or a stupid, misguided thought about how I shouldn’t visit her two days consecutively, and she could be dead, or…

The pain of what could have happened to her if I hadn’t arrived when I did is worse than when Camden waterboarded me.