Page 23

ROMAN

P ain radiated through my shoulder as I pulled the T-shirt over my head, the fresh stitches protesting every single movement.

It didn’t matter.

The pain grounded me.

Reminded me I was still alive.

Every breath was fire, every movement a threat to the torn muscle, but I welcomed it. Let it sink into my bones. Let it make me sharper. Stronger.

I locked the vest into place with a grunt, tightening each strap as if preparing my body for war—and my mind for the possibility I wouldn’t come back.

Gritting my teeth through the pain, I strapped on my holster and checked the magazine of the Glock. My movements were sharp and deliberate. They were not meant to baby my injuries, but to ignore them. I needed pain to be second nature. I needed it to not interfere with my mission.

“You’re not going there to kill her, are you?” Pavel’s voice came from the doorway. “For you, this isn’t about finishing a mission. It’s about her.”

“No, it’s not about finishing the mission,” I said as I slid a fresh magazine into another Glock and slid it into the holster under my left arm. There was one under each arm and another at the small of my back.

The holster was thin enough to fit under my Kevlar tactical vest.

“Are you taking backup?”

“No.” I didn’t volunteer any other information.

“Why not?”

I let out a deep breath. There wasn’t time for this, but I owed him answers. He had until I was ready to leave.

“Because I’m not going to kill her. The men, on the other hand, work for the Ivanov name, for Artem or Gregor. And this mission isn’t on their orders. It goes against them.”

I slid two more magazines into my vest.

I didn’t know what kind of condition Zoya was in—if her disease had flared up, if she was bleeding again, if the stress had pushed her over the edge. She needed a hospital. She needed help.

And instead, she was locked up, surrounded by men who only saw her as a pawn or a threat. I’d seen what she looked like when she was pale and fighting for breath. I couldn’t let her slip through my fingers—not like that.

There was no telling what I was walking into or what state I was going to find her in when I did. I was going to be alone, and I needed to be prepared for absolutely anything.

“Then why?” Pavel asked.

“Because I have to. Zoya is…”

“Zoya, is it? You on a first name basis now, cousin?”

“Yes,” I said with a shrug, instantly regretting the movement. “Why do you care?”

“Do you even know what you’re doing?” he asked, ignoring my question.

“Going into a warehouse full of high, drunk, barely trained men who also happen to be heavily armed, to reclaim a girl that they kidnapped from my property after I rightfully stole her.”

“You are doing more than that, and you know it.” There was an edge to his voice, and I could hear it. Not anger, but confusion laced with pain. I was hurting him.

Going to get her was hurting him.

I was betraying my family for a girl.

Did Pavel’s father give my father the same hurt, confused look? Was history just repeating itself?

“Why do you care?”

“Because right now there are very few things that Artem and Gregor agree on. One of those things happens to be what to do with Zoya. They both want her dead. The family wants her dead and you can’t blame them.”

“Since when do we gun down women?” I asked. “Are kids next on the list? If some little kid shoves one of Gregor’s kids, are we going to mount a mission to take out the tyke?”

The tension in the room rose as Pavel hobbled toward me, the cast and crutches forcing him to move much slower.

I took advantage of the time by grabbing a few more knives and tucking them into the various sheaths on my tactical vest and in my pants.

“First of all, our children, sons and daughters, will know how to handle a playground bully themselves. Chances are good they’re going to be running underground candy smuggling rings by the second grade. At least I’ll make sure my kid is.”

I loved Pavel for that.

The tension was thick. Every time it got like this, he would crack a joke to make me feel like family again.

Then it was back to the real shit.

“This woman didn’t just shove me,” he said. “She caused a car accident that could have killed my pregnant wife. Then she abducted me while her men tortured me. You were there. You know what happened.”

“That changes nothing,” I argued, turning to face him.

“It changes everything. She’s not some innocent little girl. She did this. Her actions signed her own death warrant. Maybe if my wife wasn’t pregnant, or if it hadn’t happened so close to the compound, we’d be having a different conversation.”

I scoffed.

“You’re right.” He nodded. “It would be the same conversation. Because she did this. When her husband died, she had her father committed instead of getting remarried. There is no world where she gets a happily ever after. This is only the consequence of her own actions.”

I slammed the gun safe closed and turned to look Pavel directly in the eye.

“You don’t know her.”

“And you do?” he fired back. “You were the one who went back into the building to grab her and hold her hostage. You spent, what? One afternoon with her and you decided that’s it. You let her brainwash you. Or are you just pussy whipped?”

“Brainwashed? Pussy whipped?” I laughed. “Tell me cousin, when you abducted your wife from her second job after killing a person in front of her, how long did it take you to realize that you didn’t want her dead?”

“It’s not the same,” he said, gritting his teeth.

“Isn’t it? She watched you kill a man. Not in self-defense. Straight up murder. She was snooping and witnessed you execute our enemy. Then she blew you and stole your gun. Tell me, what did the family think we should have done with her?”

“It’s not the?—”

“Artem’s wife ran away and accidentally showed our enemies the weakness in the compound. You were infiltrated and had to fight a war on our home turf. What did the family want done with her?”

“It’s not the–”

“Exactly how many times has Damien’s wife stabbed or shot him?”

“Recently?” Pavel asked and I couldn’t help my snort of amusement.

“There is one little piece you keep missing, cousin,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, using my body to steady his as he lowered himself onto a bench.

“And what’s that?”

“We married those women. Yeah, okay, some questionable things happened before we married them, but we just knew that they were the ones for us. So we kept them. And at no point did they actively try to kill us—well, except for Damien’s wife.”

“He probably had it coming,” I said, letting out a deep sigh.

“Probably,” Pavel agreed. “Are you planning on marrying this girl? Making her one of us?”

“What? No.”

Was I? It hadn’t really occurred to me before. I just knew there was something about her, something that I wasn’t ready to let go of.

“There’s chemistry between us, sure. That incredible spark was definitely present and the way she melted under me was—intense. But I don’t know. Zoya is incredibly strong.”

“Doesn’t that just make her a bigger threat?” Pavel asked.

I ignored him.

“Zoya already faced so much, and she didn’t give in. She isn’t a woman who would just break. There’s something about her.”

“Explain it. If you’re going to risk everything, if you’re going against Artem and Gregor’s orders, if you’re betraying your family, it better be worth it. So, explain it to me and I will see if I can explain it to them. It won’t stop the fallout, but it may lessen the sentence.”

“I don’t give a shit about the sentence.”

“Said every dumbass ever, before committing the crime.” Pavel rolled his eyes, and I took a seat on the bench next to him.

Pausing for a moment to enjoy my cousin’s company before walking into what could very well end up being a suicide mission. Not because I was worried about the threat from the enemy, but because I was worried about the threat from my family.

“I just need to protect her. You know she was Egor’s daughter?”

“Yeah.” Pavel nodded. “He sold her off to some shady business dude who got iced like right after the wedding, right?”

“Kind of,” I said as I tightened the laces on my combat boots. “The marriage was against her will, so she slit his throat when he tried to fuck her.”

“No shit?”

“No shit,” I confirmed. “She heard about what happened to his previous wives and how he absolutely killed them, and she protected herself. Then she was the one who got her father locked in that Siberian asylum.”

I tried to keep my tone even and unemotional. Just the facts. Stick to the fucking facts.

“She was born into a family that treated her as a pawn. They controlled her and never protected her. She used that to her advantage, proving that she was far more capable than her brothers.”

“Eh, her brothers were not that impressive.”

“Still, you know how we thought Los Infideles was pretty much done?”

“Yeah, then those psychos came up out of nowhere like fucking cockroaches.”

“That was her,” I said. “She took the shattered remains of her father’s bratva empire—after we put her brothers in the ground—and used her dead husband’s money to build an empire of her own.”

Pavel rubbed his jaw. “Yeah, and used that power and money to fucking target our family. My wife and child . You see where I’m going with this, cousin?”

Anger radiated off him. Not the direction I wanted to take this. He was my most important ally in this fight, since he was the one wronged.

I raised an eyebrow. “After we attacked her family and offed her brothers.”

“Brothers she didn’t give a shit about.”

I shook my head. “Still family.”

“Technically, they attacked Nadia first.”

Leaning my forearms on my thighs I joined my hands to keep from fisting them. “What the fuck do you want from me, Pavel? You want me to start singing the fucking Circle of Life, the mafia version?”

“Fair point.”

Pavel was silent for another moment, taking it all in. He understood the world that we lived in. He knew how much power, how much strength that took for even a man to pull off, let alone a woman.

We were in probably the most misogynistic occupation in the world.

Organized crime was literally a boys’ club.

The women were left at home raising the family, not in the streets running and earning.

“Okay,” Pavel said finally. “I get it. She is gorgeous, she is strong, and everything she did was impressive as fuck. There’s just that one little thing. That one thing that just fucks up all of it.”

“And what’s that?”

“She tried to kill me. She was the one paying off Solovyov. The one who put everything in motion. All the shit we had to deal with in the last year was because of her. We did not target her. Zoya targeted us. She made us her enemy. No one is going to forget that.”

“You don’t get it,” I said, getting back on my feet.

“No, you don’t get it.”

Pavel rose to his feet, balancing on his crutches. Rising to meet my gaze with fire and anger.

“Let me remind you…again. She almost killed my wife and my unborn child .”

“They are both fine,” I yelled.

“Zoya is our enemy. She could have made a name for herself going after any other family or even building something completely new. She has the means, and she is clearly capable. You can’t stop this. She chose this path, and if you follow her down it, you are an enemy, too.”

I scoffed and took a step away from Pavel.

His hand shot out, grabbing my good shoulder. I stopped to look at him.

“Don’t turn your back on us and choose her. We aren’t turning away from you. Don’t run from us.”

“Are you going to stop me?” I asked. “Are you going to take away my only chance to have something like what you have with your wife?”

I kept my tone quiet, calm even.

But the challenge was still there.

He saw it.

He understood that he could try to stop me, but I was going regardless.

Pavel exhaled heavily, dragging a hand down his face as he let go of my shirt.

For a long moment, he said nothing.

“Are you sure?”

“No. But I need to find out. I can’t live without knowing.”

“Fuck.” Pavel sat back down. “Fine, I won’t stop you. Hell, I don’t think I could if I wanted to. But when you find her, tell her she owes me a car.”

“You got it.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he called after me as I started stalking toward my vehicle, ready to go get her back.

“That makes two of us,” I returned over my shoulder.

“Good luck, cousin.”

That was all I needed to hear. At least one of them still had my back.

I shoved the car door open, the cold wind biting at the exposed wound on my arm.

Let it bleed. Let it hurt.

I wasn’t going to war for the family.

I was going to war against them.

And this time, I wasn’t bringing Zoya back in chains.

I was bringing her home.