Page 57 of Deadly Knight (The Bratva’s Elite #2)

The light flicks on, blinding me after hours in the dark. Days, perhaps. It’s getting harder to track how much time has passed between visits.

Always a different time of day. No pattern. They’re doing it on purpose.

Two men stride in, their faces as unwelcome now as they were the day they broke into my apartment. And as ugly as they were when they sat around a table during a different Pakhan’s rule.

Men who witnessed me take my oaths. Men who cheered at my initiation. Men I once fought alongside. Men who obeyed my uncle and father when they led the Bratva.

Mikhail and Andrei.

I suppose my father was correct in one manner. His army rose up after I stole him from them.

Mikhail strides forward, but Andrei is busy wheeling in a flatscreen on a cart, setting it up a few feet away from the cell. He busies himself by turning it on and sticking a USB into the back, flicking through saved media.

I stand, noting how Mikhail, as always, remains out of arm’s reach.

After three times of trying to go for him, one of which I nearly had the fucker, they, along with whatever grunt men they hired to work for them, knew better.

No one’s approached the cage in two weeks, treating me like a feral beast.

Probably best because feral is precisely what I’ll be when given the chance.

“Missing Miss Terasov, Dimitri?” Mikhail grins, crossing his arms over his chest, trying to make himself seem bigger than he actually is.

“If you fucking touch her, I’ll gut you.”

It’s not the first time they’ve threatened Katya, and it’s not the first time I’ve had to counter-threat.

After the first few instances, I’ve realized they, unlike Ivan, won’t go near her.

She isn’t their endgame; I am. Me, Vanessa, and the current Elite members of Bratva leadership.

These sycophants are trying to avenge their glory days.

But if I ignore the comments, they’ll realize I’m in on their game.

It would make them unpredictable, which could make them a danger to her.

So on and on we go, both circling one another with no end in sight.

“Well, lucky for you she’s already been touched enough, and I prefer my women a bit less used.”

The lights flick out again, bathing the room in darkness, except for the TV paused at the start of a video, too blurry to make out. It directs my gaze, which presumably was their goal. Which means whatever will play on that screen is nothing I’ll want to watch.

Andrei starts the video. The camera is zoomed way back from a group of people but quickly zooms in, refocusing on?—

“No.”

On the images that have haunted me every night since it happened.

To the night that took Katya away from me.

To the night when Katya lost so much of her innocence.

To the night my screams and pleas went ignored.

This time, I’m forced to listen. Forced to hear my voice run itself ragged, screaming and clawing for freedom as Katya’s tied down on the mattress, the four fuckers who are nothing more than corpses now disposed of, standing over her.

I can’t watch…but I can’t close my eyes either. And it has nothing to do with my swollen and injured eyes.

The video pauses again and Mikhail steps in front of the screen, the glow lighting him up.

“Nothing we do seems to bother you, but I bet this will. You had no idea your father filmed it, did you? Of course, we all had a nice laugh afterwards. How the mighty can fall and now, you get to trip all over again. Turn it up.”

Andrei resumes the video and increases the volume, with her screams echoing throughout the stone room. On the recording and in the stone cell room I’m being kept in.

Katya’s cries are the same that I hear in my head all the fucking time. For each of the four kills, they quieted, but like a freight train, they’re all back, slamming me off the tracks.

Somewhere in the distance, the door shuts behind Mikhail and Andrei, leaving me alone with her screams.

Her fucking screams.

I can’t hear this anymore.

I refuse to watch. Once was enough. Once in which I was helpless to do a fucking thing.

I twist around, lowering to the ground, knees drawn up while I pick a spot on the floor to stare at and tune her out.

Their jibes.

My pleas.

Her screams.

It throws me back to that night. The night I should have been starting the rest of my life with her, but instead changed us both.

Katya screams and I jolt, hands scrambling for a weapon I don’t have.

She’s not here. She’s safe. She’s not here.

No matter how much I repeat it to myself, it doesn’t change the fact that once upon a time, Katya screamed.

And she was here.

And I couldn’t save her.