Page 27 of Dirty Game (Broken Blood #1)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Varrick

Rosalynn’s awake before me. I can feel her body pressed along my left side, the hair on her arms standing straight from the cold, even with the sheets wound tight around us.

She keeps her breathing shallow, like she’s afraid even her lungs might wake me.

I let her think I’m still out. You learn more from a woman when she thinks you’re not looking.

She studies me, head propped on her fist. Her eyes don’t roam the way most do.

They fix on the places that should scare her—the scar on my ribs, the ragged tear near my hip, the old break in my arm that never healed quite straight.

She’s cataloguing, not admiring.

Her fingers start at my chest.

Slow and cautious, like she’s counting the notches on a gun.

Over the bullet groove just under my collarbone, where the bone bulges a little from the fracture, then lower, to the mess of skin just above my heart.

That one gets her. She circles it twice with her fingertip, then pulls back as if she’s touched something obscene.

I crack my right eye, just enough to see her reaction.

It’s not disgust. It’s the opposite. She looks like a kid at a funeral—too young to understand, too smart to ignore.

Her hand hovers there a long time. Then she lays her palm flat over the scar, as if she could smother what made it.

Her breath hitches.

I open both eyes.

Her face is six inches from mine, eyes wet but fierce.

“Do you ever sleep?” she jokes.

“Sometimes.” My voice sounds wrong in the hush. “Not when I’m being watched.”

She blushes, which is ridiculous, considering what I did to her against the glass last night. She doesn’t pull away, though. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

We lay like that for a minute. The heat of her palm seeps into the scar, waking up the nerves.

I feel her heartbeat as clearly as my own.

She says, “I need to know more about the dynamic with Sienna.”

I don’t pretend not to know who she means.

I don’t answer right away either. The ceiling gives me nothing but my own shadow, the city glare splitting my face in two.

“I killed for her,” I say, finally. “She tried to kill me.”

Rosalynn’s hand tenses, but she doesn’t let go.

“She was a job at first. We both lied. Both knew it. She was always her father’s daughter.” I stare at the ceiling as I talk, because if I look at Rosalynn, I might soften the story, and I don’t want to. “She was good. I fell for her.”

Rosalynn’s head tilts. “How?”

“She loved me too, once upon a time. But you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and the tabs I’ve kept on her show she hasn’t put her new life to good use.”

She breathes, the sound half relief, half horror. “So why didn’t you kill her?”

“I should have. I wanted to.” My jaw aches as I say it. “But she was already pregnant.”

“Dante,” she says, small.

“Yeah.”

The silence is absolute. Not even a car horn or the hum of the elevator thirty floors below. Just the thud of two hearts out of sync.

Rosalynn studies the scar again. “She did this?”

I shake my head. “My father did that one. Passage of rights. Fucked up on a job. Family tradition—he said if you make a mess, you wear it.” I wait to see if she’ll recoil. She doesn’t. She traces the jagged line down my chest, following it all the way to my stomach.

“Your father sounds like mine.”

“He was worse. Or maybe just better at it.” I grab her hand, not gentle, and press it flat to the base of my sternum. “Most people want to fix what’s broken. Some just want to see how much you can take before you split open.”

Her eyes search mine. “Did you love her?”

I don’t flinch. “I loved the war. She was the only person who could fight me and keep up.”

She lets that answer hang, considering. “But you let her live.”

“Not for her. For him. I wanted to know how he’d turn out. Wanted to see if my bloodline could do better than the last generation.”

Rosalynn nods, like this makes sense. In our world, it does.

Her fingers resume the circuit, slower now. She finds a round scar on my hip, traces the rim with her thumb. “This one?”

“Old job. Shot went clean through. Hurt worse getting stitched up by Korrin than taking the bullet.”

She laughs, real and sudden. “He doesn’t strike me as gentle.”

“He’s not. Never has been.” I watch her face while she works, the way her expression softens when she finds another scar, the way she makes them less ugly just by touching them.

“Yours?” I ask, meaning the scars on her wrists and the thin line through her eyebrow.

She answers without words, moving my hand to her left wrist. She pushes the watchband aside, exposing a patchwork of pale burns. “Marco. He liked me quiet.”

I curl my hand around her arm, thumb covering the worst of it. “You deserved better.”

She doesn’t argue. Instead, she fits herself tighter to my side, burying her face in my neck.

I wait for her to ask the next question. I can feel it buzzing in her skin.

She asks anyway: “Would you kill her now, if you had the chance?”

I don’t answer for a long time. I think about Sienna’s face, the exact dead look in her eyes when she stabbed me.

I think about Dante, four years old and already smarter than me.

I think about my father’s words: If you can’t kill it, own it.

“Probably,” I say.

Rosalynn doesn’t look disappointed. If anything, she looks satisfied.

She rolls on top of me, letting her hair fall over my chest. She stretches out, her body cold in spots where the sheets have slipped away. She lays her head on my heart and listens.

I keep my hand on her hair, steady.

We stay like that while the sun creeps up the skyline, burning the last shadows off the city.

I say, “You’re not afraid of me.”

Her voice is muffled against my skin. “No.”

“You really should be.”

She sits up, letting the light hit her face. Her eyes are blue ice, but there’s fire underneath now, where before there was only frost.

“I’m more afraid of being nothing,” she says.

I pull her down, not quite a kiss, more like the start of one. She lets me, and for a second, I want to drive my cock into her pussy.

But I don’t. I keep just enough back to stay dangerous.

She falls asleep like that, breath slow and even, head on my chest. I watch her until I’m sure she’s dreaming. Then I close my own eyes, letting the world drop away.

When I wake again, she’s still there. And so am I.

Only I have a text from my brothers that we need to deal with this Sienna mess, and I have no choice but to comply.

Not for me.

For Dante.

For Rosalynn.

The Black Crown is dead quiet at eleven in the morning.

The drunks have either sobered up or passed out, the cleaning crew has gone through like a plague.

The only sound is the hum of the security monitors, the faint tap of metal against wood where Korrin keeps flipping his knife into the conference table.

The back room’s just how I left it: every edge squared and functional, the walls lined with shelves holding files and firepower.

There’s a whiteboard with half a dozen maps taped up, overlapping like battle scars.

Korrin’s a black hole of energy.

Pacing, biting his nails, then remembering and picking at the cuticle instead. He’s already on his third espresso and has the twitch to prove it.

Cyrus is the opposite.

Still as a corpse, glasses perched on the end of his nose, one leg crossed over the other like he’s meditating instead of plotting a war.

He flips through a binder, pages covered in his microscopic handwriting.

I plant myself at the head of the table and scan the printouts.

Shipping manifests, encrypted texts, surveillance stills.

Cyrus has already circled everything in red or blue, his version of a mood ring.

Korrin finally cracks. “Let’s just kill them both and take the kid.”

I ignore him, sliding the manifest closer. “Sienna’s not the problem. It’s Mikhail. He’s got the Bratva backing him now.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Korrin slams the knife into the table so hard the handle bounces. “You hit him hard and fast, the Russians lose face. They’ll back off.”

“Or escalate,” Cyrus murmurs, not looking up. “Then we’re in a full-on street war, with every wannabe gang in the city betting on the outcome.”

Korrin leans over the table, planting both fists like he might tear it in half. “I say let ‘em. It’s time we clear house anyway.”

I look up. “You’re not thinking. Mikhail wants us to hit him. He wants to play martyr, rally his people.”

Korrin’s teeth show a snarl more than a smile. “So?”

“So we don’t give him the satisfaction.” I grab the folder marked RUSSIA and fan the contents. “We wait. Hit him where it hurts.”

Cyrus finally glances up, eyes unreadable behind the glass. “He has a shipment coming in tomorrow. The one Rosalynn found in the books.”

“The weapons?” I ask.

Cyrus nods. “Yes. They’re running it through the port, disguised as machine parts. But the inventory’s off. They’re doubling the load, maybe tripling.”

Korrin’s mouth twists. “Then we jack it.”

“We do more than that,” I say. “We kill every man guarding it, take the weapons, and leave a message: No more warnings.”

Cyrus slides his glasses off, folds them. “Clean. Surgical. Minimal casualties.”

Korrin’s lip curls. “You’re getting soft, brother.”

“Efficient isn’t soft.” I let my gaze pin him. “We need this to look like a business move, not a blood feud.”

Korrin throws up his hands, but he’s not really angry.

He just needs a reason to fight. “Fine. We hit the port, take the guns, and cripple Mikhail in the process.”

“And if Sienna’s there?” Cyrus asks, low.

I answer without hesitation. “She’s not the target. The boy is.”

The table goes silent. Even Korrin loses some color.

Cyrus looks at me with something almost like pity. “You’re not willing to go that far?”

I meet his stare. “He’s my son. She’s a cunt. I don’t care about her.”

Korrin grabs the knife and starts flipping it again, harder this time. “Never pegged you for the family type.”

I shrug. “Maybe I’m evolving.”

He snorts. “Or devolving.”