Page 10 of Hateful Vows

EIGHT

ALEKSEI

W e have a rule in the Bratva. The man who kills the Pakhan becomes Pakhan himself, especially if that man is his son. And his subordinates will follow.

Considering my father’s best men have followed him for thirty years, I’m not risking it.

After we leave Dante’s flat, I call for a meeting with my team. Most of them live in the same building I do, which makes it less suspicious to my father. The late hour would alert him that I’m planning something.

His cruelty knows no bounds and he’s made me kill every single man I’ve ever befriended during our sessions, for the very reason of not wanting his own son to kill him.

I still remember when I was fifteen and Nikolai Ivanov started talking to me at school.

By then, my father had already made me kill four school friends, with no regards for the loss and grief of their families.

The first one hurt the most but I can’t remember his name.

I don’t remember the other three either. But Nikolai Ivanov stayed with me.

I told him off so many times, but he insisted.

That asshole was persistent. After a while, I let him.

He made me laugh. He was reckless. Care-free.

Everything I wasn’t. I thought my father had forgotten to watch me at school so I let down my defences.

After over a year of friendship, I found Nikolai in the basement of our home, the day of my sixteenth birthday.

That was a few weeks after my dad remarried Irina’s mother and I tried to learn how to live with a sister I thought was the prettiest girl I had ever seen.

Who looked so fragile I thought she would break just by walking. She was different then.

My father forced me to torture Nikolai over the course of five days, teaching me how to keep informants alive. I can still hear his screams in my head. The way he begged. It was him or Irina. I should have chosen my friend.

Now I look at her across the seat from me.

Her face is set in a cold facade. She never smiles, nor cries. She’s quickly learnt to be as emotionless as she could. Crying never does you any good in the Dobrev household. Her mother could never learn.

“What?” she snaps and I turn back to the London streets as they pass by.

“I need you to follow my lead.”

“I’ll never bow to you, Lyosha .”

“I don’t care, Irina. I’m gonna talk to my men about the plan and I need you to fucking stay quiet for once.”

She snorts. “You think you get to give me orders, Pakhan ?” her voice is mocking and I pinch the bridge of my nose. This fucking brat. Sometimes I think she just wants to make my life harder.

“We’re staging a coup, Irina. I need to know who stands with me and who I need to eliminate,” I tell her.

“This isn’t the time to defy me.” She’s about to retort but I cut her off.

“I know you can hold your own in combat and politics, solnychko . I don’t doubt your capabilities but unfortunately for you, not all men are progressive and will see you as an equal.

And, you’re gonna marry into the Italian mafia.

I don’t know how well it will be received. ”

She shakes her head in disbelief. “That’s fucking bullshit.”

I know it is but I remain silent. I resist telling her how much I think she should be the one to kill the Pakhan considering he wants to sell her but I’ve been dreaming about killing my father for years for what I endured.

I would give her a lot of things, but the head of my father on a silver platter isn’t one of them.

Jivko drives us to the underground parking of the modern complex I live in, before we exit the vehicle and take the elevator reserved for my penthouse.

Irina follows, brooding and haughty. We agreed she would stay at my flat until she moves in with Dante after the wedding.

I already dread having her with me 24/7 but I can’t let go either.

She tried to fight it, but even she can sense the danger she’s in with my father’s plans in motion.

One by one, Ilia, Mikhail, Boris and Dan filter through the entrance door, unbothered by the late hour, and take a seat around the large marble-topped living room table.

Mikhail is my head of security and has been working alongside me for years. I’ve tortured him during our sessions and he tortured me. We still bear the marks of each other, but through pain, we understood who our common enemy was, early on.

Boris has been working with my father on weapons runs for a decade, but his family has suffered at his hands.

Any mistakes he made were taken out on family members.

A few of them died and weren’t even offered proper burial.

When I offered to have his family live in the building I built for my own safety years ago, he didn’t hesitate and I knew he’d become loyal if I protected them. And I did.

Dan was a wild card. He’s one of the only British men in our organisation, often hired for information extraction and stealth operations due to his MI-6 past. My father made the mistake of raping his wife as punishment for a mission gone wrong.

She never leaves her flat anymore. I throw a short glance at Irina; I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself if anything had happened to her. I know Dan is just biding his time.

“Gentlemen, thank you for joining us tonight,” I greet them and they nod, wary yet curious. Not a shred of fatigue mars their faces, the perfect soldiers ready for battle. That’s how my father treated them. They’re about to become so much more.

“Finally letting your best weapon in on business, Aleksei?” Dan asks caustically, looking between Irina and I.

“It was about time,” she retorts, chin high.

“Damn right,” Dan says like a proud papa bear.

I hired him myself to train Irina as soon as she turned eighteen, but it still rubs me the wrong way to see them so friendly.

I glare at him, but his warm brown eyes still glint like he’s found my weakness.

I move on to avoid further inspection on his part. He sees too much.

“You’re here tonight to usher in a new era for the London Bratva.

” A weighted silence descends upon us, the faint buzz of the fridge in the kitchen the only sound in the room, ominous and anxiety-inducing.

“Everyone around this table has suffered at the hands of my father. And in three days, we’ll all get our revenge.

Ivan Dobrev’s days are numbered and I want you to count them with me. ”

The meeting is lengthy and animated as we prepare for the hostile takeover, and what their new roles will entail. I wasn’t expecting so much talking and an almost-friendly atmosphere, but their support sends something warm and unrecognisable inside my chest.

My father is paranoid and well-protected. Yet, nothing will beat our relentless thirst for revenge.

T hree days later, as planned, my heart beats steadily in my chest when my car pulls outside of my father’s house. For the first time in years, there’s no racing or cold sweat, no external signs of distress I couldn’t control and always hated.

The mission is simple but requires so many moving parts. Everyone in the house needs to die. Today is not about finesse or redemption. It’s about our future.

Pebbles crunches under our feet as Irina and I make our way to the front door.

I turn to look at her. Her dark hair is up in a tight bun—better in case someone tries to grab her by the hair, she said—and she wears a tailored white suit.

“Ready?” I ask.

Again, that devious smirk.

She adjusts her earpiece. “Let’s kill some bastards.”

We pause at the door, waiting for Mikhail to give us the signal that he switched the camera feed with static images. It comes seconds later. “Security feed has been replaced, go.”

When we enter, my father’s butler looks disgruntled to see Irina. No one is expecting her, and that works to our advantage. She doesn’t waste time and slashes his throat open. Blood sprays across her face.

I close my eyes and sigh. Messy kills mean more clean up. “Really?”

“I want their blood to soak my clothes, Lyosha . I’ll keep them as my favourite keepsake.

A little trick I learnt from Alana Moretti,” she tells me with a deranged smile on her red-painted lips, naming the infamous drug lord from Kalliste we met last week.

Irina’s violence makes my throat dry, and I nod like a fool.

Our feet are silent on the polished floor as we continue inside the house. In our ears, Mikhail’s voice is a soft whisper. “Staff is busy in the kitchen and in your father’s private rooms. Five people in total.”

It was too easy to take over my father’s home security system. He’s grown complacent. Another reason he needs to die. His carelessness could get us all killed.

“Kill them all,” Irina says to Dan, who’s waiting at the back of the house.

“Copy,” he responds before we hear the faint sound of a door opening and closing.

These people have been with my father for years.

Most of them saw him kill my mother and then beat Irina’s and did nothing.

I know she harbours a deep rage against anyone who has seen the years of abuse, and decided to remain silent.

I’m sure they didn’t have much of a choice but I agree with her.

We can’t risk them running. Anyone loyal to my father will die.

“We don’t have access to the basement, so we don’t know what you’ll walk into. In twenty minutes, Ilia and Boris will come in with reinforcements no matter what happens,” Mikhail says and I grunt my approval.

My father is a predictable man. My weekly training session will involve physical torture, as well as what he loves to call ‘mental strength conditioning’. I don’t like not knowing who I have to kill today but that’s a musing for another day.