Page 41 of Royal Bargain (Royals of the Underworld #3)

ANNIKA

D ariy doesn’t even flinch.

“I don’t care if she’s his stepsister,” he snarls. “That doesn’t change anything. Annika sold us out the second she opened her mouth about Harborview.”

My blood runs cold.

“That’s not true—” I try to say, but my voice is lost in the roar that follows.

“Fire!” Dariy orders.

Gunshots explode across the factory floor.

I scream and hit the ground, instinct taking over. The noise is deafening—metal ricochets, concrete chips fly past my face, and someone shouts in pain. My ears ring. My body won’t move fast enough.

The sharp sting in my foot flares again, hot and pulsing, but I barely feel it beneath the panic. Where’s Liam? I can’t see anything through the smoke and confusion.

I press my hands to the filthy floor, trying to make myself small. Invisible. My heart pounds so hard it’s like it’s trying to break out of my chest.

This is it.

This is how I die.

Bullets fly past me, too close. I can hear men shouting—Irish voices, Russian curses—but none of it matters. I’m not going to make it out. Not like this.

Then,

“Annika!”

Liam.

His voice cuts through the haze, sharp and terrified.

He’s suddenly there, dropping beside me. His hands are on me—checking for wounds, brushing hair out of my face, trying to pull me up.

“You’re bleeding—fuck, Ana, you’re hit?—”

“I can’t… My foot…” I gasp.

He doesn’t hesitate. He lifts me into his arms, shielding me with his body as he runs, weaving between the crates as more bullets crack overhead.

We hit the ground hard behind a metal beam. He curls around me, his chest heaving, eyes wild.

“I’ve got you,” he whispers fiercely. “You’re safe.”

Another gunshot. Then another.

And then,

“STAND THE FUCK DOWN!”

Anatoly’s voice thunders across the warehouse like the crack of a whip.

Silence falls. Utter, complete stillness. No one dares move.

No one dares breathe.

Even the air seems to hold its breath, caught in the middle of something ancient and dangerous. Liam’s grip on me tightens. I can feel his heart pounding against my shoulder.

Dariy is the first to move.

He steps out from behind a column, gun still in hand, face twisted with fury. “You can’t be serious,” he spits, eyes blazing. “She betrayed us. You’re going to protect her?”

Anatoly doesn’t even blink. “She’s my daughter,” he says, cool as ice. “And she is under my protection.”

The words land like a blade between them.

“If anyone here has a problem with that,” Anatoly continues, his tone deathly calm, “you’re welcome to speak up. I’ll put a bullet in your skulls myself.”

Dariy’s jaw works furiously, but even he knows better than to challenge Anatoly head-on in front of an armed crowd. His eyes sweep the room, calculating. Then, without a word, he turns and stalks toward the exit.

A few men hesitate—but only for a heartbeat—before following him out, their loyalty evident in the way they move, clustered tightly around him like a pack of dogs slinking away from a lion.

And just like that, the air shifts.

The chaos, the bloodshed, the shouting—it all drains away, leaving nothing but the sound of Anatoly’s slow, steady footsteps as he walks across the warehouse floor like he owns the earth beneath it.

Like he always has.

Liam doesn’t move.

Neither do I.

We just stay there, crouched behind cover, waiting to see if my father’s mercy will extend far enough to include both of us.

Anatoly surveys the room, expression unreadable. Then, with a wave of his hand, he speaks.

“Leave us. All of you.”

No shouting. No debate. Just a simple command.

The remaining men—his and ours—hesitate for only a second before they begin filing out. Kellan and Rory throw wary glances back at Liam, but he gives them a slight nod. Lucky lingers the longest, jaw clenched, until Rory grabs his shoulder and steers him toward the exit.

No one argues with Anatoly when he’s like this.

Once the warehouse is nearly empty, Liam shifts beside me. His arm is still around my shoulders, steady and sure as he helps me stand. My injured foot sends another shockwave of pain up my leg, but I bite it down.

“We need to go,” Liam murmurs. “My car’s out front?—”

“No,” Anatoly interrupts. His voice is calm, but absolute. “You’ll come with me.”

Liam bristles immediately. “Like hell we will?—”

“She needs medical attention,” Anatoly snaps. “There’s a safe house two blocks from here. Stocked. Guarded. Quiet. Unless you’d prefer for her to bleed out in the backseat of your car while we wait for Dariy to regroup?”

Liam hesitates, torn.

But I reach for his hand. “It’s fine,” I whisper. “Let’s just go.”

Anatoly’s car is already waiting—a sleek black vehicle, spotless and armored. One of his men opens the door, and Liam helps me inside, his eyes never leaving my father.

The ride is short, but tense. Every bump in the road sends a jolt through my foot, but the pain still feels far away—muted by adrenaline, by shock, by the sheer impossibility of what just happened.

When we arrive, it’s exactly what Anatoly promised—a secure space, all hard lines and reinforced walls, with a pristine first aid setup laid out like a battlefield triage station.

I’m guided to a low couch. Liam crouches beside me, already tearing open a sterile kit.

“You’re okay,” he keeps saying, more to himself than to me. “You’re okay, you’re okay…”

I nod, even though the pain is starting to crack through the fog.

But the real storm—the why of all this—is only just beginning.

The antiseptic stings like hell as Liam cleans the wound on my foot, but I barely feel it.

I can’t stop staring across the room.

Anatoly stands with his back to us, one hand braced against the wall, the other twitching slightly at his side. He’s murmuring to himself in Russian—low, rough words I can’t quite catch.

But I understand the tone.

He’s rattled.

I’ve never seen him like this. Not even when the deal with the Irish collapsed years ago. Not when Aleksey got shot. Not when I walked out and didn’t look back.

But now, he looks… haunted.

“I should’ve known,” he mutters, voice thick and raw. “She was always clever. Always watching. Mira never disappears—she just hides.”

His shoulders rise and fall as if the air is heavy, too heavy to breathe.

“She’s been out there this whole time,” he whispers, almost to himself. “Playing the long game. Watching us rot from the inside.”

I swallow hard, my body sagging against the cushions. The adrenaline’s fading now, leaving nothing but exhaustion and a bone-deep ache in its wake.

Liam finishes wrapping my foot and presses a kiss to my temple, gentle, grounding.

But nothing feels solid anymore.

Dariy tried to kill me.

My father saved me.

And Miranda—Miranda, the woman who gave me a stage, who told me I was special, who promised me a future outside of my father’s shadow—she is the one pulling all the strings.

My throat tightens.

None of it makes sense. Or maybe it makes too much sense and that’s the problem. The betrayal burns, deeper than the bullet wound. I want to cry, scream, run… but I can’t even move. I’m so tired.

“I didn’t see it,” Anatoly says again, quieter now. “She played us all.”

For once, I believe him.

Anatoly turns from the wall at last.

His face is pale beneath the hard angles, and for once, there’s no mask—just a man who’s bleeding in a different way. He drags a chair across the floor and sinks into it across from me and Liam. For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything.

“I should have recognized her.”

I look up sharply.

He rubs a hand down his face, slow and tired. “Her name was Mira, once upon a time. And she was my sister.”

A beat of silence.

“Our father married her mother when we were just kids. I was four. Mira was two. Everyone expected me to resent getting a new sister, but Mira and I… we were inseparable at first. I was overjoyed to have a sibling. Someone to play with.”

He pauses, his eyes drifting somewhere far beyond the walls.

“She was clever. Brave. Always trying to keep up with me, even when it meant scraping her knees or coming home covered in bruises. I’d tease her, she’d bite back. We’d get in trouble together and lie to cover for each other. It was like that for years.”

Something fragile flickers in his expression. A crack in the stone.

“But our father…” He swallows hard. “He had a way of seeing loyalty as a weapon. Love as a weakness. He started pitting us against each other. Little things at first—who could finish their training faster. Who could memorize the codes. Who could bring in more money, more obedience, more pain.”

He shakes his head.

“He made us prove ourselves, again and again. Not just to him but to each other. Told us only one of us could inherit the Bratva. Only one of us would be worthy to carry the name. So we fought. We trained harder. Got colder. I started seeing her as a threat. She started seeing me as a rival.”

His voice grows quieter.

“Our closeness grew into distance. Our friendship turned bitter. Still, we kept fighting for the top spot. I would make a move, then Mira would work to undermine it. Back and forth, for so long. Our father got some kind of sick satisfaction from the way we used each other, turned on each other.”

He smiles sadly. “And in the end, he chose me.”

My breath catches.

Anatoly looks down at his hands. “I thought Mira would protest. Throw a tantrum. Fight me for control. But she didn’t. She accepted our father’s decision calmly. Maybe too calmly. Didn’t cry. Just nodded. Said she understood. And the next day, she was gone.”

He leans back, eyes closing for just a second. “I thought she’d left to make her own way. I thought she was free. But now I see… she was waiting. Watching. Planning. She didn’t want her own kingdom. She wanted mine.”

The silence afterward is thick.

I don’t know what to say. My mind is spinning, trying to fit this version of Miranda—Mira—into the woman who encouraged me, pushed me, believed in me. The woman who seemed to care about the Brannagan family enough to protect them when I entered the picture. Tested my loyalty to them.

Liam’s hand finds mine, grounding me. But even he doesn’t speak.

Anatoly opens his eyes again, locking them on me.

“She’s not done,” he says softly. “Whatever’s coming next… it’ll be worse than anything we’ve seen before.”

And for the first time in my life, I believe him without question.

I sit in silence for a long moment, Anatoly’s words still echoing in my head.

Mira.

Not Miranda.

Not the polished, unbothered woman in pearls who handed me a future.

The sister he lost.

The enemy we never saw coming.

My voice is thin when I finally speak.

“But if she wants power,” I whisper, “then why is she helping Burns?”

Liam turns to me, startled.

“She’s backing his campaign. Funding him. Feeding him intel. If she wants control, why isn’t she going for it herself?”

The question hangs in the air like smoke.

Liam opens his mouth, then closes it again. His brow furrows. He doesn’t have an answer.

And suddenly, the silence feels like a trap we’ve only just realized we’re walking into.