Page 2 of Trapped by the Bratva (The Valkov Bratva #5)

DMITRI

I clenched my teeth as they carried me onto a clean bed. Like a limp, useless lump of weight, I lay there helpless while the nurses and techs hurried. As a team, they rushed to accommodate my size, switching me onto something more adapted to transportation.

“Sorry, sir,” one young man in scrubs said. He didn’t sound too apologetic, not really, but he’d noticed how hard I tried to keep my grimace in.

I grunted, not bothering to speak as they moved me onto the other gurney. What would words do? Nothing could be said.

You’re sorry that you’re stuck helping me?

You’re sorry that I was tortured, disfigured, and pushed close to death for almost a week?

It was bullshit. No amount of confessed sorrow would do a goddamn thing.

“Hey.” Maxim nodded at the team moving me as he entered the room. “Sorry I’m late.”

I rolled my eyes. “Enough with the fucking apologies.”

My youngest brother opened and closed his mouth, thinking twice about speaking up again, at least not in a conversation with me.

“We’re ready to go, then?” He held the hand of the slender brunette who’d found me at the warehouse.

Nadia was supposed to marry the old Pakhan of the Avilov Family, but somehow, along the way of Maxim retrieving her and bringing her back to her father, they’d had a change of plans.

She had yet to leave his side, always holding his hand, and that told me enough. Another sister-in-law to welcome into the family. As if her weird introduction hadn’t been telling enough. When she found me in that dark room, she told me she was Maxim’s fiancée.

While I was curious about how they’d met, how she’d come to find me, and why, that intrigue paled in comparison to the deep-set anger that remained at a low boil in my blood.

How dare those fucking Kastavas capture me. And how dare Erik Avilov make it his personal pastime to torture me without mercy.

Until I could pay them back in kind, this fury would reside in me.

“We’re ready to fly out?” Maxim asked the doctor in charge.

Nadia furrowed her brow at me. It wasn’t a wince, but she was clearly uneasy about making eye contact.

“What?” I snapped.

“Are you ready to fly out?” she asked.

I appreciated her consideration. It seemed that she had an intuition to make sure I was making choices of my own, and I surmised she’d been deprived of that right to be so quick to observe it when it happened to someone else.

“I’m not going to drive myself out of here, am I?” I coughed at the strain of speaking that long, but when she sort of smiled, I knew she got it. I said it in the vein of a joke between us. When she found me and told me that she’d get me out, I was a wiseass in pointing out that I couldn’t walk.

I bet I couldn’t crawl, either. My body was that battered.

As soon as she drove me and Maxim away from the warehouse that was engulfed in flames, they brought me to the nearest emergency room in Chicago.

They did their best, but with correspondence to New York, we arranged for continued care there.

I’d live. That was what the lead emergency room doctor here told me.

Satisfied that I was stable to fly home, he’d reluctantly given approval to discharge me straight to the hospital near the mansion the Valkov Bratva used as a headquarters.

“Again, I would advise to wait so we can monitor Mr. Valkov here,” the doctor told Maxim, “but?—”

“But you can shove that advice up your ass, Doc.” I stared up at the ceiling to avoid making eye contact with Nadia or Maxim.

“Dmitri…” my brother said. “He’s just trying to?—”

“Well, I want to get out of here too,” Nadia said.

I had a lot to learn about this newest woman in our family, but I respected her already. She got it. She wasn’t intimidated by my pissy mood. If anything, she sympathized.

With a little more fanfare and fussing, the team that helped to declare me stable assisted my exit from the hospital. Maxim and Nadia joined me in the plane, and while a couple of guards sat in the back, it was just the three of us on the way back to New York.

Nadia rambled, filling Maxim in on more that had happened. She’d been taken right out of the Valkov building in Chicago, transported and gagged, then she eavesdropped on what Erik planned.

As we flew, I lay there locked in my beaten body and unable to do more than shift on this gurney, but I listened. I let her words sink into my mind. All this information was critical because that man, that fucking Avilov leader, was the only person who needed to be sorry.

He’d be sorry he'd ever laid a finger on me. As soon as I could, I’d make that motherfucker regret thinking about torturing me during captivity.

The Kastavas—Sergei Kastava, especially—had a place in hell waiting too, but Erik Avilov would rue the day he ever saw me and decided to turn me into this mess.

Missing fingers. Broken bones. Cuts and bruises. A dislocated shoulder, torn ligaments, and a snapped ankle.

Multiple surgeries would await me at home. Countless exercises and therapeutic assistance would be required. It would take my body significant time and effort to get back to the strength I had before I was taken by the Kastavas and brought to the Avilovs.

But I would get there. I had to. Because the idea of getting revenge was the only thing that made me want to stay alive for another single second.

Maxim sighed heavily, letting Nadia lean against him from her seat next to his. They’d lifted the armrest so they could be closer together, and I strained to turn my head the other way on the pillow.

I didn’t need to watch them. I could give them privacy. I didn’t know all the details of how they’d gotten together, but I wasn’t so stuck in my misery to miss how they clicked. How they worked together.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked her.

Another doctor had checked on her from her shorter time as a captive, and other than a kick to her thigh and being dehydrated, she was given a clean bill of health.

Unlike me.

“Yes. I’ll always be all right. Now that I’m back with you.”

I stared at the opposite wall of the plane, wishing my pain could be a little worse, a little more severe, to just knock me the fuck out.

I didn’t need to hear them kissing and making out over there. I didn’t want to hear Maxim ask her again and again, like a goddamn worry wart, if she was hurt or uncomfortable.

Just like our brothers, Maxim had found a strong woman who’d stand by him no matter what. A partner. A friend. A supporter through thick and thin.

I wouldn’t begrudge him for getting his girl, but dammit, it was like salt in the wound, and I had many of them.

If anyone could benefit from compassion and comfort right now, it was me. As soon as those painkillers wore off, I would be an ideal candidate for someone to distract and nurture.

But I didn’t have anyone. I was the last one standing, the last bachelor of us brothers.

It felt like a full circle mocking me. It all started with Alek stealing Mila Kastava.

He’d taken her and started this entire beef between the Valkov and Kastava names.

And throughout the last year, every single one of them had found their woman.

Alek and Mila.

Then Nik found Amy again.

Ivan was happy with Becca.

Clearly, Maxim had started something with Nadia.

Then there was me.

Alone as fucking ever, and for the first time, it bothered me. Maybe it was a side effect of the narcotics they’d pumped me with to lessen the pain. Perhaps it was the psychological result of being held captive and tortured for a week, a plaything for a sadistic asshole to push close to death.

I would be solo during my recovery. Sure, I’d be home. My brothers would be around, but they all had other commitments and loyalties to consider, like their women and children.

Like walls trapping me in my mind, my injuries and aches rose up to a suffocating level of hopelessness. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t fight back. But I would soon.

I vowed to.

Erik Avilov wouldn’t survive my wrath. He would receive every bit of agony he’d doled out on me.

My need for revenge would keep me company. I would let the ideas of torturing him fill my mind. Fantasies of inflicting pain and earning his cries and begs for mercy could fester in my mind.

I was already in a dark place. I lived for the purpose of making that fucker pay. No room was left to envy my brothers for finding the women who completed them. And trickles of jealousy would need to cease flowing.

All I had to look forward to was regaining my mobility and strength. Once I did, I would be on my way to find Erik and give him a taste of his own medicine.

Slipping in and out of consciousness spared me from hearing Maxim and Nadia talk and kiss. The flight wasn’t a long one, and with this private plane, we were given the luxury of a short trip home.

We landed, and Maxim accompanied me to the hospital. Ivan and Alek waited there, both of them sporting expressions of concern. With them were several of the Bratva’s top soldiers.

One glance at Alek suggested that he knew that I wasn’t in the mood to talk. I couldn’t, not for long, with the fractures in my cheekbone that shot pain through my face.

He nodded at me, acknowledging my arrival before they wheeled me off to surgery.

Of course, I would be expected to tell him what happened. I would also want to sit in on all the meetings to hear what they’d learned. None of us would let the incident of my captivity and torture be swept away now that I’d been found and rescued. They’d want justice as well.

But only I would deliver it. Seeing revenge was all I would endure living for.

Nothing else mattered.