Pride, Prejudice and the Bratva (Darkest Vows #1)

Prologue

RUSLAN BARANOV

THE AIR INSIDE THE abandoned house tasted of rot and rust. Damp stone breathed through the walls, thick with mildew, and beneath it lingered the familiar metallic tang of gun oil that never quite washed off—no matter how many times we scrubbed our hands raw.

Outside, the November wind clawed at the building, rattling the cracked shutters so they scraped against the wood like fingernails dragged across bone.

Every sound carried too far in the quiet.

I sat on a splintered crate that had once held vegetables, maybe onions or potatoes, back when this place had been a kitchen instead of a safehouse.

The peeling wallpaper curled away from the walls in yellowed strips, its old floral pattern warped by moisture and neglect.

I stared at it as if it might rearrange itself into something useful. A map. A sign. An answer.

It didn’t.

We had been twenty-one when we came here—hand-picked operators pulled from the CIA’s Special Activities Division and stitched together into a team that officially did not exist.

Unofficially, they called us the Blue Berets, a joke born from the sun-faded patches we kept hidden beneath civilian jackets.

Tourists saw us as backpackers or expats. Locals saw what they wanted to see. No one saw soldiers.

The deployment order had been signed at the federal level. I remembered the briefing room in Langley, the lights too bright, the coffee too bitter.

A brutal mafia boss turned terrorist—long believed to be a ghost—was loose in Europe, and the Agency wanted him erased. So we were quietly deployed and inserted into Greece with a single mission: capture him. Exactly the way Washington preferred to handle its messes—deniable, quiet, and lethal.

Alonso “Al” Chapo Guzmán wasn’t just another cartel boss who’d grown too big for his borders. He was a contagion.

When the Mexican government—nudged and bullied by the United States—began tearing apart his empire, he disappeared from Sinaloa like smoke on the wind.

No body. No arrest. Just absence.

Intelligence followed the trail across the Atlantic and found him here, in Athens, rebuilding in the shadows with the patience of a spider.

From Greece, he trafficked teenage girls across the Mediterranean, selling them to men who would never be punished.

He flooded American streets with fentanyl-laced heroin, poison that crept into Ohio suburbs and Midwestern towns, killing kids whose parents still thought drugs were a city problem.

He armed jihadists in Syria with American-made weapons siphoned from leaky supply lines, and he laundered blood money through casinos scattered along the Aegean coast, where tourists drank and laughed on floors bought with corpses.

He wasn’t called a terrorist because he didn’t fit the narrative. But he was one in every way that mattered.

The bounty on his head was thirty million dollars—dead or alive. Preferably dead. Proof was all they wanted. A body bag. A DNA swab. Something they could lock in a vault and pretend closed the book.

Our orders regarding Al Chapo Guzmán were clean on paper: confirm his identity, neutralize the threat he posed, extract evidence, and exfiltrate. In practice, it looked simple—meant to be a clean, silent operation. But things didn’t go as expected.

The operation launched in February.

Nine months later, only three of the twenty-one sent on the secret operation were still breathing

Me.

My sister, Amy.

And Elena Vasquez—the quiet sniper from California who spoke only when words mattered and never missed when they didn’t.

Eighteen others were gone.

Brothers and sisters in arms who had shared cigarettes, bad jokes, and blood-soaked stairwells.

Some died in ambushes in the narrow alleys of Exarchia, where gunfire echoed like thunder between concrete walls.

Others vanished in fireballs—IEDs buried beneath olive groves that had stood for centuries before we bled into their roots.

A few fell to clean shots from men who fought for Chapo with the devotion of zealots, eyes empty, fingers steady.

We had killed dozens of his soldiers in return.

Maybe hundreds.

The numbers blurred together after a while, reduced to shapes on thermal scopes and bodies on pavement.

Each victory felt smaller than the last.

Each loss heavier.

I rubbed a hand over my face, feeling the grit ground into my skin, and wondered how many ghosts could fit inside one man before he stopped recognizing himself.

Somewhere in the city, Chapo was breathing. And until he wasn’t, none of us were leaving Greece.

Headquarters had gone silent.

Weeks had passed since our last extraction request, each urgent plea swallowed by the bureaucracy and left unanswered.

The official line, repeated like a mantra in half-hearted emails, read: “The sacrifice of eighteen operators will not be in vain. You are the final element. Complete the mission.”

Translation: we were expendable now. Acceptable losses. Replaceable parts in a machine that didn’t care if the gears bled.

I rubbed the stubble on my jaw, feeling the exhaustion settle in my bones like molten lead.

Every movement carried the weight of nine months of ambushes, explosions, and bullets.

I was only twenty-one, young by any measure, but I’d enlisted at eighteen, straight out of high school.

Something about a life lived at the extremes drew me in—danger made everything sharper: colors brighter, sounds louder, time slower.

This was the only world where I truly belonged, and I had learned to love it.

But my only blood sister, Amy—also part of this secret team—wasn’t made for it. Not really.

A soft clink pulled me from my thoughts, cutting through the oppressive silence of the house. I looked up. A chipped ceramic mug hovered in front of my face, steam curling from the dark, bitter Greek coffee inside.

“Here. Drink,” Amy said, voice low, warm, carrying a softness I hadn’t heard in months.

She stood there in a faded red tank top and worn blue jeans, dark hair pulled into a messy ponytail.

Months of stress and malnutrition had sharpened her features; cheekbones now cast slight shadows on her pale skin, her frame leaner and wiry.

Yet her eyes burned with that familiar stubborn spark I’d known since we were children—the same one that had gotten us both into trouble and sometimes kept us alive.

I took the mug, holding it with hands that trembled slightly from fatigue, and drained it in three long, burning swallows.

The bitter liquid scorched my throat, a reminder that I was still alive, still here, still fighting.

Amy dragged a rickety wooden chair across the warped floorboards and straddled it backward, resting her forearms on the backrest.

Her gaze locked on me, half-smirk tugging at her lips—the silent question I already knew the answer to.

The house we squatted in wasn’t just abandoned; it was dead.

Nestled on the dusty outskirts of Athens, far from the golden lights of the Acropolis, its boarded windows hid the sun.

Electricity had long since given up, leaving us to the flicker of battery-powered lanterns.

Water trickled from a single rusty tap, the occasional drip echoing in the hollow rooms like a metronome counting down the days we’d survived.

We cooked over a camping stove, slept on thin bedrolls that pressed against the cold floor, and kept watch in endless rotations.

Every creak of floorboard, every whistle of wind through cracks, felt like a reminder that we were the last living souls here—ghosts haunting a tomb built for the dead.

Amy tilted her head, lips quirking into that smirk that I hated and loved all at once. “You’re doing that thing again,” she said. “Brooding so hard I can hear the gears grinding in your skull.”

I set the empty mug on the floor with a soft clink. “I’m not brooding,” I said, though even I could feel the edge of it in my voice. “I’m calculating odds. Risk assessment.”

“Same difference,” she said, leaning forward over the chair’s backrest, elbows dug into the warped wood.

Her eyes narrowed, sharp as flint. “Still worried?”

“Not for me,” I said, meeting her gaze squarely.

“I’ve made my peace with this job a long time ago.

I love it—the rush, the purpose... taking monsters off the board.

But you...” I let the words hang, heavy as the stale air around us.

“You never wanted this. You’re only here because of him.

Because of whatever deal you made with that bastard. ”

Her half-smile faltered, fading into something fragile.

She glanced toward the cracked window where weak gray light filtered through the dust and grime, illuminating the sharp planes of her face. “Dad didn’t give me much choice, Rus. You know that.”

I exhaled slowly, tension in my shoulders knotting like barbed wire.

My fingers brushed against the crate beneath me, splinters digging in as I tried to stay grounded. “I know,” I said, voice quieter, rougher. “But surviving this... surviving him... surviving us... you’re stronger than you realize.”

She let the words sink in, then tilted her head, meeting my gaze again.

Her eyes were dark, reflecting the world we were trapped in—dirty, gray, and merciless. “Maybe,” she whispered, voice almost lost in the wind rattling the shutters. “Or maybe I’m just stubborn like you. Stupid, like you.”

I let a small, bitter laugh escape, one that didn’t reach my eyes.

Our father—Colonel Viktor Baranov, retired CIA legend and eternal patriot—had built his entire identity on service.

The Agency wasn’t just his career; it was his religion. Loyalty, sacrifice, secrecy—those were the commandments he’d raised us on.

When I enlisted at eighteen, he’d shaken my hand like I was a fellow officer instead of his son, pride shining in his eyes.

When Amy tried to choose a different life—college, normalcy, something that didn’t end in blood—he’d smiled, nodded... and quietly dismantled her future.

He pulled strings.