40. Lev
We arrive at the poker game. As always, it’s being hosted by Daniil, a good friend of the bratva, at his restaurant in Brooklyn. It’s where a lot of allies meet to enjoy good vodka and conversation over a friendly game of poker. While guns are allowed, it is supposed to be a safe place for all those invited, and one of the true times I can relax.
We arrive after closing time and walk through the empty restaurant to the private bar out the back.
Two of my men stay at the door as security while Brooke and I enter.
It’s a dark room lit only by a few wall sconces, a pendant light over the table, and a backlit bar.
Poker is played around a large round table that seats up to eight men. Tonight, it is full, the only empty seat being the one left vacant for me.
When I walk in, I receive respect from the other men at the table.
Except for two.
I bristle when I see Vlad sitting next to Vadim.
“What is that piece of shit doing here?” I growl to no one in particular.
Vlad sits back and crosses his legs, watching me through his beady eyes as he sucks on a cigar. He looks too relaxed for my liking, and immediately, I feel my blood run hot.
“He is my guest,” Vadim says as if it is nothing.
I narrow my eyes. My uncle has some nerve flaunting how he’s gathering allies against me.
“Let us all enjoy the game,” Daniil says, trying to disperse the tension that hangs in the air like a thick cloud of toxic smoke.
But I’m not about to subject either Brooke or myself to Vlad’s company for the next couple of hours. I know exactly where I would prefer to be, in bed with my fiancée with her legs wrapped around my hips and my name on her lips as I make her unravel beneath me.
“If he is here, then we’re not.” I turn to Brooke. “We’re leaving.”
She is already glaring at Vlad. But then she turns to me with a wicked gleam in her eyes. She’s caressing the diamond choker around her neck, stroking it.
And damn, it turns me on.
Not just the way her fingers caress the choker but the wickedness I see burning in her big brown eyes.
“I’d like to stay,” she says.
I cock an eyebrow. “You would?”
“Let him see who outbid him and who’s wearing it,” she whispers. “While you take his money from him.”
Damn, my little bunny really is a hell bunny.
I pull her into my arms and kiss her. My zayka might be bratva material, after all.
I take a seat at the table, but when Brooke moves to take a seat across the room, I pull her down onto my lap.
“Since when do women join us at the table?” Tobias asks. The old Greek is the head of a small family syndicate operating out of Astoria. He’s old school. Loyal and reliable. But he’s a grouchy sonofabitch.
“Since I became engaged and my fiancée has joined us for the evening.” I run my fingers down Brooke’s bare back, and she curls her arms around me, playing the perfect attentive bratva fiancée.
“She’s a distraction,” says Peter De Kysa, cousin to the current don of the De Kysa, a powerful family in New York City.
“I would think you should like that,” says Victor Barasarkov, a longtime friend of the bratva. “If we’re distracted, you might actually have a chance at winning a hand for once.”
“Yeah, yeah, old man,” Peter says, leaning back in his chair and taking a sip of scotch.
“Let the girl stay,” Tony the Hand says. Tony is another old-school player with ties steeped in the Italian mafia. He’ll tell you they call him The Hand because he’s good at poker. But rumor has it, it’s because he chopped off a rival’s hand for touching his wife and then sent it to him in the mail. I know which one I believe. The old man has some years on him, and I’m damn sure most of them were wild ones.
“I second that,” Vlad drawls, his eyes sweeping over Brooke as a rapacious smile slides across his lips. “Let her stay… and watch.”
His bravery is bolstered by Vadim’s presence. He thinks sitting next to my uncle is going to protect him from me. Which tells me he’s not just a slimy fuck, he’s a stupid one too.
One step out of line, and no one will be able to protect him from me. Even the bald-headed thug he’s brought with him as security.
Every muscle in my body is tense, but seeing Brooke proudly caress the choker around her neck instantly calms me. Her dark smirk reminds Vlad that he already lost once to me and will again tonight, and damn if that doesn’t make me want to take my little bunny home and show her my appreciation.
“If you ladies are about done, how about we play some poker,” says Daniil, shuffling the cards.
We settle into the poker game, and I win the first two hands, which speaks to Vlad’s primal need to be a dick. “Perhaps if I had a nice piece of ass sitting on my—”
I’m about to flip the table to get to him for disrespecting Brooke, but my uncle surprises me and stops Vlad from finishing the sentence.
“Shut the fuck up, you little shit. You are my guest here tonight. That is the pakhan’s fiancée. You will show a little more respect.”
I stare at my uncle, trying to figure out where the sudden show of respect came from.
“Of course, Vadim,” Vlad says with a laugh, draining his glass of vodka. “I mean no harm.”
His gaze drops to me, and I level him with a look that doesn’t need words to back it up.
Feeling the tension, Brooke leans closer to whisper in my ear. “Let me get you a drink.”
She wiggles off me, right across my zipper, and it makes my cock thicken with gratitude.
From my peripherals, I watch her make her way to the bar. But my focus is on Vlad and the way those beady eyes track her every step.
I grit my teeth. He’s doing this to get under my skin, and I’m fucking letting it.
Because I know exactly what he’s thinking as he looks at her lush body sashaying toward the bar—it’s written all over his ugly face. He’s fucking her ten sides of crazy in his head, and just the thought of him imagining all the vile things he would do to her makes me fucking insane with rage.
Vadim says something to him, pulling his attention away from Brooke, which is good because my temper is about to detonate.
But Vlad is drunk, and as Brooke makes her way back from the bar, carrying a vodka for me, he finally crosses the line. While one hand—the one with a ridiculous lion’s head ring on his finger—remains palm down on his cards, the other reaches out and grabs Brooke.
“Is that for me, baby,” he purrs, dragging her closer to him.
He slides his fingers down her arm and across her milky skin to her wrist. I see Brooke stiffen. I see the distaste. Feel her disgust.
My head explodes with rage, and I blindly reach for my gun and press it to the top of his hand before pulling the trigger. His hand bursts open like a watermelon being slammed into the sidewalk. Blood and bone and small pieces of flesh burst upward before raining down on the poker table.
The mudak roars with pain.
Guns are drawn.
Chairs scrape and hit the floor as people stand.
The only person who doesn’t stand is my uncle. He simply sits there, his cold eyes watching me with contempt. Beside him, Vlad cries like a baby, blubbering something about revenge and humiliation, and blah blah blah.
I lean down. “I warned you once, and you didn’t listen. Now you know there are no second chances. You even glance sideways at her, and I’ll fucking shoot you again, only next time I will shoot you in the goddamn heart.”