Chapter 4 #3
Father frowned, his expression thoughtful. “With your wedding to Anya Tarasova so close, I think he’s just being cautious. He can’t afford for this deal to go south. I don’t think he’s given up, by any means. I think he’s just waiting for the best moment to try again.”
While what he said made sense in theory, there was something still bugging me. Something that just wasn’t sitting right with me about the whole thing.
“You don’t agree?” he asked, cocking his head.
“I think he’s leading us into a false sense of security and plans to attack when we least expect it. Like when we land in Russia. Or on the plane. Or the night before we leave.”
His eyes widened slightly, which, for my father, was the equivalent of him passing out from shock. “I never considered that.”
“It’s a smart move,” Adrian added, his dark brows creased with worry. “Something you’d do yourself.”
“I would,” Father acknowledged with a slow tilt of his head. He leaned back in his chair and raised his arm, signaling for one of the men on security patrol.
Yakov nodded and shifted in his direction to come toward us. He was a cool dude. One of the men who’d come over from Russia to help replenish our numbers after Dominik’s attack.
We’d spent some time together. Sparring. Talking shit. Cracking jokes. I wouldn’t say I knew him exceptionally well, but I did know him well enough to know something wasn’t quite right about him.
I ran my eyes up and down his large, muscular frame. Dressed in smart casual black slacks and a black button-down shirt, he fit in easily—as if he were just another guest and not security. The harness strapped to his chest, filled with two handguns, was the only thing to give him away.
Yakov stopped on my father’s right side, bowing his head. “Sir?”
“I want an increase of patrols around the house for the next forty-eight hours. No one in or out of the estate. Double-manned gate shifts. Someone on video surveillance twenty-four hours a day.”
Yakov nodded. “Yes, sir.” He turned to walk away and then stopped. A chill ran down my spine at the same time as I saw a flash of silver. He moved.
“Watch out!”
The words had barely left my mouth when Autumn snapped into action, her hand whipping out fast as fucking lightning to grab Yakov by the wrist. Eyes wide in shock, Father looked down at the blade an inch away from piercing his throat and then back up at Yakov, betrayal deep in his rageful gaze.
Autumn yanked Yakov toward her at the same time she picked up the knife beside her plate and rammed it straight through his ear, right down to the hilt. Yakov made a sound that was a cross between a scream and a whimper before his entire body went slack, collapsing on the table.
She went right back to eating like nothing happened, shoving a handful of crackle into her mouth, the loud crunch, crunch, crunch echoing around us.
“Oh, fuck. Crackle is so good. Mm. I need the recipe for this,” she mumbled in between bites, totally casual, like she hadn’t just run a sharp instrument through someone’s brain.
Father blinked slowly and ran a hand down his front. “You can’t cook.”
“I can too,” she snapped, affronted.
“Two-minute noodles don’t count as cooking.”
“Well, you can make them yourself next time,” she snapped.
They began to argue with each other. Not in an angry or aggressive way, but in a fun, picking on each other kind of way.
After being around them for a few months, it was easy to see that they liked arguing.
They liked riling each other up. It was like some sort of sick, twisted form of foreplay for them.
I knew that because, shortly after their bickering, they would always disappear, and wouldn’t come back for hours.
I looked around the yard, noting the fact that no one apart from the people at our table seemed to have noticed what just happened.
Autumn had killed Yakov so quickly and so effectively that none of the guests had even noticed.
My gaze swept through them all, one person after the next. Nothing. Not even a glance in our general direction. It was because I was looking around that I saw Denis, another of our soldiers, with his machine gun pointed at my father’s head.
I was moving before I’d even fully processed what was happening, leaping across the table and tackling him out of the way as a stream of bullets hit the air.
Autumn was quick to respond, spinning around in her chair to throw a knife at Denis, but it didn’t matter.
Half a dozen men—our men, men who were meant to protect us, watch out for us, lay down their lives for us—turned on us, all of them aiming their weapons at my father.
Chaos ensued. Time seemed to slow down as numerous things happened at once.
People screamed, running in all directions the moment bullets started flying.
Adrian picked up the table like it weighed nothing at all and slammed it down in front of us to act as a shield.
Nikolai grabbed Tatiana and held her close, tucking her head into his chest and shielding her with his arm as he shoved people out of the way, trying to get her and their unborn children to safety.
Aleksandr and Drea went on the offensive, attacking the men. Illayana, Arturo, and Vincenzo grabbed Theodora and Lucian, making a run for the warehouse, knocking out whoever they needed to to get those kids to safety.
Time snapped back along with a rush of sound that had me covering my ears. Adrian was crouched on one knee to my left, using the table for support as he fired at our attackers. Autumn dropped down at my right, facing behind us. She’d somehow acquired a machine gun. How or from whom, I had no idea.
She let loose a stream of bullets, guarding our six.
“Get off me,” Father grunted. Holes ripped into the table, shredding the wood like paper just as he went to get up.
I pushed him back down with a rough shove to his shoulder.
“Stay down, you idiot. We’re in a vulnerable position.
We need to stay behind cover.” I pulled out a gun, peeked over the table, took aim, and fired.
One of our ex-soldiers went down like a house of cards.
“Ten points, motherfucker,” I growled under my breath.
“Sorry for calling you an idiot,” I threw to my father as I continued to fire.
“You know, heat of the moment kinda thing. You understand—”
A flash of red caught my attention. I pulled my hand away from the gun, staring at my blood-soaked palm in shock.
What the fuck?
I looked down at my father. His eyes were closed, a giant red patch spreading out across his shirt from his shoulder. I froze, staring at it. A cold tremor ran through my body, and I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything but stare in shock as blood seeped out of my father’s body.
Autumn gasped. “Put pressure on it!” she barked.
I snapped into action, dropping my gun and lurching forward. My hands slammed down on his shoulder. He groaned.
That was good. Groaning was good. Meant he was still alive.
“Is there an exit wound?” Autumn asked in between shots.
“How the fuck should I know?” I growled.
“Turn him over,” Adrian grunted, blocking a high kick to his own head with his forearm. He pulled a knife from the holster at his waist and jammed it into the dude’s eye.
“Right. Turn him over,” I said to myself. My hands shook as I rolled my father over to his side. “It’s through and through.” I breathed out with relief.
Any bullet wound was bad news, but what the projectile hit or passed through would determine the survival rate. If the bullet hit nothing of significance, my father’s chances of survival would increase dramatically.
Panic clutched me in its claws. It wasn’t very often that I felt panic.
Not to toot my own horn, but I was pretty fucking resilient.
Blood, violence, and death had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember.
I’d grown accustomed to them. Numb to it all. Nothing really affected me anymore.
I really only had three triggers.
Sexual assault—anyone who had to force themselves onto another person was just fucking vile.
Hurting children—they were sweet, innocent, absolutely pure-hearted, and deserved to be protected at all costs. Anyone who harmed a child was a fucking coward.
And hurting my family—they might have been a bunch of idiots, and annoyed me most of the time, but they were my idiots. Only I was allowed to fuck with them.
Seeing my father like that, unconscious and bleeding out right in front of me, was something I never thought I’d see.
But I didn’t have the time to dwell on it. I needed to—
Pull yourself together!
I slapped myself across the face. The slight sting of pain knocked me out of my panicked daze.
Autumn blinked. “The fuck was that?”
“Factory reset.” Keeping one hand on my father’s wound, I whipped out my phone with the other and opened the WhatsApp group chat, diving straight into it.
Aleksandr and Drea appeared, bloody and out of breath. Anger radiated from the king and queen of the Bratva, so palpable it stifled the fucking air. Their clothes were covered in blood, some even dripping down the sides of their faces.
I thought that anger was because we’d just been attacked by our own men, but my brother directed it right at me.
“Are you seriously on your phone right now?” he hissed.
Glaring, I showed him the screen. “I’m calling in all the docs on our payroll. Unless you’ve already done that?” I asked, arching a condescending eyebrow because I fucking knew he hadn’t.
He held up the bloodstained knife in his hands. “I’ve been a little busy.”
“Me too.” I gestured down with a tilt of my head.
Aleksandr’s eyes widened. Drea gasped.
“Fuck! What happened?!”
“Shot by one of those fuckers over there,” I snarled. “Is the situation handled?”
Aleksandr’s gaze did a lap of the yard.
Pure. Carnage.
Tables were overturned. Food was strewn everywhere. Bodies littered the ground. Since it had been our own men who attacked us, I couldn’t tell if the dead were friends or foe, but there were a lot of them.
My gaze clashed with Aleksandr’s, the anger burning in his eyes mirrored in my own.
“Fucking Grandfather,” we both growled.