Chapter 1
Chapter one
Alisa
Two Years Later
Exhaustion permeated me as my target droned on about his seemingly only interest: crypto currency.
I blearily rubbed my eyes as he droned on in a condescending tone. Not that he even noticed since his attention was completely fixated on my chest.
Aidan, the man the Bratva had assigned me to kill, absently scratched his hairy arm. I glimpsed the wedding band he’d forgotten to take off in his rush to find a girl to pick up after work.
Piece of shit. I didn’t have a choice in who I killed for the Bratva, but it helped when the men were as terrible as this man.
I waved to the bartender for a drink and asked for a whiskey on the rocks.
“Glad you aren’t into that fruity shit,” Aidan said, ordering the exact same drink.
I was into fruity cocktails, but little did this guy know that I’d crafted my appearance to fit all his desires. Wore a black wig that made me look like his stepdaughter–nausea spiked at that thought–and a short dress that showed enough cleavage to get his attention.
From the way his khaki pants were tenting, I definitely had his attention.
The door to the bar swung open, and I felt the energy in the room shift. My head turned like it was following a magnet. And I wasn’t the only one.
I caught Aidan’s frown in my peripheral vision as we both stared at the newest arrival to The Parlor, the Lower East Side’s hottest new bar.
The man with cruel eyes, and an even crueler mouth.
Gun metal eyes met mine, and despite the twenty-foot distance between us a shiver ran up my back.
I steeled my expression as I glared at Dmitri Novikov. He might have a saint's name, but I was intimately aware that he was the farthest thing from it.
He’d proved that when he’d murdered my brother while I begged him not to.
After he’d killed my brother and left me to pick up the pieces of my shattered heart, I spent the next few months waiting for him to approach me. To say anything.
It never happened.
Now, Dmitri slowly strode across the room. The previous hum of the room slowly descended into silence as if they could sense the dangerous energy radiating off him.
“Do you know him?” my mark asked while trying to puff out his chest.
“No,” I lied, wishing it was true. Wishing my brother and I had never been shoved into that room with him.
“Such a little liar, kotenok,” Dmitri’s gravelly voice echoed as he stepped beside me.
My body bristled at the nickname. I wasn’t a fucking kitten. And it didn’t help that it was the same one he’d used on me right before he’d killed Kiril.
Dmitri leaned in closer. “I’ve felt you staring at me during the Pakhan’s meetings,” he whispered, his breath hot in my ear.
A flush crawled up my neck. Anger and guilt and something else I didn’t want to admit billowed under my skin.
“Screw you,” I muttered. A small part of me wished I could swallow back the words.
I still had no idea why Dmitri had approached me after all this time, and here I was antagonizing him. Not to mention, my target was getting pissed that I was paying attention to another man.
But damn did it feel good not to cow to Dmitri like every other person in the underworld did.
“Back off,” Aidan said, tensing up his minuscule muscles as he leaned towards Dmitri. “She’s mine.”
My body hummed its denial at the words while Dmitri’s eyes gleamed darkly.
Dmitri stepped in the middle of us, and the size difference between them was glaringly obvious. Dmitri’s arms were three times the size of Adian’s, and he looked like he could strangle Aidan’s skinny neck with only one hand.
“Are you sure about that?” Dmitri said.
Aidan’s posture wilted under Dmitri’s soulless stare.
As Dmitri held Aidan’s gaze, he placed his hand on the back of my barstool. Heat flooded me the moment Dmitri’s long fingers brushed against my bare back.
Aidan glanced between us and hurriedly stood up.
“I’m going to go to the bathroom,” he said, rushing off before I could even reply.
Shit.
I went to stand up, but Dmitri’s large hands pushed me back into my seat. I pressed my feet into the ground and tried again. But his muscles didn’t budge an inch as he held me in place.
“If you ever bring another mark into a business under my protection,” he said, switching into Russian. “Then we’re going to have a fucking problem, kotenok.”
I hadn’t realized he was running a protection racket here before I’d walked into the bar. I’d only chosen the location, because this was my target’s favorite haunt.
Just my luck.
“Now be a good girl, and leave.”
Irritation welled up inside me and seeped into my glare.
“Don’t push me, Alisa.” His fingers tightened bitingly into my shoulders. “Leave.”
Electricity sparked on the spot he’d dug his nails into, and scattered like lightning bolts across my skin. Before I could brush off that feeling and reply, Dmitri had already strode away without so much as a backwards glance.
Aidan shuffled out of the bathroom, and I debated taking him out into the night and trying my luck at killing him there. But there was a reason I preferred to poison my targets at our initial meeting point.
It was a seemingly simple strategy: kill my targets with poisons that mimicked mundane things like heart attacks.
But I added a bit of a twist. I slipped the drugs into my own drinks, and offered my targets a taste.
No one ever suspected you’d drug your own drinks. After all, who would go to such an extreme?
When he was alive, my brother used to affectionately call me the ‘Poison Princess’. But I never felt like much of a princess when my body was bearing the brunt from constantly microdosing and taking antidotes. It made my body weak, which was a liability in the Bratva’s competition.
And my body’s weakness was one of the many reasons I didn’t like to take my targets into a second location once we’d made contact. Too risky.
Aidan stomped my way, and my heartbeat quickened.
As I watched him approach, a door clicked shut behind me. Dmitri wasn’t even going to bother to see if I followed through with his order.
Anger flared through me. He was so sure that I would submissively follow along with his every wish just like everyone else. He’d upended my life and then ignored me for years. Now, he marched back in unannounced, and endangered my life by making me take Aidan to a second location.
Fuck that.
When Aidan’s dilated pupils and irritated expression came into view, my decision was made. There was no way I was taking a man in a manic mood into a dark alley.
A small rational part of me warned this was a bad idea.
Instead, I settled into my bar seat and patted the seat beside me.