23. Thanatos
Chapter 23
Thanatos
The red tracking dot on my phone stays perfectly still, like it has for the past week. No quick trips to town or fleeing the city boundaries—the bitch has decided to stay, for better or worse.
Unluckily for her, things are about to get really fucking worse.
I crack every joint in my body before walking up to the tiniest ramshackle house I’ve ever seen. It’s unobtrusive but offensive, the paint peeling on the outside, the flowers and bushes in the front garden long dead, the patches in the roof needing repaired at least two years ago. Whoever owns this place doesn’t give a shit if it falls apart.
How Celia Monrovia can stand living somewhere less than perfect is easy to answer: desperate people break their own rules all the time, and our prima donna princess better be damn near falling apart.
She tried to kill my brother.
I’ll never fucking forgive her.
There are a lot of things I can overlook—being a bitch, okay, a lot of people suck. Being prissy also sucks, but it’s not a death sentence. Marrying outside the bratva, even, I don’t give two shits about.
It’s the lack of loyalty. The way she leads people on, only to throw them away once she gets bored. I don’t give a fuck why her husband left—only that she didn’t fight to keep him. From what I understand, she collapsed into a puddle of pathetic tears and went crying to my brothers’ club, climbed into their laps, and joy rode them with some S-tier, magic pussy, because they’re bending over backwards to make her love them.
But I know for a fact that a girl willing to run out on a man after he saves her life from a home invasion isn’t worthy of their love. She isn’t worthy of the spit in my mouth. The fact that she gave Rage hope that she would choose him over everything else and then walk away because of a job he couldn’t have—and rightly shouldn’t have—refused…
It’s enough to make me want to kill her.
After witnessing the hell Valentina Baranova went through to stay loyal to her men, I know a strong woman when I see one.
And Celia fucking Monrovia?
She isn’t worth shit.
Walking up to the front door of her hideaway and busting the lock in, therefore, is satisfying as hell. I’m not usually the kind of guy who likes to terrify girls—I’ll leave that to my brothers—but this one… I enjoy every shiver of fear her body makes. The way her wide, doe eyes dilate as the adrenaline kicks in, and she scrambles for the gun resting on the counter behind her.
Bratva lesson number one she clearly failed to learn: keep your gun within arm’s reach.
I’m on her before she can load the first bullet into the chamber. Tearing the gun from her hand and flinging it across the room, I bare down on her hard, pulling her arms behind her back and locking her wrists into handcuffs. She fights—I half expect her not to, so it’s a welcome surprise—kicking and thrashing against me.
“Easy, princess?—”
“Get off me!”
Rage told me not to bruise her. All of my brothers have some kind of fetish for marking her body for themselves. Fine, whatever, I’ll give the man room for what he’s due. I work carefully, then, shoving a gag between her teeth without getting my fingertips chomped off, then tying a rope around her ankles and looping it through her cuffs. It takes a few minutes for her to realize that she’s been bested, and even when she does, she looks like she wants to scream about it.
Her smooth skin glistens with sweat, a delicate flush curving down her neck.
If she weren’t so venomous, I might actually agree with the rest of the bratva that Celia Monrovia is the pretty one. Everyone knows who she is—and there are a lot of men who would cut off a finger if it meant they could marry someone as pedigreed as her.
But there’s nothing pretty or desirable about a traitorous bitch.
“Don’t worry, I’m not here to kill you.” Much as I’d like to. “My brothers are convinced that you’re worth something, so it’s up to them to realize how little that is. A few weeks with you in a cage might change their minds. Once they realize you’re nothing but flesh and bone instead of some kind of goddess, everything will go back to normal.”
She trembles in my arms as I carry her out to the gutted cargo van. Tossing her into the back, I watch her hit the metal floor with a heavy thud , satisfied when her face scrunches up in pain. She has no idea what real pain is.
My brothers are too blind to teach her. I can see it in the plans they make—cages and satin and handcuffs, like she’s an unruly pet they’re fond of, when all they really need is to put her down.
I could drive her to the cliffs and throw her over, watch her sink to the bottom of the icy ocean.
I could put a dozen bullets in her right here, bury her in the backyard of this little hovel, and tell my brothers that I never found her.
But we are a family with a history of being denied our grudges—this one, I can actually deliver.
While we drive across town to the club, I keep an eye on her in the rearview mirror. She keeps still, no longer wriggling to free herself, just… silent. Eyes shut. Blocking out the world.
Maybe planning retaliation, if she’s smart.
I slam my hand on the dashboard, enjoying the way she jumps. Loose tendrils of hair wisp around her head, stick to her neck, and billow out in a delicate halo of honey brown. The scarlet flush on her cheeks is a delicate thing—too light to be considered a bruise, but too dark to be mistaken for the embarrassed excitement of a blushing bride being delivered to her future husband. It’s something in the middle, some kind of new, ruddy color, which does something to me. My gut twists, and my glare turns steely.
It’s kind of pretty.
“I don’t understand it,” I laugh, my shoulders bouncing. God, I so don’t get it. “What’s so great about a bratva reject?” Shaking my head, I take a breath. “See, even after I left, Ezra took me back in a heartbeat. Andrei, too, of course, since I’m of use to the bratva. But you?” I tilt the mirror to get a better look at her. Long legs stuffed into tight, black leggings, a pale pink sweater that rides up her sides, exposing a nude bra underneath. Her stomach is showing, and I force my eyes back to the road.
That’s another grievance.
The Plan B.
“If we tell the bratva what you’ve done—” I click my tongue against my teeth—“not even your brother can save you. It would have been faster to put a bullet in your brain, you know, if you wanted to kill yourself. Messy, but fast. You would have been gone like that. ” I snap my fingers. The sound echoes through the empty drum behind me, making Celia flinch. “But now?” I whistle, taking the next turn at a red light. “Now, you won’t escape my brothers, not even to death. You realize that, don’t you? They’re gonna lock you up so they can play a game of pretend—but let me tell you a little secret.” I meet her gaze in the rearview. “The only games they know are the brutal kind, and even when they’re gonna try to be nice to their fake little wife —” I spit the word, resentment flooding my system—“none of us have seen what a happy marriage looks like. Our dad was one mean bastard, especially to the things he loved .” I roll my eyes on that last part. I doubt my father ever knew the meaning of the word love.
“Anyway, you should have offed yourself.” I run a hand down my face, fighting a sudden wave of fatigue. The long nights are catching up to me. Not only does Ezra have me running protection for the real bratva princess—excuse me, Queen —but I’m combing the streets for a real threat every other waking moment of the day. Exhaustion is a persistent mistress, riding my ass from dusk till dawn.
But at least I won’t have anything more to do with Celia Monrovia after this drop-off.
She’ll be my brothers’ problem to solve.
It takes an hour, but we finally make it to back to the club. During special swinger events, they call it Midnight , but during the day, it doubles as a gentleman’s club serving alcohol and pussy to anyone with enough cash to pay their way through the door. Most of our clients are fellow mafiosos—Russian, Irish, Italian, whoever we’re dealing with that day—so it’s rare to have guests we don’t entertain with our specially-curated staff.
I swing around to the back entrance. Ruin is waiting at the door, arms crossed, looking as menacing as ever.
Most of the time, I think it’s a shame that our father fucked him up so badly, but it’s times like these that I know we’re better for it. Stronger. More resilient.
It’s a fucked-up kind of gratitude, but maybe that’s the only kind we can afford to have.
Anything else—the softness, the sweetness, the genuine thankfulness someone might have for any number of life’s blessings—never makes it to our doorstep.
I throw open the back of the van and drag Celia to the edge. “Brought you a present.” Smacking the metal floor next to her, I watch her for signs of panic, but she’s completely collected, the long drive giving her time to think and process her future.
Ruin stares at her for a long moment, unmoving. The seconds tick by while I wait, exhaustion creeping in on me, its needles stabbing the backs of my eyes. “We good?” I ask.
My youngest brother breaks out of his trance and nods. “Did you drug her?”
“Didn’t have to. She wasn’t much of a challenge.”
He grunts, then takes his time getting to the van. He fingers the ropes around her ankles and follows a trail of red up her calf, likely from where she was pressed against the ridges in the floor for so long. Goosebumps break out across her skin, and I watch as they bleed from one inch of skin to the next. Ruin traces their path with his gloved fingertips, a reverence to his touch that I simply don’t understand.
How can he still like what he sees?
How isn’t he strangling her right now?
But if I know my brother like I think I do, he already has plans for how and when he touches her next. Ruin is deliberate, methodical, liking to take his time to ensure he experiences every raw detail of the moment.
If anyone will stay Rage’s temper and curtail Rebel’s impatience, it’ll be Ruin. He could keep the bitch alive for days. Weeks. Hell, years.
That might even be his plan—dragging things out as long as possible, denying her death even if she begs for it.
I hope she does.
I hope my brothers deny her wish.
After all, she denied them something precious, too.
A baby wouldn’t have solved our family problems, but it might have brought us a ray of hope in this dismal fucking world.
I glare at Celia as Ruin picks her up and cradles her against his chest. Leaning down to meet her eyes, I throw every ounce of my hatred into these words: “I hope you never get pregnant.”
She flinches like I’ve slapped her.
“A bitch like you would poison your child before it’s even born. They’re better off dead than with you as a mother.”
A silent tear tracks down her cheek. I brush it away with my thumb and swipe it over her gagged lips, hoping that she not only tastes its salt, but that she remembers this moment as much as I will.
Because every time she cries, I want her to think of me—and choke on her regrets as much as the rest of us.