Chapter 1 Willow
WILLOW
My head aches.
Pain pulses through my temples, each dull throb feeling like it’s going to split open my skull and spill my foggy brains all over the floor.
My throat is dry, and it takes a solid second for me to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth.
Even though my eyes are closed, I swear I can feel the world spinning around me, and there’s a worrying flash where I think I’m going to be sick.
But eventually it settles, and I drag in a deep breath, trying to remember what happened to me.
My eyelids feel heavy, resisting when I try to open them, and I frown, disoriented.
Every time I try to piece together what’s going on and where I am, the details slip away. A groan falls from my lips without my permission as I struggle to get my thoughts in order.
“Ah. You’re awake.”
The deep voice comes from somewhere nearby, and I jerk slightly as my mind snaps into focus on the sound. It’s gruff and gravelly, and when that sentence is followed by something in Russian that I don’t understand, my first thought is that it’s Malice.
He sometimes mutters things in that language, either saying something too horrible for me to know or something too sweet. It’s always a toss-up with him.
Thinking it’s him soothes the nerves that were rising in me, because if Malice is here, then I must be with them. With the three Voronin brothers.
That means I’m safe.
But does it?
The thought hits me out of nowhere, and I frown. Something important tugs at my brain, trying to get my sluggish mind to catch up… and when it does, that feeling of security melts away in an instant.
Everything that happened in the too-early hours of pre-dawn comes flooding back to me.
I remember being at the guys’ warehouse turned garage-house. I remember starting to feel things for them. The banter with Ransom, the all-consuming moments with Malice, the weird little truce/bond with Vic over peanut butter, of all things.
I remember them fighting for me, killing for me.
Telling me that no one else would have me.
I remember the night my old boss Carl came knocking, demanding that I pay him off in sexual favors to keep quiet about the fact that I was at the brothel the brothers burned down after they killed Nikolai Petrov.
Vic killed Carl, but the fact that someone was hunting for the people responsible for murdering Nikolai meant I was a potential target. I was a witness to everything that happened that night, so they couldn’t just let me walk away.
An uneasy kind of peace developed between me and the brothers once I came to live with them—the kind that was only in place because they couldn’t risk throwing me out and I didn’t want to piss them off by running away. But then things started to change.
We started to understand each other.
To trust each other.
To want each other.
Images of the night I had sex with Malice and Ransom flash through my mind, and as if on cue, the still-healing tattoo on my chest throbs a little. Malice marked me, and then he and Ransom fucked me while Vic watched and held himself under his usual control.
But remembering having sex with them makes the rest of it come back too, and it’s just as painful to remember as it was to see it in person on Vic’s computer the first time.
The sex tape.
The disgusting fucking video they put together, showing footage of me in every compromising position they could find. And the message that went with it, the blunt words calling me worthless. Dirty. Trash.
It hurts, and the pain lances through me like it wants to cut me open and bare my soul to the room.
That’s why I ran away. Why I couldn’t stay there.
Because if that’s how they see me—if that’s what they’re telling people about me—then I don’t want to be anywhere near them.
How could I ever have trusted them?
Tears prickle behind my eyes, and I groan again.
Whoever is standing nearby takes a step closer, their footsteps loud on the floor. Strong fingers grab my chin, digging into the flesh hard.
I suck in a gasp and slowly manage to open my eyes, forcing my unwilling body to cooperate. If it’s Malice, if they managed to find me, then I have to leave again. I have to tell him to fuck off and leave me alone. That I don’t want anything to do with them.
My vision swims for a second once my eyes are open, and I find myself staring into the face of a man.
But it’s not Malice.
I don’t recognize this man, but there’s something almost… familiar about him. Something in his features that makes my head hurt as it tries to remember where I’ve seen him before.
And then it hits me. Those dark, hooded eyes. That nose and the cut of his cheekbones.
He looks just like Nikolai Petrov.
But Nikolai is dead, so this is clearly his brother. Ilya.
My heart lurches at the realization, and fear pounds through me. The burst of adrenaline and terror that floods my veins pushes down some of the grogginess that’s still clinging to me, and my heart beats wildly.
Ilya nods in satisfaction, his dark eyes tracking over my face.
“Good,” he says. “There you are. I need you fully awake.”
He steps away from me, and I finally take a look around at where I am. The room is dark, but it looks like I’m in some kind of abandoned building. It’s old, with wood that’s rotting in some spots. There are holes in the floor and the walls, showing exposed wiring and the bones of the building.
I jerk in the hard wooden chair I’m sitting in, and the ropes wrapped around me bite into my skin, holding my wrists behind my back and keeping my torso bound tightly to the chair.
All I get for my struggles is the rope rubbing my skin raw, and my stomach sours as I realize how much worse this is than waking up back in the Voronin brothers’ warehouse.
This is bad.
Really, really bad.
Panic bubbles up in me, and I wriggle a little harder, trying to find any give in the restraints, but there’s none. I don’t have any room to go anywhere.
Ilya snorts under his breath, as if amused by my pitiful attempts to free myself. Turning his back on me, he strides over to a rickety table that’s set up nearby. I can make out a few things laid out on it, and I crane my neck, trying to see what they are as a sinking feeling fills my chest.
Almost as if he can tell what I want to know, Ilya picks up a knife, holding it up so it glints in the light from the bare overhead bulb. Then he comes back over to me, getting close again.
“I have been tracking the bastards who killed my brother,” he tells me.
Talking about Nikolai makes his Russian accent sharper, and I can’t believe I thought he was Malice while I was out of it.
“We were not exactly close, but blood must be repaid by blood.” He glares down at me, and those dark eyes burn with something deep and sinister.
“They hid their tracks well. I couldn’t find anything about his murderers. But then they made one mistake.”
Ilya pauses, like he’s waiting for me to ask what the mistake was or say something. But my mouth is too dry to speak, and I’m frozen in place, hating the way it feels to have that terrible gaze trained on me.
“They came after me,” he finally says, answering the question I never asked. “They attacked me at my hotel, and I managed to track them down after that. It was easy to pick up their trail once they thought they had gotten away.”
He takes a step closer as he speaks, raising the blade of the knife. I’m practically holding my breath, my blood like ice, afraid to move or even breathe.
The blade is cold when he runs it up my arm, slicing through the fabric of my shirt sleeve. At first, I just barely feel the edge of it, but when he gets to my shoulder, the blade nicks my skin, and I gasp sharply.
His blunt features don’t change, and he continues on, dragging the knife down between my breasts, slicing through the shirt and cutting me again.
The cuts aren’t deep, but I know they’re the kind that will scar, and as he leaves more and more of them, the little hurts start to grow into a bigger one that burns with every ragged inhale.
The worst part is that I know he’s doing it on purpose. He’s trying to bare my skin to his gaze and hurt me at the same time. He’s only cutting as deep as he wants to, and he could go much deeper. He could carve me up right here. He could kill me at any moment.
Each time the knife slices into my skin, I have to resist the urge to flinch. I don’t want to move and make him cut me deeper. I don’t want to bleed out in this shitty building.
Ilya keeps talking, holding a one-sided conversation with me as if it’s nothing. His eyes are on the knife and on the flashes of skin he bares with it as he cuts away my clothes.
“I was working on my strategy, my plan to go after those men who killed Nikolai. To make them pay for what they had done. I was staking out their warehouse, trying to evaluate their weaknesses, when what did I see? A little deer came creeping out of their warehouse, and I saw an opportunity.” A rough chuckle rumbles in his chest. “Because little deer are so much easier to break than wolves.”
He drags the blade up my throat as he says the last words, and I don’t even dare to swallow, quite literally held on a knife’s edge of fear. But he doesn’t cut there. Instead, he moves down my other arm, and I almost slump in place with the relief of not being killed yet.
Ilya’s shadowy eyes flash to my face, and I want to turn away from him, but I don’t. He’s a predator, and I may be his prey, but I refuse to act like it.
“So I captured you,” he continues. “You have the information I need to take out those men, and you will give it to me.”
My head spins, my stomach dropping out at the clear threat in his tone.
This man could kill me easily. He could torture me until I tell him everything he wants to know, every secret the Voronin brothers ever told me, and then murder me for my trouble.
Then he’ll go after the brothers, and he’ll probably win.
The three of them would fight like hell, but—
I want to shake myself out of that thought, because I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t feel anything for them. This is the bed they made, the risk they said was acceptable if it meant getting their revenge.
And now I’m caught in the middle of it.
The sharp tip of Ilya’s knife cuts through enough of my shirt that it falls down on one side. Of course it’s the side where the scarring is the worst, the side where my nerves are fucked up enough that the cuts don’t hurt as bad.
Ilya’s eyes linger on the rough patches of healed skin, and his lip curls.
“You are damaged. I wouldn’t have thought those men would keep such a broken, pitiful pet,” he sneers.
For a second, he looks even more like his brother than before. I have a vivid memory of Nikolai standing over me with a similar expression of disgust on his face the night he almost took my virginity.
Nausea roils in me, bile trying desperately to claw its way up my throat.
My nostrils flare as I suck in breaths of air, trying not to hyperventilate.
Ilya steps back, taking his knife with him. He strides over to the table to get something else, and I know it’s going to be something else to torture me with. Something worse.
I jerk in my bonds, wriggling as hard as possible. I can’t just sit here and let him do this. I can’t just give up.
The chair shifts a little from my jostling movements, and as it does, I realize that one of the legs has a little give to it, wobbling under my weight.
The chair seems to be as old and creaky as the rest of this place, and I grab on to that little spark of hope.
Sucking in a breath, I work my hips from side to side, pushing down on the side of the chair that’s damaged, putting that wobbly leg under more and more stress.
When the chair collapses, it shocks the hell out of me. The leg snaps off from the seat of the chair, dumping me on the floor.
The impact makes the old wood of the chair splinter even more, and with a quick jerk of my wrists, I manage to get free of it.
My wrists are still bound behind my back, but other than that, nothing is holding me anymore.
I’m running on pure adrenaline and self-preservation, and I manage to get my legs under me enough that I can stagger to my feet and take off running.
The old floor creaks and groans under my weight as I dash across the open expanse of the room. In the center of the space, there’s a bundle of wires sitting next to a small hole in the floor where a few floorboards rotted away.
I avoid the hole, but my foot catches on one of the wires, and for a terrifying second, I think I’m going to fall. But it’s not enough to slow my momentum. I yank my foot free, snapping through the tangle of wires. A couple of them hiss and spark at me, but I ignore it and keep running.
“Fuck.”
Ilya’s deep voice curses behind me, and the sound makes my heart skip a beat.
All I can think is that I have to get out of here. I have to escape.
Fear and adrenaline are a hell of a cocktail, and they push me to keep going, my eyes darting frantically through the gloom of the old building to find a door or something I can shove myself through.
I won’t be able to work a handle with my hands tied like this, but maybe the wood of the door will be shitty enough that I can just slam myself into it and break my way through.
I spot something that looks like a door and start running toward it, only to yelp when a heavy body hits me from behind at full force.
I go down hard, hitting the dusty wooden floor hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs.
My chest heaves uselessly, stars dancing in front of my eyes as Ilya grabs hold of my legs with his thick hands. Squeezing my ankles tightly, he starts to drag me back toward the table where all of his instruments are laid out.
“Shouldn’t have tried to run,” he mutters darkly. “Now you’ll have to pay for that.”