Keeping My Enemies Closer, Pt. 2 (The Bratva Duets #4)

Prologue

I didn’t want to open my eyes. In fact, I could have gone without waking up for weeks.

My entire body felt like it hurt to even breathe, and my brain felt like I was underwater, though I knew that I wasn’t.

The constant beeping noises and the steady hum of machinery told me that I was in the hospital, and while I knew that I must be a mess, I wasn’t dead.

I wasn’t dead.

Even as foggy as my mind was, I hadn’t gotten amnesia, so I remembered everything. I remembered going home after my shift, then being completely blindsided by a blow to my head when I’d gone into the kitchen to see why my mother had still been up.

I also remembered how she’d been tied to a chair and gagged, two masked men holding her hostage as they had demanded money that we hadn’t had. I could even recall how they had spent over an hour torturing us to force an answer that just hadn’t been possible.

Tears stung the back of my eyes as the night’s events began to replay themselves in the back of my mind, and even with all that they’d done to me, nothing had hurt or scared me like when they’d shot my mother.

With my uncle dead, my grandparents in Russia, and my father long gone and forgotten, she was the only family that I had left, and they’d shot her as if she hadn’t mattered to anyone.

However, she mattered to me. Despite us being at odds right now, she mattered greatly to me.

I also couldn’t ignore how Marcelle had to be the person behind the attack.

There was no way that the two men could know what they’d had if it hadn’t come from her.

I’d participated in the auction under a different name, and so only Marcelle had been aware of the connection to me and the three-hundred-thousand dollars that the two men had been looking for.

What she hadn’t known, and what she had refused to believe, was that Kasimir Korolev hadn’t paid me yet.

Unlike all the other girls who’d been paid that very night, Kasimir hadn’t given me a dime from the money that he owed me, but that was because he didn’t owe it to me anymore.

Something bigger had happened behind the scenes, something that only a few people knew, and Marcelle hadn’t been one of those people.

I took in a deep breath, but then immediately stopped.

Every inch of my chest felt like it was on fire, which told me that my ribs had been cracked or fully broken along the way.

The guy with the blue eyes hadn’t care that I was a female, and so he hadn’t gone easy on me.

He’d wanted the money more than he’d wanted to keep his humanity, and so I could only imagine what other injuries I had, besides the bruised ribs and gunshot wound.

Still, none of that mattered. I just wanted to know how my mother was doing.

If someone would just tell me where she was and how her surgery had gone, I’d deal with the rest of it later.

Yeah, I knew that there was going to be hell to pay for calling the police and bringing them to the Korolevs’ doorstep, but it’d been that or bleed out to die, and I hadn’t been willing to let my mother die to protect the Korolevs.

Granted, calling the police had probably already cost us both our lives, but I couldn’t worry about that now.

I also had no problem pleading with Aleksei Korolev to kill me but spare my mother.

I tried to open my eyes, but they felt too heavy for the effort that I had in me right now.

So, instead of forcing myself to wake fully, I let out a slow breath, fighting through the pain, then did my best to relax.

Plus, I also knew that the police were going to be waiting to question me once I woke up, so maybe it was in my best interest not to rush it.

I didn’t want to talk to them until I spoke with my mother, it being very important that we both had our stories straight.

If there was any chance in hell that I could still keep the Korolevs from killing us, then I wanted that chance.

I also needed time to figure out what to do about Marcelle.

While I could point the police in her direction, I had no proof without confessing details about the auction, and I knew that I couldn’t do that.

Plus, other than their eye color and general build, I couldn’t identify the men who had broken into our home to rob us.

The pressure behind my eyes got stronger, and hopelessness gripped my chest as I thought about this past year and how hard I’d been working to crawl my way out of the darkness and onto a better life; a better life for both me and my mother.

I’d been doing everything that I could, but then Kasimir Korolev had decided to make my family pay, me being the ultimate cost.

I also couldn’t ignore how I never would have been in this position had Kasimir not bid on me the night of the auction, making it seem as if I was worth half a million dollars. Whether he’d meant to or not, he had put a bullseye on my back, and I was laying in a hospital bed to prove it.