Vicious Wins (Cruel Games #2)

Chapter 1 Aleksandr

ALEKSANDR

The slush soaking into the team’s sneakers and their gear in the aftermath of the storm only added to the morose atmosphere as they disembarked the bus, dispirited after our two losses to the Hawks.

Cole and Tristan grabbed their bags, visibly isolated from the rest of the team, unusually quiet, not even looking at one another.

Dr. Parker stood beside me, watching the team disperse. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Did I want to confess to this woman, my peer, whom I respected immensely, who had dedicated her life to healing college athletes who abused their bodies in the name of sport, that I’d fucked three students last night?

That I’d been forcing one of them to sexually serve me for weeks, only to discover she’d been using me as much as I’d been using her?

That my cousin had sent me a Trojan horse that was destroying me from the inside out?

Fuck no.

“Tristan will need a friend,” I murmured softly, rubbing my chest to dissipate the pain of my career crashing down around me because I’d been so fucking eager to get Eva’s lips around my cock.

Her eyebrows lifted.

Did she think I hadn’t noticed when she took him under her wing his freshman year, the only Black player on the team and desperately in need of kinship?

“What happened?” she asked quietly.

“It’s not my story to tell,” I answered.

“But you know the story.”

Her breath fogged in the cool air, and she was no less intimidating for being half my size. I swallowed against the swelling in my throat. Fuck, I was a mess.

“He’ll need a friend,” I repeated after a sharp exhale.

Dr. Parker nodded then awkwardly patted me on the back, surprising me with her touch. We’d never crossed the bridge from colleagues to friends, and we certainly weren’t going to start now.

She hurried to her car as the slush turned to snow, the flakes catching in her locs and shining in the overhead lights.

A miasma of emotion swirled in my gut. I’d hurt the team.

Hurt Tristan. Hurt Cole, who was like a son to me.

Hurt Eva, whose sweet submission had made me want to be the type of man who deserved her—the type of man I’d worked hard to be since I walked away from the NHL and the bratva, my brotherhood.

And yet, she too had betrayed me.

Fuck this. And fuck Dmitri, who’d sent me straight into her arms.

I’d gotten everything I ever wanted. I’d ruined Eva. Her father was going to suffer at Jed Carter’s hands. My revenge was complete.

Eva fucking Jackson. A spy. For Jed fucking Carter.

If I were Eva, I’d tell the whole fucking world what we’d done to her. Jed Carter had put her in our path, and we’d fallen for her, shown her the worst of ourselves. Now, he could do whatever the fuck he wanted with that information.

I rubbed my thumb over the screen of the phone in my pocket.

I had pictures, so many pictures. Of her on her knees.

Of her face streaked with tears as I fucked her throat.

Of her luscious ass as she concentrated on making me the perfect macchiato.

If I shared them, I could get ahead of the story, get ahead of the end of my career.

So why didn’t I want to? Why was I worried sick about that hateful, manipulative bitch?

I’d fought the urge to call her during the entire bus ride, unable to untangle my fury at her betrayal from my worry for the spitfire who’d melted for me, who’d come to me two days ago for a moment of safety, who was so fucking brave, and who was in so much fucking danger right now.

The buses pulled away, leaving me standing in the snow like a melodramatic anime character, staring into the darkness as if it held any answers for me.

Fuck this. I called Dmitri, the architect of this disaster.

“Sasha,” he breathed, using the familiar diminutive of my name I hadn’t heard in years. Goddamn that ache in my heart.

“You motherfucker,” I snarled into the phone in Russian. “You made a deal with Jed Carter?”

“Sixteen years of silence, and this is how you greet me?” he answered, the urbane amusement in his voice sending me over the edge.

“Fuck you,” I said, regretting the call, but before I could hang up, he spoke.

“Wait—brother. Sasha. I would never betray you like that.”

“Eva Jackson,” I snarled into the phone, wanting to believe him but unable to wrap my mind around the coincidence.

“Was a gift,” he answered.

“Liar!”

“Nyet,” Dmitri disagreed firmly. No. His tone held none of the smugness I’d expected. “Where can I meet you?” I opened my mouth to refuse, but he interrupted. “Come to my apartment.”

“Dmitri—”

“I’ll send you the location.”

A second later, my phone pinged. I sighed and shouldered my duffle bag.

Dmitri had quit hockey long before I did—the price for ascending through Nikolai Berezin’s bratva as his enforcer here in the States, when we graduated from petty crime.

Well, Dmitri graduated. I was drafted into the NHL straight out of high school, and I suppose that was its own betrayal, wasn’t it?

I threw my bag into the back of my SUV and climbed in, breathing deeply and imagining I could still smell Eva’s vanilla and citrus scent, pretending she hadn’t betrayed me and I hadn’t betrayed her in turn.

A large man in a black suit, covered in Russian prison tattoos, met me in the lobby of Dmitri’s building and escorted me to an elevator without saying a word.

Despite the disquiet roiling in my gut, I kept my hands still while the elevator climbed, well aware video cameras watched my every move.

Sixteen years of silence.

Our paths had crossed, of course. Yorkfield was a metropolis, but the Russian-American community was small. Dmitri had found ways to run into me, only for me to move heaven and earth to avoid speaking with him.

For a moment, I was eighteen again, sitting on the hood of Dmitri’s car after practice, passing a bottle of smuggled vodka back and forth while we planned a job. “You’re going to make it, Sasha,” he’d told me, his face earnest in the setting sun. “You’ll play in the NHL and make us all proud.”

He’d believed in me more than anyone, right up until the moment he’d chosen the bratva over helping me when I needed him most.

My aching loneliness had slowly shifted to anger at the injustice until the only emotion I felt toward him was rage.

Lies, a voice in the back of my head whispered. I fucking missed him.

The elevator stopped, and the doors slid open silently, revealing Dmitri standing a few steps back. He wore a grey suit and a white button-down shirt but no tie. His bright blue eyes glowed with a thousand emotions I couldn’t name, one bisected by a scar that hadn’t been there sixteen years ago.

I stepped out of the elevator. We stared at each other, equal in size, even after all these years. And then, Dmitri flung his arms out and embraced me.

“Brother,” he breathed into my ear as he clutched me. Stunned, I crept my arms up his back until we embraced each other silently. Dmitri’s shoulders shook once, as if he were holding back a sob, before he moved back. “Sasha,” he whispered, reaching up to touch my face, his eyes red-rimmed.

I remembered why I was here and stepped out of reach before swinging my arm and punching him in the jaw.

Dmitri never saw it coming.

The blow knocked him half a meter back before he recovered, raising his fists at me by instinct before dropping them.

He took a deep breath then stood up straight, rubbing his jaw.

“Your right hook isn’t as powerful as it used to be, old man,” he said with a smile.

Astonished, my jaw dropped.

Dmitri laughed. “Come, cousin. I believe we have decades to catch up on.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t give in now. I couldn’t let him charm me out of sixteen years of anger now that we were face to face. He’d refused to help me when Conrad Jackson had ruined my life, and then he’d sent Eva to ruin me again. “Why did you send Eva to spy on me?”

Dmitri’s brow furrowed, deepening the scar that slashed down his cheek in a streak of white, as if no matter how much time he spent in the sun, it would never bronze to match the rest of his face.

“I didn’t,” he said. “She was a gift—an apology.”

“A gift who spied on me and reported our team’s every movement to Jed Carter. A poisoned apple that brought my whole team down when I took my revenge.”

Dmitri’s frown deepened. He stepped toward me and clasped my forearm, turning it so I could reluctantly do the same to his. “Sasha, I am a criminal, a murderer, and a thief, but I am no liar. I did not know that Carter owned his debts.”

He met my eyes with ease, hiding nothing. He never had. Dmitri was perfectly comfortable with the depraved acts he committed.

“No, you are not,” I said with a sigh, surprised to see tension leach out of my cousin’s shoulders. He wasn’t as confident as he seemed.

“Come,” he said. “It seems we have more to talk about than simply rekindling our friendship.”

Dmitri’s penthouse apartment was sparsely decorated, as if it were a hotel and not his home for the last decade, since he’d ascended to his place as Nikolai Berezin’s right hand.

He’d never cared for fripperies or amassing physical items as a sign of wealth.

The stark apartment suited him—raw power and nothing else.

He took a bottle of vodka from the fridge and poured each of us a glass. “Za tebya.” Cheers. I lifted my glass to his, holding his gaze as we both drank.

“I miss you,” he said finally, his voice gravelly with suppressed emotion. “Issuing you an ultimatum after everything that happened was a mistake.”

My eyes flew to his, but he stared into his drink, swirling the liquid in the glass without looking at me.

“Eva was supposed to be an uncomplicated apology—a way for you to take your revenge, find closure, and come back to me.”

“She has been anything but uncomplicated.”

Dmitri raised an eyebrow then walked to stand in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over Yorkfield.

“Over the summer, she worked as a waitress at one of my restaurants,” he continued.

“Dirt poor. Scumbag of a father. Shitty insurance through her school that doesn’t pay for anything, not even her surgery.

And so fucking desperate to please. The kind of woman I’d feel sorry for, if her father hadn’t hurt the man I care about most in this world. ”

My jaw clenched at his unsparing assessment of Eva—strong, beautiful, controlled Eva, who’d been through so fucking much and held herself together through sheer force of will. I was self-aware enough to realize I’d described her in similar terms but unwilling to examine why I hated Dmitri doing so.

“I put her in your path at Ana Costa’s wedding, hoping you’d accept the gift then,” he continued, “but you didn’t take the bait. So when I learned she was applying for jobs with the hockey program, I called in a favor with the athletic director.”

“With Dion?” Dmitri knew Dion?

“I made it my business to keep an eye on you,” my cousin said softly, “but I didn’t send her to spy on you.”

“Jed Carter did,” I answered flatly, “and that’s a really big fucking coincidence.”

“It is,” Dmitri murmured, rubbing over the scar on his forehead. He pulled out his phone and dialed.

“I need to know how much Conrad Jackson owes, and to whom.” He listened for a moment, his eyebrows flying up, then nodded. “Spasibo.” Thanks.

“Nikolai’s treasurer says Jackson owed the bratva two hundred grand, but Jed Carter bought that debt several months ago. He’ll have more information for me in the morning.”

I wondered when Dmitri’d become so close to the Pakhan that he could refer to Berezin by his first name. “How much debt does he have?”

“He’s a gambling addict and a drunk.”

“So he likely owes everyone.”

Dmitri frowned, as if disagreeing with my assessment. “I’ll find out.”

I scoffed. “At what cost?”

Dmitri looked up at me, hurt and vulnerability flashing across his expression then disappearing just as quickly. “Pick up the fucking phone when I call.”

“And what was the cost for Eva?”

He smiled, and I remembered the handsome, mischievous cousin I’d grown up with. “I’m getting lonely in my old age and wanted my best friend back. She wasn’t supposed to cost you a fucking thing.”

And yet, she might have cost me everything. What had I been thinking? Jed and Eva had conspired together to put the perfect temptation in my path, and I took the bait, like a fucking idiot. Now, just as I had the power to destroy her, she had the power to destroy me.

She’d already destroyed the team by making them fall in love with her, by showing up and being kind and sweet and earnest and so fucking adorable, they couldn’t help themselves. And when we hurt her?

They defended her, that fucking bitch.

Eva had no idea what she’d stumbled upon when she agreed to take on her father’s debt to Jed Carter. I hated her for it—hated her for her naivete, hated her for being the type of woman my team would defend.

And still, she’d betrayed all of us.

The vodka burned as it slid down my throat then warmed in my stomach.

“You’re fucking her,” Dmitri surmised as I joined him in staring out the window, the lights of Yorkfield twinkling against the stark night sky. It stung that he could still read me so clearly when he was a stranger to me.

“She’s—” I cut myself off. Sixteen years had fallen away as if they’d never happened, and yet, I didn’t know Dmitri anymore. “I was,” I admitted softly.

“She betrayed you,” he continued.

“Like her father did.”

Dmitri didn’t answer. He furrowed his brow. “The last time you were hell-bent on revenge, I lost you for sixteen years.”

“You won’t lose me this time,” I vowed. “Find out who else Jackson owes money.”

Dmitri’s face lit up with pleasure. “And once I do?”

I took a deep breath and sold my soul to my cousin. “Then, we’ll negotiate.”