Bratva Obsession (Volkov Brothers, #1)

Chapter One

The day started with Lena Miller’s car dying. Why did it have to fail her at the most inconvenient possible moment in her life? The dashboard blinked once, twice, then went dark in the middle of Lily Road traffic.

Her father’s old beige colored Toyota Corol

la reminded her of a stubborn workhorse. It had always been stubborn, somehow still alive through sheer spite, but finally it had decided it was done.

“Come on,” she whispered, pressing the ignition again.

There was nothing but a hollow click. She growled softly under her breath in frustration. She sat there for a full minute, her forehead against the steering wheel.

He had given her that car in her second year of university, the keys dropped into her palm like a quiet promise. “You’ll be okay, even when I’m not around to make sure of it,” he had said.

Now it was just a dead machine on a hot road, and she had a delivery. It wasn’t just any delivery.

The sealed compliance package was in a thick envelope, had embossed insignia, and urgent routing. It only meant that someone powerful was waiting on the other end to receive it.

So she did what she never did unless absolutely necessary, she took the subway.

The station seemed to swallow her whole. The heat immediately hit full blast. Damp sweat soon clung to the back of her neck, making her terribly uncomfortable. Then the noise and the press of bodies followed.

It was rush hour, so they were crammed shoulder to shoulder, elbow to rib, breath to breath. She tightened her grip on the courier bag slung across her body.

Don’t panic, Lena. Breathe in and out.

Still, the air didn’t feel clean down there. It felt recycled, chewed, exhausted. Someone bumped into her hard enough to knock her half a step sideways.

“Sorry,” a voice muttered, already gone.

Her chest tightened. The walls seemed to inch closer. No, not this and not now, she thought to herself.

She stared at the station map until the letters blurred, forcing herself to read the arrows like they were instructions for survival. She counted to ten, inhaled, then exhaled, or tried to. Her lungs forgot how to cooperate.

The edges of her vision started to fuzz, like the world was losing signal.

She pressed her palm to the metal railing and told herself it was cold and real. Something that could anchor her.

You are fine. You are fine. You are just in a crowded station. It didn’t help. The pressure from the crowd continued to press against her.

When the train finally arrived, she almost didn’t get on, but she did anyway. She thought it would get better, but inside the carriage, it was worse. It took her a second to realize why.

It was the absence of space, the lack of escape routes. The way bodies stood too close without meaning to, shoulder straps brushing, sleeves grazing, strangers pretending not to exist in each other’s orbit.

She found a standing spot near the door and gripped the pole so tightly her knuckles ached. The train lurched forward, and with it came last night’s shocking turn of events, uninvited and unavoidable.

Liam’s apartment door had been slightly ajar when she arrived. That was the first wrong thing.

She remembered thinking maybe he’d forgotten to lock it again. Maybe Cassie had come over early. She thought of other explanations save for the truth that she wished she hadn’t stumbled upon.

It was Cassie’s laugh she heard first, then Liam’s low and familiar voice. Something about it was different. He spoke in a soft tone which he hadn’t used with her in weeks.

Then she caught sight of them, entwined like mating snakes. She hadn’t screamed at them, or demanded explanations from Liam. That was the strange part.

She had just stood there, keys still in her hand, watching her life rearrange itself into something she didn’t recognize. Cassie saw her first.

Her face had gone pale instantly. “Lena.”

Liam had said nothing at all, and that silence hurt the most.

In the present, she pressed her forehead to the train pole, breathing shallowly.

Stop it. Stop replaying it.

Cassie had been her friend. She wasn’t her best friend or anything, but she was more of a coffee-between-shifts friend. “Text me if you need anything,” she often liked to say.

Liam, she could understand in a twisted, humiliating way, but Cassie? Cassie had chosen this, to betray her despite knowing Liam and she were having problems.

She regretted confessing it to her a week ago, over Chinese take-out and tequila.

The train rattled over tracks, dragging her forward whether she was ready or not. She should stop torturing herself and just focus on the delivery.

Work kept her sane. Still, the courier bag felt heavier than it should have, or maybe it was her, dragging her feet the entire way.

Her stop came too fast, or maybe she had just dissociated through most of the ride. She stepped off into air that felt marginally less suffocating and immediately regretted it.

This part of the city didn’t look like the part she grew up in. The glass towers with the clean lines and the minimalist landscaping unnerved her.

She checked the address again. Elysian Crest Residences, penthouse suite. She was at the right place all right.

She adjusted her grip on the courier bag and walked. Her sensible flats, which she got at a huge discount last month, felt cheap against the garbage-free pavement. Let’s get this over with, she told herself.

Finally she found herself standing in front of Elysian Crest Residences. She entered the building and immediately noticed that security at the entrance was absent. That was odd.

A luxury building like this should have doormen, cameras, definitely someone pretending to care about who came and went.

Instead, the lobby was empty and strangely still. Surely at this time of the day, there should be people in motion. After the hot subway ride, the air conditioning should be a relief, but it was freezing and uncomfortable.

Still, she stepped inside the elevator and pressed the button to the penthouse. Restless, she watched the numbers climb. It seemed to go forever.

By the time she reached the top, her skin was prickling with something she couldn’t name. Fear? Anxiety? She shook her head, relieved when the doors finally slid open.

The silence hit first. There was no movement, music or any sound of life. Absence greeted her and when she saw the penthouse door was already open, she paused.

Did the owner leave it open? It didn’t look like someone forced their way in. Of course, people who lived in a building like this didn’t need to worry about security. Still, the sight made her uneasy.

Her stomach dropped, and alarm bells rang in her head, telling her to back away. She kept walking anyway, because she needed this job to pay the bills.

Splitting the rent with Cassie had been a lifesaver back when she first moved in, but she couldn’t stay in that apartment a second longer. Swallowing her silly fears, she knocked on the door, but there was no response.

The carpeting was soft under her feet, her steps sinking into it like quicksand.

“Hello?” Her voice came out smaller than she intended. There was still no answer. She pushed past the door, walking past a narrow corridor that opened to the living room. That was when she saw it. Him.

The body lying flat on his back, on a puddle of his own blood. Her client. She recognized his features from the photo. He was a wealthy logistics magnate whose name she had read on the file this morning without thinking twice.

This morning, he’d probably been still alive, she thought morbidly.

Her breath stopped for a few seconds, before she remembered to breathe again. Cold spread through her chest so fast it felt physical, like ice cracking through bone.

No, no, no. This couldn’t be happening to her. She knew the crime rate in the city was up, no thanks to the crime families that fought over the place like rabid dogs.

The courier bag slipped slightly in her grip, and then she noticed the second presence.

She didn’t hear him move, hell, she heard absolutely nothing. However, she did feel the strange shift in the air. She turned.

He was already looking at her. The killer. He still had a gun in his hand. The man had short dark hair, but it was his eyes she noticed immediately.

She remembered thinking she’d never seen anyone with such flat and empty eyes before. There was no hint of humanity in those eyes.

He wore an expensive tailored suit that was fitted to his body. Beneath the collar, black ink curled up his neck like ivy. More ink peered from his folded cuffs.

Bratva was the first word that came to mind. That was right. The Volkov Bratva secretly controlled the city, even though four other crime families had called this city home.

She’d seen this man on TV once, standing right next to the mayor. At the moment, she couldn’t recall his name. It finally occurred to her she had just walked into something she shouldn’t have.

He didn’t look surprised to see her. That was the worst part. To him, was she only an unexpected anomaly he needed to erase? Her throat tightened. Talk, plead, say something to convince him she wasn’t a threat.

“I’m here for a delivery,” she blurted out. A moment later, she felt incredibly foolish.

His gaze dropped briefly to the courier bag she was clutching tightly, then back to her face.

His clinical stare was assessing, measuring. She swallowed. Was he thinking how he should dispose of her? She could turn, make a run for it, but he had a gun. It was clear from the holes in the body he knew how to use it.

“You are early,” he said.

He didn’t raise his voice, he simply checked his watch, like her presence there was inconveniencing him.

Her throat tightened.

“I think there’s been a mistake,” she said quickly, too quickly, words tripping over each other like they were trying to escape first. “I was told, I was supposed to...”

Her voice collapsed halfway through the sentence, because her eyes had drifted again, back to the body. She hadn’t imagined it—it was still there.

For a split second, her mind betrayed her. She saw herself lying there next to the dead man. She blinked hard, and told herself not to go there. However, her imagination kept going.

Cassie’s face surfaced first. That soft, guilty panic when she saw her last night. The way her mouth opened like she wanted to fix it but didn’t know how to undo what she had already chosen.

Would she wonder? Would she think about her after a week? After a month?

She left, moved, disappeared. That was what Cassie would probably think. Then there was Liam. Would he notice when she didn’t come back for her things? Would he assume she’d changed her number?

Her chest tightened painfully.

Worse than all of that, who would even know she was gone in a way that mattered? Her savings were thin. She doubted the law firm she worked for would bother paying for her funeral or burial.

She swallowed hard, trying to force air into her lungs. No one would even know how she ended up here.

Her fingers tightened around the courier bag strap until it bit into her palm. The pain was grounding. She tried to stop her mind from spiraling, but it wasn’t working.

She could feel the edge of something sharp inside her, not quite panic, not quite collapse. Something closer to resignation trying to disguise itself as practicality. She was not important enough to be missed.

That was the thought that stuck. Her eyes flicked back to the man standing in the room. He hadn’t moved. He was just watching her like a wolf observing its prey.

She forced herself to speak again, because what else could she do?

“Who are you?” Her voice came out rougher now, smaller, but steadier.

“I need to know your name,” she added quickly, because her brain had latched onto the idea like a drowning person grabbing driftwood. “If this is some kind of mistake, I can explain. I can call my supervisor, I just—”

She trailed off, her tank suddenly empty. He watched her through it all without blinking.

“Maksim,” he finally said.

She nodded once, because her body didn’t know what else to do with information that didn’t help her survive.

“Maksim,” she said aloud, as if saying it back might turn it into something manageable. “Okay. Maksim. My name is Lena. I’m only a courier. I was told to deliver documents to Mr. Voss. That’s all I’m doing. I didn’t see anything. I won’t say anything. I can leave. Please let me leave.”

She knew she was asking the impossible. She had seen everything after all, even if she didn’t understand it yet. Her gaze drifted again, traitorous, back to the body.

Her stomach turned. Was this it? Was he going to finally point that gun at her, and finally shoot her?