Chapter 7
KATYA
Misha holds a lighter to his cigarette and inhales, watching me calmly from behind pale eyes that are colder than a Siberian winter.
My palms are sweating. I haven’t spent much time in the same room as my brother since we were kids, and I’m reminded how much of a stranger he is to me. How he’s a man capable of anything.
Murder, torture, blackmail—whatever it takes to get what he wants.
Silence stretches, punctuated by his contemplative breaths as the room fills with smoke. Only the two of us are in his office. No sound but the muted traffic of the city that lulls me to sleep every night. Trapped in these four walls with Misha, it takes on a nightmarish bent.
“You can’t sell me to the Mafia,” I blurt finally, unable to take it any longer.
Specifically, he can’t sell me to a man who dropped me into a chair like I was an annoying piece of garbage he needed to get rid of and then walked away without a backward glance.
A dangerous man who kidnapped me and chained me to a bed.
The enemy. One who would have killed me without a blink or a hint of conscience.
I used to think this city was the land of hopes and dreams. But now I know it’s the land of monsters and greed.
Misha takes his time exhaling, blowing a perfect ring of smoke. Then he calmly pulls a switchblade from his suit pocket with his other hand, hits a button that sends a wicked-looking knife popping out, and whips it past my head.
The blade passes so close, it stirs the wispy hairs at my temple.
I flinch as it hits the wall behind me. An inch to the left, and the blade would have sunk into my eye socket.
“You don’t tell me what I can do, Katya,” he snaps.
My heart pounds. “Misha, please—”
“You were stupid,” he interrupts, barking out the words, “getting caught by the fucking Andrianis.”
“I was walking in a perfectly safe part of the city.”
He stubs out his cigarette, leaving it in a gold Hermès ashtray. “There is no place here that’s safe for you. You’re a weakness to me. A vulnerability I can’t afford.”
“But I have nothing to do with you,” I counter.
We’ve lived separate lives. Misha is twelve years older than I am, and he’s spent the last few years in Russia, far from the world I’ve built for myself in the States.
He speaks the mother tongue fluently. Svetlana has kept the language alive for me, but I’m far from a native speaker.
The Bratva has owned him since well before our mother was murdered in cold blood.
I’ve been kept from the stain, first by our mother and then by the woman who became a mother to me, raising me in her absence.
He flicks an annoyed glance over me. “You are my blood. Any enemy who wants to get to me will go through you. That’s why I need you off my hands. Someone else’s problem, not mine, da?”
“No one even knows who I am,” I protest.
No one except for Scorpion. And I’m still wearing his shirt and pajama bottoms as a reminder, his scent lingering like a ghost.
“Wrong.” Misha’s lip curls. “Everyone fucking knows who you are now that I’m Pakhan.”
Apparently, I have a target on my back, thanks to Misha’s power grab. But I’m not about to pay the price for his sins.
“If that’s true, then it’s your fault,” I point out, trying to maintain the pretense I’m calm, when inside, I’m anything but. “I’ve kept a low profile my whole—”
“A low profile?” He slams his fist on his desk. “You are on the stage for anyone to see. You and that fucking ballet. I never should have allowed it.”
That gets my back up. Misha doesn’t control me.
I’m my own woman. I have my own life that I built with hard work and determination.
I didn’t use the Sidorov name or throw our family’s money around.
I did what I had to do to get where I am, and I’m still climbing from the bottom up, clawing my way there.
“You can’t tell me what I can and can’t do any more than you can tell me who I’m going to marry,” I tell him, my fingers biting into the arms of my chair.
He rests his elbows on the polished surface of his desk and gives me a dispassionate look. “You will do this, Katya.”
My chest goes tight. He’s deadly serious. He’s also dangerous. It doesn’t matter that I’m his sister. I’m useful to him. A pawn, nothing more. He won’t hesitate to kill me if I don’t go through with this. I can see it in his eyes.
But I don’t care. I can’t marry Scorpion Andriani. I just can’t sacrifice myself, my whole life, for the kingdom of greed and death Misha’s trying to build.
“No,” I tell him. “I won’t go through with it.”
“You misunderstand. Refusing isn’t an option.”
“I’m not going to marry him.”
Misha sighs, then leans back in his chair, drumming his inked fingers on the desk, the skulls and snakes swirling over his skin like they’ve been brought to life. “Svetlana.”
A cold fist of dread wraps around my heart and squeezes.
Not her. Not Svetlana.
“You wouldn’t,” I bite out.
But Misha smiles, a cold, feral killer’s smile, and I know he would. He will. He would murder Svetlana without hesitation, because he doesn’t have a conscience or a soul.
“If you won’t marry Andriani, she dies.”
“She loves you too, Misha,” I say quietly.
Quieter than I feel. Inside, I’m screaming. But I know better than to let my brother scent blood.
Svetlana is like a mother to me. I was a kid when Mama was gunned down.
Misha was older. He had memories with Mama that I didn’t.
Svetlana had always been good to him, but Misha had been angry.
He hadn’t wanted her caring or concern. He had wanted bitterness and fury. Nothing has changed since then.
Misha calmly gets up from his chair and walks to the window behind him, signaling he’s dismissing me.
“The choice is yours, Ekaterina,” he says calmly. “Decide. Either you marry Andriani, or I’ll put a bullet in her skull.”
The fight seeps out of me as I think about Svetlana, everything she’s done for me. She sacrificed her life for me, pushed me to become the woman I am. I can’t betray her like that. I think of her elegant face, her silver-streaked hair, covered in blood.
It’s no choice at all. Not really.
I stare past Misha’s broad shoulders, unseeing, out to the view of the city skyline.
“I’ll do it,” I whisper.
Scorpion
I look up from the marriage contract Priest has pushed across his desk to me.
I knew this meeting he called was going to lead to bullshit.
I should have known better than to show up, but he’s my don and I have to pay him respect, even if his head is up his ass and he thinks I’m going to walk down the aisle to a feral Russian hellcat who moonlights as a ballerina.
“I’m not fucking doing it,” I tell him, shoving the contract toward him without even reading a single word.
“We’ve been over this.” Priest crosses his arms over his chest and leans back in his chair, looking like he just stepped in a puddle of cold dog piss on the floor. “This isn’t optional.”
Anger shoots through me.
“The fuck it isn’t.”
I want to hit something. Or someone.
“This is your fault, fratello mio,” he says.
That sets me off. Because I found out what ruined all my carefully crafted plans for making Mikhail Sidorov squirm and rue the goddamn day he ever decided to blow up our fucking restaurant and come at us.
Saint thought Isla would be better off without him, and instead of asking her what she wanted like a grown-ass man, he decided to send her away.
He had Rocco take her from the safe house to the airport, and that’s when Sidorov’s goons attacked, taking Isla and our men hostage.
The situation had gone from us having the upper hand and all the power to us being fucked and Saint and Priest offering me as tribute to keep the streets from running red with Andriani and Bratva blood.
“No.” I shake my head, pent-up fury coiled inside me, waiting to be released. “This is Saint’s fault. He’s the one who sent Isla to the airport in the middle of a war with the Bratva. She was in the safe house when I left. Everything was fine.”
Priest inclines his head. “He’s admittedly an idiot.”
Saint’s not here to listen to us dragging him. He’s enjoying his reunion with his woman—the one he was too much of a jackass to realize he was in love with until it was almost too late—while I’m being hung out to dry.
“Exactly. So why should I be the one to pay the price for his losing Isla to the Bratva?”
“You know why. When you took Pakhan’s sister, all bets were off.
He was after blood, and he wasn’t going to stop until he had it.
I made the decision that was in the best interest of the family.
And you, believe it or not. Cazzo, that was a ballsy, stupid fucking move, kidnapping Ekaterina Sidorova. ”
Priest is forgetting I had a good reason for what I did.
I flex my fingers impotently at my sides, longing for a fight. “He blew up our fucking restaurant. You were on your honeymoon. What was I supposed to do? Sit around knitting with Zia Maria and hope Sidorov would allow us to keep our territory out of the goodness of his heart?”
Priest sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Good news. I’m only ever getting married once, so there’s not going to be another honeymoon.”
“Technically, you got married twice,” I point out, because he and his wife Luna had an arranged marriage that turned into love, and then they had a second wedding before their honeymoon.
He gives me an annoyed look. “Do you really want to fuck with me right now?”
Yes, I do. But also, no, I don’t. Priest is vicious as hell when he’s riled. I may be hotheaded, but I’m not stupid. I know when to play with fire and when to let it burn.
“Not at all.”
“Then look over the contract. I need you to acquaint yourself with it, inside and out. Sidorov has…specifications we had to agree to.”
My eyes narrow on him.
Two days have passed since I left Ekaterina Sidorova cuffed in a chair deep in Bratva territory, a strip of duct tape over that fuckable mouth.
Two days since my brother signed my fucking life away to the king of the Bratva.