SAVAGE brATVA KING
Leonid
I stole the Italian princess days before her wedding to my enemy—an alliance crafted to destroy my Bratva.
The plan was simple:
Break her. Take her innocence. Ruin her for anyone else.
Send her back wet, panting only for me.
I locked her in my basement, fed on her defiance, and filled her with my seed until she sobbed my name like a prayer.
She was supposed to be a message:
But then she carved herself into my blackened soul.
And my rescue dog? Yeah, he’s already hers.
Then they ripped her away.
That’s when I realized—she’s no pawn.
She’s my fucking queen.
I’ll bleed kings, and make the world kneel—just to make her mine.
Gianna
I watch my suitcase trundle off down the ramp towards the waiting aircraft, the flight sticker flapping from the handle like a miniature flag and turn around to face my friends.
“Aw, come here.” Mika pulls me into a hug, the fake fur of her leopard-print jacket tickling my nose and making it even harder to hold back the tears. “I wish we were coming with you, Gi.”
I wish they were coming with me too, but that would mean introducing them to my family and telling them the truth about my fiancé, neither of which is going to happen. Not while there’s breath in my body, anyways.
Cartier goes next. She already has tears in her beautiful big eyes, and I deliberately turn away, stare at the luggage still waiting in line, owners already carrying the stress of the coming flight on their shoulders.
“Gi…” Cartier holds my arms and forces me to look at her.
“You know you can tell us anything, right?”
I force a smile. “Sure.”
“Only…” She sucks on her top lip and eyes me up like I just told her I’d arranged for a shipment of horror novels to land in her apartment after I’ve gone. “I don’t know. Call me cynical, but you don’t look like a woman who’s flying back to Chicago to get married.”
I tip my head back and laugh.
Mika stands next to her, shoulder to shoulder, ganging up on me.
I haven’t told them much about Seamus. My fiancé.
I’ve shown them photographs. If they realized that none of these images were of me and Seamus together, they didn’t say it out loud, and neither of them is known for their discretion and diplomacy.
Mika once told the guy in the grocery store near where we worked that I was the only twenty-three-year-old virgin in the world, and I deserved either a medal or for some adonis to come and sweep me off my feet and show me what I was missing.
All with a smile on her face that promised it was in my best interests.
I did almost kiss a dark-haired adonis once.
In a nightclub. I was drunk—not so drunk I didn’t know what I was doing but steaming enough to tell the adonis that he was pretty kissable.
The girls rescued me with a glass of water and a reminder that my fiancé was waiting for me in Chicago, and I’d be plagued with guilt in the morning.
And, of course, I didn’t stop them.
“Pre-wedding nerves,” I say.
“Wow, that’s what you’re going with.” Mika’s eyebrows do this funny dance that I’ve never been able to master. “Who are you and what have you done with the real Gianna?”
“Stay, Gi.” Cartier’s tone is serious. “Who will get drunk with Mika next weekend if you’re not here?”
“And who will tell Cartier it isn’t real life when she finishes the tear-jerker she’s currently reading?” Mika elbows Cartier in the ribs and earns herself a playful punch on the arm.
We’re the three musketeers. We’ve worked together at the women’s refuge in Montenegro for the past twelve months.
We’ve helped people like Rosalie, whose husband beat her so badly when she told him she was pregnant with his child that she miscarried, her injuries leaving her unable to carry another child to full-term.
We’ve cried together, made each other laugh, and generally picked each other up off the floor each time we try to stitch a broken woman back together.