I’m going to kill this bastard. I’m going to hunt him down and slit his throat myself. Watch him gasp for his last breath as he bleeds out.
“We’ll talk soon,” Priest says curtly, signaling that it’s time for us all to get the fuck out.
Fine by me. I can’t wait to leave this place. The only way they’re going to get me back here is if I’m fucking dead. I toss the keys to Ekaterina’s cuffs on the table before I go.
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. Theenemy. 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.