Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 65593 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 328(@200wpm)___ 262(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65593 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 328(@200wpm)___ 262(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
A shiver runs through me. I was crazy to come here by myself. I’m lucky Nikolai wasn’t awful. That could’ve gone horribly wrong.
All the righteous rage I’d harbored on my way here has dissipated. Now I’m just mad at Zane.
He did this.
Nikolai is right. Zane should figure it out himself.
The trouble is, Zane is all I have, and he’s my little brother. My responsibility. If I don’t figure his shit out, he could wind up permanently damaged or dead.
My mind flits back to Nikolai’s comment about the hospital.
I shouldn’t find it interesting or respectable that he seemed to know just how bad Zane’s injuries were. He believed Zane didn’t require medical care. That doesn’t make him honorable.
But it does make him smart. Much smarter than I anticipated. The beat-down he delivered to Nikolai was calculated. Measured. Perhaps a prescribed remedy for late customers.
I don’t want to find out what he will do to Zane next if my brother doesn’t deliver.
I open the door to my car—the one I’d come here fully planning to turn over to the bratva—and climb in.
Well, I still have a car. I may not have a brother for much longer, but I can drive to his funeral.
3
Nikolai
“Swing your end around that way,” I instruct Oleg, who has the other side of the new sofa I just had delivered. I’m moving out of the penthouse suite and into an apartment on the floor below. Living upstairs was fine when it was only the six top cell members living together. It was a bachelor pad, and we lived like kings. But Ravil kidnapped the mother of his child and brought her there to live with us, and Maxim moved his unwilling bride, Sasha, in shortly after. Then Oleg had to bring his girlfriend Story to live with us to keep her safe. Now Pavel and Dima have both moved out of town to be with their girlfriends, so it left me as the only single guy swinging his dick in the wind up there.
“Yeah, right there. Put it down.” The two of us simultaneously lower our ends to the floor, and I stand back to survey the results. It faces the giant flat screen television I had mounted to one wall. Like the suite upstairs, my place sports the wall-to-wall windows looking out over Lake Michigan and all the luxury associated with the Kremlin. Hardwood floors, quartz countertop, the finest fixtures, you name it.
I hired Ravil’s decorator to pick the furnishings and wall art, so it looks decent. But I’ve had Oleg and Adrian moving my shit around with me all day, and I can’t seem to make it feel right.
What it lacks is… warmth.
People.
The place feels empty.
The sad fucking truth is that I’m twenty-eight years old, and I’ve never lived alone. Growing up, I always shared a room with my twin. Then Dima and I were recruited—maybe conscripted is a better word because it wasn’t like we had a choice—to the bratva before we even finished secondary school. I’ve lived in close proximity to other people my whole life.
Oh, who the fuck am I kidding? Dima moving away was like having a limb ripped off my body. Dima is the more remarkable of the two of us. He was the boyfriend of the girl who died of cancer in high school. Then he quickly became one of the most useful and powerful members of the bratva with his hacking skills. I’ve never been anything but Dima’s brother. The guy who balances him out. The outward face of the package that was the two of us.
Now he’s gone to live with his girlfriend Natasha a couple hours drive away. I’m so fucking happy for him, but I am adrift.
I literally don’t know who I am or what the fuck I’m doing without him here for me to back up.
Staying in the penthouse suite was too painful with him gone. I thought moving down here would assuage the irritating sense of emptiness I’ve been harboring lately, but now that I stand here in my lonely fucking apartment, I realize it’s just going to exacerbate it.
I need a goddamn hobby.
Blyad.
I have no idea why that thought calls to mind the tits of Zane’s sister. Playing with her ripe nipples would not be a hobby. Gospodi, I am dying to know what they look like though. Something about her still has me hard a week later.
It was her response to my colorful suggestion of how I’d like to punish her that turned me on. I thought for sure she’d be pissed. I saw what a little firecracker she could be. But no, she’d been intrigued. She wanted a taste of my dominance.
Now I can’t get the idea of giving it to her out of my head.
Too bad it’s not going to happen.