Page 17 of Shattered Empire (Shattered World)

Dante Romano was the twins’ biological father.

Had Elias known? Is that why he’d so easily sold Kenzi?

Kenzi.

Just thinking her name caused the grip on my sore and battered heart to tighten painfully. It felt as if someone had wrapped a tourniquet around it and just kept tightening and tightening. Sooner or later, it would explode under the torturous pressure until nothing remained but the cold, dark abyss.

“Gonna freeze my balls off out here,” Vas mumbled, stepping through the open doorway that separated the tunnel system from the forest that surrounded it.

“You didn’t have to follow me out here.”

“Pfft.” Vasily snorted through his nose. “I didn’t follow you,” he insisted. “I love being out here in the cold. Reminds me of Russia. So nice…and cold. Freezing.”

“I get it,” I deadpanned. “It’s cold.”

Vasily shivered dramatically. “So cold.”

I couldn’t help but smile at his attempt to cheer me up, but it didn’t lighten my soul like it normally would have. There was too much weighing it down. So many secrets.

“Do you think he knows?”

Vas didn’t have to ask who I was talking about; he’d been in the same room as me when Mark dropped the bomb.

“I would be surprised if he didn’t at least suspect,” Vas admitted.

“All this time and I never suspected that anyone other than Elias was their father,” I breathed. I thought back to everything I could remember about the twins from the first time I came to live with them. If Elias knew, he hid it well.

“No more secrets,” I whispered to him, the bleak, silent dawn of the early morning wind carrying my words like a promise. “I mean it, Vas. I’m done with it all.”

Vas hesitated, his face contorting painfully. “There are things I won’t betray, Ava.”

I scoffed. “Like where Dima is?”

Vas let out a frustrated sigh and looked heavenward, as if praying for patience. “He’s on an assignment. I told you that.”

“An assignment that you can’t tell me about,” I pointed out. “YourPakhan.”

“I made a promise to—”

“A dead man.” I didn’t let him finish. “You made a promise to a man who is now rotting six feet under, and as much as I admire your loyalty, I need to know what goes on inmyoperation.”

Vas smirked. “This has nothing to do with theBratva. It’s a personal thing.”

“Then why can’t I know about it?”

Vas shrugged. “There’s no need for you to.”

“Just so you know,” I told him. “I’m picturing your sudden demise in ultra 4k right now.”

“Whatever helps.”

His nonchalance was going to get him a bat to the back of the head. Or pushed off a cliff.

“What about Leon?”

“With the Cosa Nostra,” he replied simply.

“You didn’t think to tell me one of my men is working with my former uncle?”

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