Page 15 of Fractured Devotion

Easing open the door, I glanced into the hallway, ensuring no other patrons were milling around. At the seedy hotel, where Drosky agreed to meet me, I wasn’t too concerned about anyone noticing me leave.

I’d just stepped out from the shadows of the building and stood beside my motorcycle when my past collided with my present.

“Not exactly the place I’d expect to find you.”

His voice washed over me, freezing me in place. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I spoke over my shoulder, refusing to look him in the eyes. If I looked at him, I couldn’t pretend he was standing behind me.

“You see… I doubted myself before, but then I learned the Angel of Mercy was here… in Vegas. Then I learned this elusive woman was on a vendetta mission—a mission to seek retribution for the torment he’d cause her. It was then that I knew the chance meeting with a woman I thought was just a stranger was something more.”

I started to climb onto my bike, but his hand wrapped around my arm, halting me.

“Why?”

The agony in his voice nearly brought me to my knees.

“Why what?” I jerked out of his grasp as if his touch burned.

His grunt of disgust seemed to echo off the alleyway.

“For months, we’ve mourned you. No, that’s wrong.” He took a deep breath. “We blamed ourselves, Carmela. We’d been right there and lost you— Fuck.” The sound of my brother’s voice cracking tore at the fiber of my soul. “You should have come home to us… let us help you.”

“You can’t help me, Vincenzo. No one can.”

“You’re wrong, Carmela. We understand what he’s taken from you, from all of us. We want him dead just as much as you do.”

I turned to face the man I hadn’t seen in nearly a year. Vincenzo was everything I strived to be—a man I molded myself after to become the woman standing in front of him now.

“You have no idea what I’m feeling. Lipovsky took everything from me. It wasn’t just my soul he robbed me of—he ripped my fucking heart out and obliterated it. Lipovsky didn’t destroy me; he decimated me. All that’s left is a black hole where my heart used to be. An empty void that’s filled with so much rage it changed the girl you remember. Death isn’t enough for him. I want to rip apart the man who took my reason for holding on to hope when I shouldn’t have had any.” I swiped at the tears gathering in my lashes.

“But I did, Vin. I had hope. Hope when I was locked in a cage barely big enough to move around in. Hope when I was strung up and beaten just because they could. Hope even when he strapped a chain around my neck like I was a fucking dog—because I knew you would come for me… I knew that he would come for me.” I took a step closer to my bike. “And when I watched the man I love more than myself fall to his death, I knew hope wasn’t real. So, don’t stand there and tell me you understand what Lipovsky’s taken from me… because you have no fucking idea.”

Swinging my leg over the bike, I settled into the saddle of my motorcycle. The rumble of the engine under me was like a growl of anticipation, a prelude to the escape I was about to make. A fleeting glance at my brother Vincenzo was enough to catch the raw, unguarded pain on his face. It was like a punch to the gut—a feeling I’d become too familiar with.

“The sister you love is dead,” I called out to him over the noise, my voice cold, a stark contrast to the chaos of emotions inside me. “She’s not coming back.”

With that, I kicked the bike into gear, gravel spitting from under the tires as I sped out of the parking lot. I left behind more than a cloud of dust—I left behind the person I used to be. Carmela Anastasi was a name that belonged to a life filled with family warmth and safety, not this husk of vengeance that now bore her face. As the casino’s lights began to appear on the horizon, my resolve hardened. I had to act fast—Vincenzo’s discovery of my whereabouts in Vegas would soon ripple through the family. Alone, he might not attempt to hinder me, but if the family united against me, that was a different story.

Undoubtedly, they would act under the guise of protection, believing they were saving me from my own disastrous path. They’d cut the threads of my ambition, believing it mercy, before I could weave them into completion. My brothers, with their stern resolve and conviction, held not just the power to dismantle my plans—they held the power to destroy what little was left of me.

nine

ALEX

I stood watching as the fighters took their place alongside the ring. A murmur of shock filtered through the crowd as spectators spoke of Oleg Drosky’s death. To the world, Drosky died in a drug deal gone bad—but I knew it wasn’t drugs that killed him. It was her.

The Angel of Mercy.

Massimo has used his contact with the police department to get details of the crime scene. Just as we expected, Drosky had been stabbed, or rather, filleted. His nearly severed cock had resulted in him bleeding out—but not before the stab wound to his throat had sped up the process. Vincenzo had been acting weird since the news of Drosky’s murder, but no one could get an explanation out of him.

Now… we all gathered around the venue, waiting and watching for things to play out. Ryker was a ball of nerves as he readied himself to fight Kronos Kreiten, Drovsky’s prized fighter. We were shocked that he didn’t pull out when his boss’s body was discovered, but we suspect that had more to do with Lipovsky than loyalty.

“I’m going to check out a few places.” I nodded toward the hallway behind the ring.

Massimo nodded his head. “Be careful. We still don’t know where Andrei is. Last thing we need to do is tip Lipovsky off because you spooked his second.”

“I’ll avoid him if I see him. I’m more interested in the woman he’s been parading around.”

Leaving him to watch the event, I headed down the back hallway to where the fighters waited. I’d barely made it to the end when I caught Andrei in a heated exchange with a woman outside one of the rooms. He said something to her before turning back to the room and slamming the door, locking her out in the corridor alone. She balled her fists and slammed them into the closed door before turning on her heel and heading in my direction.

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