Page 52 of Forced Bratva Wife

Chest aching in a way I could scarcely comprehend, my mind circled back around to the only other time I’d truly felt like this.

I could see my brother walking down the hall of my old home. I’d rushed down the stairs after I’d heard a gunshot, my own weapon poised in my hand. His back was to me, and the door to the study where our mother read was open.

Smoothing across the oriental rug was an expanding pool of deep crimson, and I pushed the door open enough to see her dead on the floor, a massive hole blown through her head.

My stomach clenched, and I nearly threw up on the spot. But then reality had crystalized around me, and I had been immediately aware of what my brother had just done.

I’d flung myself down the hall after him. I’d only been seventeen. He was twenty-seven.

Memories of him referring to me as the oops baby had swelled in my mind. The words about our mother having gone soft, of our father fucking off and dying instead of dealing with her, had swirled through my veins.

When I’d reached him, I’d held my gun up with shaking hands.

“You’re not going to do it, you little piss ant. You haven’t got the balls.”

I had been nearly sure he was right. But then he’d smirked at me, wiping the blood that had splattered on his face off with his sleeve.

He’d killed her. The one woman in all the world that I’d cared about, who’d been kind to me.

I fired as he’d taken another step forward, dropping in on the spot with a similar head wound.

Bloody. Fatal.

And I had been left alone in the now quiet house.

“Lev!”

My mind clicked back to the present as Pietor screamed my name, and I realized what was worming through my nerves like a disease.

Fear.

“What.” It wasn’t a question.

“This is wrong. The house isn’t answering, and I just got our driver on the line, who says the front door is locked. We need to go.”

“Fuck.”

It had been a trap. We’d been lured here. Just as the thought occurred, I saw several of the Irish family still alive fleeing the house. Sergey was hot on their tails, delivering justice to anyone who landed in his sights.

When he saw me, sergey sprinted over.

“What the fuck is this all about?”

“Pavel. He wanted me gone from the house. He wanted…Fuck!” I kick the dead Irishman at my feet, knocking him over. “He’s got Parker. I just know it.”

Eyeing me with a combination of annoyance and intrigue, Sergey cocked a brow and gestured down the hall.

“Get the fuck back there then. Deal with this, and take that fucker down.”

I just nodded. There wasn’t time for anything else, and then Pietor and I were running for the front door of Vadim House.

***

My men had caught up with Pietor and I, getting us back to the house. The place was eerily quiet, and when we arrived at the front door, it was locked.

The team grabbed the battering ram from the Escalade’s emergency kit and broke the thing down so we could get inside.

More of the house’s guards were dead or incapacitated. It looked like whoever had been in here had been more concerned with speed than ensuring there were no survivors.

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