Page 10 of The Bratva's Innocent Bride

“Don’t patronize me, Viktor,” Boris mutters, that strain of anger from earlier still evident in his voice. The poor guy is frustrated beyond himself. Part of me wants to take him aside and tell him what my father always told me: Emotional intelligence is your number one tool. Being angry only means you’ll make mistakes.

But I get the feeling that this guy doesn’t want advice from someone like me—a woman.

“It’s bad enough that you went against my orders and kidnapped him, but if we don’t figure out the details of how they took the guns, it could very well happen again. That entire area was searched. Not a single French motherfucker in sight. And yet, we’re still one million dollars in weapons poorer.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that,” Viktor says, and I hear the sharp slide of something—a knife being unsheathed. Are they going to continue torturing this man while I’m down here? I’m appalled when my pulse quickens, my body excited about the thought.

“Allard is going to pay for this,” Boris says, “decades of the French understanding their place and leaving us be, and now, suddenly, they think they can come in and steal our product?”

“Dealing with the Italians is bad enough,” Viktor agrees. “But I do enjoy the way these Frenchmen squirm under the knife.”

I hear a muffled grunt of pain and realize Viktor has started in on the man in the chair again. They continue interrogating him, asking him about the weapons, asking him about Mr. Allard. A few things are becoming clear.

First, Boris Milov is the leader of some sort of organized crime group, likely the Russian mafia. Second, Mr. Allard isn’t a financial risk expert, as I assumed. He’s the leader of the French mob here in Vegas.

And I’ve somehow gotten myself caught up in the middle of this fight that should have nothing to do with me.

Chapter 5 - Boris

I pace back and forth as Viktor works on the Frenchman, who has, surprisingly, not let a single thing slip about what Allard is up to. Either he doesn’t know, or Allard has truly done a good job of training his men. Either way, it’s endlessly frustrating to me.

“It was a wrong move, brother,” I say, running my hand over my chin. “I think we’re just further alerting Allard to our movements. I’d wanted to catch him by surprise—how am I going to get the real Olive now? I need his daughter if I want to hurt him.”

“You’re still going on about that?” Viktor laughs, pausing in his careful work on the man’s hand to turn to me. “You can’t marry more than one woman at once, brother, as much as you might like to.”

“Well, I obviously don’t intend to keep this marriage,” I mutter, thinking about what Fiona said at the chapel. It’s not a real marriage, anyway. She signed Olive’s name, which means none of the paperwork will go through, which means I’m technically married to nobody. But if Viktor didn’t hear that, I’m not going to repeat it. I don’t need to drive home the truth of my mistakes to my brothers.

“I know you’re trying to follow in Kervyn’s footsteps,” Viktor says, grinning as the guy in the chair grunts in pain, “but if I’m being frank, kidnapping a woman and forcing her to marry you isn’t exactly an admirable action—as if forcing a woman against her will isn’t what every other man does. If you want to do something truly different, you have a woman wanting you. Seducing Olive and making her desperate for you would be a far more interesting way to take what the man loves most.”

I think about that—about the idea that by forcing a woman to marry you, you’re just showing that you wouldn’t be enough for her without the parameters of a forced marriage. I shake the thought away—Penelope is the most ruthless Bratva queen we have ever seen, and she came from one of these arrangements.

But she and Kervyn had also spent time together before the forced marriage, so maybe that makes things different.

“I guess you don’t value your limbs, my friend,” Viktor says, grabbing a bone saw from the table and spinning around, nearing the man in the chair. At the sight of the spinning blade, the man struggles against his bindings, desperately trying to get away, but there’s nowhere for him to go. I watch, fascinated, as, instead of just telling us what we want to know, the man screams through his gag as Viktor places the blade against the soft flesh of his pointer finger, applying pressure until blood starts to spatter against the walls and Viktor’s plastic face mask.

“Disgusting!” I call, turning my head. Viktor has always had a certain psychotic streak to him, taking on the parts of torture that even our other brothers aren’t interested in. Punch a guy, knock him around, threaten his family—that’s one thing. But Viktor is the kind of man who likes to rip out a man’s fingernails, one by one, or place toothpicks under his toenails, wedging them in further with each minute the man refuses to tell us what we want to know.

I hear the tiny thunk of the finger hitting the floor and watch as Viktor grabs a blowtorch, cauterizing the wound carefully so it won’t become infected. The care with which he treats wounds must be infuriating to his victims, who are likely begging for death by the time Viktor has the bone saw out.

Right as I’m about to tell Viktor that it’s enough, that he doesn’t need to take another finger at this moment, I hear the tiniest creak of movement from outside the room, in the hallway. Viktor must hear it, too, because he goes completely still, holding the blow torch up with one hand.

Slowly, moving as carefully as I can, I round the corner, catching a glimpse of a white sneaker moving quickly up the stairs. The housekeeping staff know better than to come into the basement—we have a completely different set of cleaning staff for the kinds of messes that happen down here.

I know, instinctively, by the way the person moved, that it wasn’t a housekeeper running up the steps, desperate not to be caught by us. It was Fiona, being crafty, having found a way to move throughout the house unnoticed. I wonder what happened to the poor housekeeper whose uniform she took, and my heart rate quickens at the thought of her fighting someone and taking them down.

Before I can move toward the steps, Viktor darts past me, running to the base of the steps and moving at breakneck speed after her. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that if he catches her, he will kill her. I take off after him, my muscles burning as I race up the stairs.

I see Fiona, her hand stretching toward the front door. She throws something at Viktor—a knife—and it buries in his thigh, making him cry out in pain. But as he falls to the ground, he gets a hand around her ankle, yanking her to the ground. He reaches down, pulling the knife out of his own flesh and raising it up like he might stab Fiona in her back.

Without thinking, I kick the knife away from him, watching as it skitters across the floor, coming to a stop at the base of an end table. Fiona takes this as an opportunity to kick Viktor in the jaw, which sends a splatter of his blood across the floor.

“Fuck, brother, what the fuck—”

Fiona is getting to her feet, her hand on the door handle, turning it, her body moving through the threshold. She’s laughing, I realize, as she sprints out onto the grass, running as fast as she can.

But those aren’t her shoes, I realize, as I run after her. She was much faster in the office when I was chasing her. Now, she’s limping a bit, clearly wearing sneakers that are too small for her. When I catch her, I wrap an arm around her waist and pull her back, sucking in a breath when her back presses firmly against me.

We stand like that for a moment, breathing hard, her back pressed to my chest. I can feel myself starting to get hard, the exhilaration of chasing her, of catching her, sending too much blood south.

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