Page 136 of Bratva Knight

“You’re talking about Mum.”

“Yes,” he whispered sadly. “You really should give her another chance, Tatiana. She—”

I held up a hand. “This issonot the time.”

“Okay. Fair enough. But wedoneed to talk about it eventually.”

“No. We really don’t.” That was a conversation I wasn’t even remotely interested in having. Not now, not ever.

The debate flying around the room about what to do next reached a crescendo, everybody yelling and screaming over the top of one another, trying to get their point across. The frustration within me reached boiling point. We were getting nowhere, and the more time we wasted arguing amongst ourselves, the more likely Nikolai and the others would be dead by the time we found them. Drea seemed to be feeling the same frustration I was, because she slammed her hand down on the table, demanding silence. It worked.

The room went so quiet, the only thing that you could hear was people breathing. For such a little woman, she sure held a lot of power over these men. Or maybe none of them wanted to join Percy on the floor.

“Alright. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to worry about finding the island later. Right now, I want to get our soldiers ready so that as soon as wedohave the location, we’re ready to go.” She looked at Arturo. “How many can you bring to the table?”

“Forty. Some of them are still in the early stages of training, though.”

Drea nodded. “My brother can bring seventeen. What are our numbers?” she asked Vladimir.

“Our force was recently replenished after the attack. Currently, we have sixty-five. Half of that are the new soldiers sent over from Russia. They’re still in the middle of their evaluation, so I’m unsure of their skill set, but they should all be proficient in basic hand-to-hand combat and weapons training. We could possibly get more if we reached out to Sergei—”

“No,” Drea and I said at the same time. We shared a look with one another. She knew as well as I did that they didn’t have a great relationship with their grandfather, that they wouldn’t want him involved. We had to do this without him.

“We’re not going to Sergei,” Drea said sternly, her voice laced with authority.

Vladimir bowed his head in acknowledgement of her command.

“Where do we sit with weapons?”

“We have enough to supply our own soldiers, but not the others,” Vladimir answered.

Arturo finally sat down but his leg bounced repeatedly, like he still couldn’t keep still. A nervous habit, no doubt. “We still have the shipment of guns supplied to us by Dimitri. It’s not enough to arm everyone, but we can make do.”

“I can cover the rest,” Mikhail added. “Just get me the final numbers and I’ll pull it from my personal inventory.”

Vincenzo pulled his phone out. “On it.”

Drea took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s start getting the soldiers all here. I don’t want to waste any time. I want to leave the moment we have a location.” She raised a hand to silence Mikhail, who had been about to say something. “Yes, I know we haven’t figured that out yet, but we will.”

The man looked doubtful but kept his mouth shut.

To be honest, so was I. Surely if there was some other way to find the island, they would have thought of it the first time around instead of putting Nikolai undercover.

“Mine are already on the way,” Arturo said. “They’ll be arriving within the hour.”

Drea checked her phone for the time. “Good. The cartel will be here roughly at the same time. Now—”

The laptop on the desk dinged with an incoming notification. Drea ignored it, but when she tried to continue on, it dinged again.

And again, and again.

Ding.

Ding.

Ding.

Ding.

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