Page 70 of Kings of Violence

I don’t know if I like the way he talks about her.

“Don’t let her cunt distract you,” Kotya says firmly, his eyes pointedly on me. “But we can keep using her. At least until she leads us to her father’s hidden stashes. After that… we’ll have to see.”

I’m torn between anger and shame. Of course Kotya wants tobe smart about everything. But it feels like he’s calling me out, after I’d just confessed something so private to him.

Nikolai nods. “I think that maybe…” He glances at me. “Maybe we might not always want her.”

“Maybe we should switch to English, because you just said fucking nonsense in Russian,” I snap back at him.

“Why are you so obsessed with her?” Nikolai asks, throwing his hands in the air. “She’s just another fucking woman. Pretty, yes. Intelligent, yes. But there are plenty of pretty, intelligent women out there for us to share.”

“I’m not obsessed,” I snarl. “And you’ve had her more than I have. You’re the one who picked her out and branded her! So don’t fucking talk to me aboutobsessed.”

“Shut up, both of you!” Kotya shouts, standing up. “This is fucking stupid. I won’t have my two best men fighting over a cunt.” He glares at us. “We will keep her around until we have no use for her. We can decide what to do with her once that time comes. So until then, keep your fucking squabbling to yourselves, or it won’t be Sierrochka who I tie to a wall and whip. Understood?”

Nikolai glares at me as he answers Kotya. “Understood.”

“Understood,” I grumble.

So much for Kotya being on my side. I get off the rocking chair and try to leave, but Kotya grabs me again. He forces me to meet his eyes.

“Understood?” he growls again.

I feel some of the fight leaving me in the face of his angry disappointment. “Yes,” I answer, much more subdued.

I don’t think he would actually whip me, but sometimes it’s hard to tell with Kotya.

He nods and releases me. “Then get the fuck out of here, both of you. I want to finish this project in peace.”

I shoot one more glare at Nikolai before I calmly walk away. I can hear Nikolai mumbling something to Kotya, but I can’t make it out.

It’s fine.

What I want doesn’t matter. After all, I was gone for two years.

They wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t come back at all.

SIXTEEN

Sierra

“I should be studying,”I mutter under my breath.

Nikolai glances over at me from his vantage point near the parking garage entrance. “You say something, zaya?”

“Nope!” I answer as cheerfully as I can. Not that it’s a lot of cheer, considering we’re staking out a warehouse where my father may or may not have stashed some of the missing weapons shipments.

Between my brother’s notes and some good old fashioned hacking, I’d managed to finally break into my father’s admin account on the laptop, but that doesn’t help me crack all the passwords on his private files or various email accounts.

And boy, did he have a lot of different email accounts. Sean’s notes had mentioned a few in relation to which contacts they were connected with, but I doubt that even he knew the extent of our father’s paranoia.

“She complained about being here,” Yuri says. He fiddles with his gun, and I edge away from him nervously. “Sierra would rather be studying than helping us.”

I glower at him. “Thanks, snitch,” I mutter. “I’m just saying this is a waste of time, that’s all.”

And I shouldn’t be here at all. Just because I found the place doesn’t mean I’m suited to being in a potential weapons-holding warehouse with two mob men. If something goes wrong, I’ll go from hostage to target fast.

“There hasn’t been any movement in the past hour,” Nikolai says. “But I spotted a few cameras. The cables leading in are probably in the box by the back of the building.”

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