Page 67 of Claimed By Desire

Except there’s something special about her.

Catching a glimpse of her bare skin turns me into a god damn idiot.

Lev bails me out of this conflicted hell a couple hours later after the sun goes down. I make sure the cameras work before I meet him down in his truck.

“Got word the Marinos are planning something,” he tells me as he drives fast down south, heading in the direction of the docks. “The Marinos do a lot of business with the Irish, and I’m good friends with one of their mid-level captains. He’s got a Rolex addiction. Anyway, he says the Marinos plan on hitting part of our new Canadian enterprise, and he thinks it’s got something to do with our containers.”

“You think they’re going to steal from us?” I almost laugh at the audacity. It’s one thing to go violence-for-violence; street level fighting doesn’t have to get in the way of business necessarily.

But hitting our goods is going to escalate the situation.

We were all set to become allies. Natalya’s marriage to Adriano would’ve forged a new order in Philly and established both the Marinos and the Zeitsevs as the dominant force on the east coast. Everything was just right—until I put my hands on her.

And fucked everyone over.

The worst part is, even knowing how much misery and death my relationship with Nat is causing, I’d still do it again in a heartbeat.

Not because she’s a great partner or anything. But because she’s pregnant with my child, and I couldn’t live with myself if I let another man raise what’s mine.

Much less touch what’s mine.

And IownNatalya. Every inch of her supple little body responds to my touch like she can’t help herself, and it’s obvious in the way she gravitates toward me that she wants me as much as I want her.

The sex is mind-blowing. It’s other-worldly. Frankly, sex like that shouldn’t exist.

And even though people are going to die so I can continue to fuck her into a senseless oblivion, I can’t really work up the energy to give a fuck about them.

She’s mine. She’llstaymine.

Only, I feel guilty about Lev and his father. They treated me like a son and I betrayed them in the worst manner possible. I’ll have to find a way to make it up to them one day, only I’m not sure that’ll ever happen.

Lev pulls the truck up to a booth at the entrance to the docks. The guy on shift only nods and lets us through. Typically, we’d have to have identification and shit, but the Zeitsev Bratva’s got a whole lot of connections in this part of the city, and their goods move through here like fish through water.

We drive slow through the narrow street and park in the darkness on the side of the admin building. Lev nods at me as he loads up his gun and tucks it into his jeans and we climb out together. Our footsteps slosh through puddles and echo off the steel containers. I catch glimpses of their originating ports in the dim orange light: Morocco, Sudan, Thailand, Ecuador. These have come from all over the world, only to end up in south fucking Philadelphia.

The place is oddly quiet. Even on slow days and late into the evening, there are people working here, cataloguing and checking contents, doing whatever the fuck dockworkers are supposed to do. But as we move through the narrow lanes between the massive piles, we run into nothing and nobody.

It’s fucking spooky.

“We should wait for backup,” I tell him, already fingering my gun. I’m on edge and a bad feeling crawls up my spine.

“Fuck that. I want to make sure they’re not getting away with this shit.”

“Did you tell anyone where we were going?”

“I got a team on the way.”

“Then we should wait.” I grab his arm, but he wrenches himself away, glaring death at me.

“This is your fucking problem. You’re the perfect little soldier, always playing by the rules, but I’m sick of that shit.”

“I break the rules when it makes sense. Right now, it doesn’t. We can post up here and if the Italians are nearby, we’ll stop them before they can escape.”

“How about you do that then? I always knew you were a stuck-up perfectionist, but I didn’t know you were a coward.”

I step toward him as a spike of rage runs through me. How dare this bastard call me acowardof all things? I’ve risked my life for him and for his brother a dozen times over, and I’ll keep on putting myself in danger because that’s what I do.

But there’s a difference between doing the hard thing and being a reckless idiot.

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