Page 4 of Innocent Bratva Hostage

Dad wouldn’t let the men he worked with call me otherwise.

“Yes, you’re speaking to Giselle Rae,” I muttered. “Is there a problem?”

“I’m sorry,devushka,”he said in that thick Russian accent. “Your father was murdered this afternoon.”

And just like that, the blue sky turned grey, and my world went dark.

Chapter 2 – Andrei

“A body in the morgue and a shipment missing sounds like a fucking problem to me.”

All eyes in the room turned to me: piercing green eyes belonging to Egor Yezhov, thePakhanof the Bratva; the dark, intense eyes of my cousin, Rafayel Yezhov; and the light blue, murderous eyes attributed to my other cousin, Miron Yezhov.

Every man in this room shared something in common beyond our last name and our connection to the dark underworld; we were all here to mourn the same man.

But not in the way his family and friends, if he had any, would. One thing about men in the Bratva was that we had no friends. Trust was fickle, and love was a vulnerability—everything the mafia was against.

We only needed our fucking wits and brutality to survive, but even that wasn’t enough sometimes.

Peter Rae was one of the best men we’d had, and he was dead.

Not just dead—he was fuckingmurdered. But that wasn’t the real problem, at least not for me. The problem was that he’d hidden something very valuable, something we couldn’t find on our own, and you know what they say about dead men not telling any tales.

The man had taken a secret that cost blood and money to his grave.

“We’ll find whoever is responsible for this, and we’ll take them down,” Miron said. “We’ll burn the world if we have to.”

Miron was a cruel bastard. He didn’t care that Peter died; he couldn’t give a fuck which one of our men was gutted by our enemies. He only cared that he could use it as an excuse for extreme violence. He was the most sadistic of all four of us, and I liked that about him.

Everyone in this room aside from him would be worried about the motive behind Peter’s murder and why, but not Miron. He never asked questions. He wanted a name. A target. Someone to put a bullet in.

He and I shared certain similarities; however, he was volatile, while I preferred to be practical.

I leaned back in my chair, flicking my lighter open and closed, the metallicsnickechoing through the room as I put my brain to work.

Smoke curled in the air from Egor’s cigar, mixing with the scent of aged whiskey none of us had touched. ThePakhansat at the head of the table, leaning back with his legs crossed and his expression unreadable. His fingers tapped against the glass in front of him in a foreboding way, and his eyes were fixed on one thing—the phone on the table.

It was Peter’s phone. Miron had retrieved it from Peter’s body before it was taken to the morgue.

“Peter’s dead,” Egor said, his voice heavy with rage and the need for vengeance, despite his calm exterior. “Except he isn’t just dead; he was murdered. Someone openly declared a war against us.”

“Now I’m curious about who would be brave enough to do something like that,” Rafayel chipped in for the first time. “No one would be stupid enough to declare war unless it was someone powerful enough to do so.”

It didn’t take much mental gymnastics for me to figure out what the killer was after. I was surprised they hadn’t figured it out yet. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Rafayel shot me a sharp look. “Isn’t what obvious?”

“What they’re after.” I let the lighter snap shut and met his gaze. “They’re after the Tyfun-1.”

My cousins exchanged glances.

The Tyfun-1 was a massive shipment of high-grade, synthetic drugs we’d shipped in from Mexico only two days ago. We’d kept it confidential, but I guess secrets leak very easily around here.

“The Tyfun-1 was a secret. There’s no way anyone else would have known about it,” Miron said, shooting up to his feet and pacing the room.

“Well, I guess we weren’t careful enough. Someone knew about it, and whoever it was went after it. The timing makes sense,” I explained as calmly as I could. “Peter took the shipment during a raid yesterday. He hid it God knows where, and today, he’s dead.”

The leather cushion creaked under Rafayel’s weight as he shifted on it. “So, you’re saying someone killed him in order to take the shipment.”

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