Page 5 of Savage Bratva King

It is a tall ask. Impossible, some might say.

Marco opens the rear door of the sleek black Cadillac as I approach. He’s a short solid man with clear blue eyes and thick hair that had turned silver-gray by his twenty-first birthday. He has been driving me for over a decade now, so I don’t need to tell him where we’re going.

The casino is busy. I navigate the VIP entrance, stopping to kiss the cheek of a regular Hispanic customer, and ignore the way her fingertips brush my sleeve, while her eyes slant suggestively. Some might see it as a perk of the position, but I never mix business with pleasure, especially when that pleasure will bring another mafia family knocking on my door.

The bartender has a drink waiting for me in the private lounge. Negroni. I peer over the balcony at the main area, at the losers with hunched shoulders gambling away their inheritances, at the wealthy Asians who throw money at the table knowing that eventually some of it will stick, at the winners who allow themselves a small gloating smile before they chance their luck again.

Chance is a peculiar concept. A possibility. Events beyond a person’s control. And yet so many people risk their entire lives on the flip of a card.

Unfortunately for Xander Amory, I leave nothing to chance.

We always knew that it would come to this. My family is the wealthiest and strongest Russian contingent in the United States. Xander Amory heads up the Sicilians. He has loaded his chips on the side of war, and I’m not a man who shies away from the front line.

I swallow the Negroni in my glass and signal for another.

I was five years old when I saw my first corpse.FIVE YEARS OLD.

I heard raised voices coming from my father’s study. The anger in their tones wasn’t what dragged me barefoot from my bedroom; in my father’s line of business, tempers often frayed at the edges, and deals got destroyed by a wrong word or an imagined slight, or a bullet in the back of someone’s fucking skull. No, it was the cold menacing threat behind them, and the ominous silence pervading the rest of the house.

I crept downstairs, my heart thumping inside my chest. I thought my father or one of his men might hear it, but no one was standing guard outside the door to his study. My toes sank into the thick pile carpet on the stairs in anticipation of what I might find when I reached the bottom. But nothing, literally nothing, could’ve prepared me for the sight of my father firing a bullet into the skull of his right-hand man.

My stomach lurched sickeningly at the same time as my body seemed to turn to ice. But I must’ve groaned like a ghost or squealed like a pig because my father turned his head and looked at me, the murder weapon still in his hand. Then he calmly rose from his seat, stowed the gun inside a drawer, and closed the door behind him as he came to me at the bottom of the stairs.

“Come, moi syn.” He placed his warm hands on my shoulders, turned me around, and guided me back to my room. When I was tucked up in bed with the comforter pulled up to my chin, he said, “Never allow love to cloud your judgement, Leonid, because heads turn for far lesser things.”

I nodded. I had no idea what he was talking about, but suddenly, with the firing of that single bullet, the man who had been my role model, my comfort blanket, my shelter when the rest of the world was raining, had taken on a ghastly appearance. My papa was gone, and in his place was a man whose footsteps I was destined to fill. That night, I fell asleep with the image of my uncle, a man I’d known my entire short life, sprawled on the floor of my father’s study with cold, vacant fisheyes and blood trickling from a hole in his head.

* * *

In the casino, I gauge the time by the fuzziness slowly wrapping itself around my brain from the Negroni. This coupled with the increasingly charged atmosphere from the casino bowl below has never let me down yet. The evening is still relatively young when Tamara enters the private lounge, collects her favorite tipple, Applejack and soda, and joins me at the table in the corner by the balcony.

“We have secured the asset, Pakhan.” She sips her drink and watches me coolly from beneath raven-black bangs.

Tamara and Ivana are identical twins, but few people realize it at first glance. Tamara’s curls, wide smile, and smoky eyes give her a soft appearance and an almost childlike quality that most people are instantly drawn to. Especially men. Ivana on the other hand wears her hair cut short and spiky, the tips dyed lurid green, the strange look accentuated by the elongated green flicks at the corners of her eyes and the battered Doc Martens that I’ve never seen her without.

I rescued them twenty years ago when they were just little kids. They’d been trafficked from abroad, arrived on American soil in a filthy container that stank of piss and shit, several of the adults with them already dead. My father had been tipped off that the cargo was entering our port along with another shipment that we were expecting, both of which had been made known to the police commissioner.

They were just a couple of scared little girls with wide green eyes and grubby faces, and the sight of them made me feel nauseous. What kind of sick bastard would abduct kids and sell them into the sex trade? My father said that they were probably sold by their own parents, and that was the fingertip that pushed me over the edge.

While my father handled the shipment we’d been expecting, I relocated the girls to our safe house and saw to it that the sick fucker who shipped them here would never touch a woman again.

My mother cleaned them up, fed them, gave them clothes to wear and moved them into a guest room in our home. She cared for them, but I was the one they looked to as their savior. Their superhero. Some kind of fucking demi-god in a gold loincloth and wielding a jewel-encrusted sword.

They still do, even though they know the real me.

Sergei would kill to protect me. But Ivana and Tamara would kill themselves if they believed that it would keep me alive.

“Where is it?” I swallow my drink in one mouthful.

“En route to your home.” She watches me coolly. “Do you want me to see that it is settled?”

“Where is Ivana?”

“At the safe house. She had to lose another man.”

Fuck!The body count is rising. This asset had better be worth its weight in gold or I might be forced to go in harder and lower.

“No, ask Ivana to arrange a little welcome party.”

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