Page 90 of Sexting the Bratva Beast
Too much blood. Too much talk of killing and torture and death while the two people I care about in this room could be saved if he would only let us go.
“That isn’t true though, is it?” Andrej steps closer.
I’m so busy watching the man I love that I don’t even realize that Yuri has moved until another bullet flies from Andrej’s weapon, my ears ringing from the sound. My uncle crashes onto his knees on the floor, blood oozing from a wound in his left arm.
“No more warnings.” I’ve never heard Andrej’s voice so cold. “Move again, and you won’t hear me tell her what really happened to her parents.”
“Andrej?” I whisper, my own voice drowned out by the echo of the gunshot. “What are you talking about?”
He moves to stand beside me and Ivana, and although he holds himself upright, his hand steady around the weapon, there’s something off about him. His body hasn’t yet reacted to the wound. When this is over and the pain hits, he’s going to crash, and he’ll need me to catch him.
“I’ve been doing some digging since I came back to Russia.”
It’s unclear if he is speaking to me, Yuri, or to the room in general. He hasn’t even acknowledged Ivana bleeding out on the carpet, and I wonder how much of my conversation with my uncle he overheard.
“I suspected that the feud between our families had run its course before your parents were killed, Cartier. It turns out, I was right. Progress had been made towards forming an alliance, one that would’ve benefited both sides. Our parents wanted to end the feud and work together, each working to their strengths. But someone else had other ideas. Didn’t they, Yuri?”
My uncle looks at me, arms folded across his chest to stop the flow of blood to the bullet wounds in his hands. “Don’t listen to him. He will say anything to stop you from hearing the truth.”
“On the contrary.” Closer, and I can see the beads of cold clammy sweat on Andrej’s forehead. “I’m in love with Cartier. I want her to know that she will never hear anything but the truth from me.”
“Tell me.” I face my uncle.
His mouth twists into an unnatural smile. “There would’ve been an alliance if his father hadn’t sold us to our enemies.” He raises his chin in a gesture of defiance. Or arrogance. I can’t tell.
“You didn’t want the alliance,” Andrej continues, “because it would’ve guaranteed your place as underboss. You wanted more. You resented your brother for being the eldest born son.”
I know where this is going, and I already know that I don’t want to hear it.
I want this finished.
I want to get Ivana to hospital, and for life to move on surrounded by tinsel and lights and jingly tunes.
“You don’t have a fucking clue.” Yuri’s expression is ugly. His voice is like short sharp stabs at the room.
“You sacrificed your brother and his wife for your own gain.” Perhaps Andrej knows how painful this is for me. He’s no longer addressing me but keeping this purely between him and my uncle. “You sold them out to another Bratva family, who reneged on the agreement when you failed to deliver the Ivanovs to them on a silver platter.”
“What does this mean?” I whisper.
“They killed your parents.” Yuri struggles back onto his feet. “My brother was part of the deal, but I had to hand over the Ivanovs first.”
Andrej’s breathing is growing ragged now. Ivana is deathly still. This is taking too long.
“Your brother was part of the deal, correct. Buttheydidn’t kill him,youdid. It was him or you, wasn’t it, Yuri? And like the fucking coward that you are, you killed your brother and fled the country. The only part I don’t understand is why you came back now.”
He killed his own brother.
The sentence is stuck in my head, tuneless, just words playing back and forth across a rolling screen until they eventually fall into the correct order and finally make sense.
He killed my parents and then blamed Andrej’s family in the hope that I would help him take them down too. The man is a fucking monster. Andrej was right: there are monsters out there, people who don’t deserve to live when they’ve destroyed so many innocent lives.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Yuri stares at Andrej. “I was waiting to find the chink in your armor, and my niece was the one who provided it. I couldn’t have planned it better if I’d tried.”
“You killed them…” I finally catch up with the scene playing out in the library.
Tears spill down my cheeks, and I don’t try to stop them. I’ve never cried for my biological parents before. Maybe I cried when I was a baby and they didn’t come to console me, but at two yearsold, I didn’t understand that I’d had my final hug from them. I’d been kissed goodnight for the last time. I’d giggled at them for the last time. Never knowing that all our interactions were our last.
Perhaps my tears now are for me too. For the baby who was too young to know grief.
