Page 15 of Brooklyn Bratva

I shook my head, unamused by her gall. When she finally stepped back from the table, it was with a turn of her head and a finger-wave. No doubt to maintain the charade that she’d made headway for the boyfriend she was going back to. A man who’d use the woman he was involved with as a honey trap was, to my mind, on the same level as something you scraped off the bottom of your shoe.

I gritted my teeth.

“Wait.”

I might not have felt a shred of attraction for her, but any woman deserved better than that. I left the card exactly where it was and skewered a pickled herring with my fork as she looked back to me.

For tonight, the main purpose of being here was to maintain visibility, I’d rather have been at home. All I could think about was Becca, and how I wanted to plunder her body and take her.

But more than that, I could see her next to me, on the couch, both of us in the kitchen, side by side in bed. It didn’t matter where as long as it wasn’t some tacky-floored club thick with the stale smell of sloshed alcohol, dry ice and dust burnt onto the stage lights.

I was done with this. I wanted the wholesome life her dad had tried to carve for her. And I could provide it. But right now, there were too many bad apples I had to deal with first.

I’d have run those men down and killed them with my bare hands for doing far less than what they did to Becca. No one was going to drag her down. I barely had the restraint not to get my hands wet right in the middle of the street in broad daylight.

But I was going to find out who was pulling the strings. And I was going to end the little game they had going once and for all.

“Yes?”

“Ask your boyfriend whether Grigori is running cell phones. There’s someone starting something up.”

“So?”

“So, they need to pack up shop. Either they disappear on their own, or I make them go.”

The woman scoffed. “You’re not the boss around here, just because you have some Russian friends.”

“Is that so?”

Her smile had returned, as though she thought she was getting somewhere with me after all. “Everyone has Russian friends, Ivan.” She slunk back to the table and slid her hand up along my thigh. “Maybe because they get so cold and lonely. You need to do better than threats.”

I caught her hand at the wrist, and my grip tightened until she flinched and pulled back.

“You tell them Grigori can play at being the big boss all he likes, but he runs what we approve of, and he doesn’t poach business or clients. He knows this. It’s been that way for years. There are going to be consequences if he’s changing it up.”

She narrowed her eyes as she rubbed at her wrist, nursing it like a wounded animal.

“I don’t know anything about that. You tell them yourself if you’re too important to talk to me.”

Finally, she left me alone and I dug into my food.

She was wrong about me. I wasn’t looking for just any woman to relieve my loneliness. I didn’t need to escape from my own company. I could handle being alone and living my life this way. I’d rather take that than let someone like her get her talons into me and my life. But Becca was different. Becca reminded me of all the things I used to love.

I picked up the woman’s card and ripped it in half, depositing it on the floor. I wasn’t hers to have. I wasn’t anyone’s apart from Becca’s. Even though she didn’t know yet how completely hers I was.

I poured another glass and focused my thoughts on her all over again, feeling my cock rouse as I conjured the memory of her smooth skin and her smile. She would never parade herself like that for anyone to leer at. It was clear she had more respect for herself, and I could see that would follow over into respect for me.

She’d been so pleased with the apartment, and Mama had taken to her in an instant. I wanted her in my life. I wanted her beside me, sharing these plates with me, or even slumped on the couch watching TV, knowing she was by my side where she was meant to be.

Above the dull thud of the music, the higher pitched buzz of my cell phone’s vibration caught my attention. I frowned at the screen, watching it dance on the table top in front of me, flashing Joe’s name at me. Becca’s dad.

I scowled and shot back another mouthful of vodka. The alcohol barely touched me given I’d grown up drinking the stuff by the bottle, just like most of the men I knew. I would need to have more inside me than I did now to talk to him.

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