Page 26 of Brooklyn Bratva

I was a little mortified that I had so little self control. I couldn’t fathom how he had any. But then again, I’d been waiting for this my whole life. So many other girls my age had left their virginity in the dust when they were teenagers, but I still had mine. I’d been missing out on his touch for all these years and now I knew he wanted me too, I couldn’t handle waiting a minute longer than I had to.

As soon as we could be alone, properly alone, nothing was going to keep us apart.

CHAPTER 11

Ivan

After dropping Becca off at the clinic, I made a detour to Jerome’s apartment, but my head wasn’t fully in the game. My other head was far too distracted and I couldn’t wait to see her after work.

Kissing her had made me even more determined to get on with evicting the squatters on Russian territory. As soon as it was over, I’d be able to focus one hundred percent on the woman who was going to be my wife, and that was the only thing I wanted.

Dealing with her father was the problem I wanted to be concentrating on, not schooling the numbnut who thought it was a good idea to compete in our territory, in my precinct.

I didn’t bother jimmying the lock. A solid shoulder to the door busted the lock right out of the flimsy frame. Places like this weren’t well cared for. I knew the building opposite had rooms where the Ukranian’s ran girls and worse. As much as I disliked it, I turned a blind eye, for a fee.

We might have been the controlling power, but over the years, we’d learned that the path of least resistance was the most lucrative one. It paid to let the locals get on with whatever they wanted to, and to offer assistance in getting into more profitable areas that looked more legitimate. For a fee. Grigori liked his old school set up. And we allowed it, to avoid a turf war that could bring both our organizations down.

In a way, Jerome was no better than those prostitutes. Just another young kid drafted in to do the dirty work for a quick buck, thinking that he was taking control of his life. I guess he was, in a way. Same as I had. I couldn’t begrudge him that.

But I could damn well cut off the head of the snake, once I figured out which reptile I was dealing with.

The whole apartment was a single room, and there were a couple of mattresses on the floor. No bed frames. But he did have a bedside table. Just like he’d said, and the burner was right where he said it would be. I grabbed it and walked out of the place, thankful I’d never had it so bad here. Back in Moscow was a different matter, but that had been a lifetime ago.

As soon as I got back to my desk at the precinct, I plugged it in to charge, and sat there making a cursory stab at the pile of paperwork mounding up on my desk. That part of the job wasn’t what I lived for and I doubted anybody did. It didn’t take long for the screen to light up, and the battery bar to get to a decent level. I switched it on once it had enough juice.

Whoever had given it to him wasn’t clever enough to opt for a smartphone. Nothing stood out to cops more than a young guy standing on a street corner texting on a Nokia their grandma wouldn’t even use.

I opened the message log and scrolled down to read through the previous messages. As expected, it was all pretty brief.

I laboriously typed out my own message along the same theme.

More merch ready to go

I pocketed the phone, and waited for whoever was on the other end to bite. I had to move fast, before whoever was running the gig found out the pair who’d been running this were locked up and they pulled their neck back in and disappeared.

But as soon as the message came through, I was ready to go. No one was going to get away with shoving Becca around.

Becca

When I got to the pharmacy and pulled out the prescriptions, my jaw dropped at the number of pills. I was going to need a grocery bag to carry them all home.

My practical medical knowledge was still basic, but I recognized the names of some serious painkillers, and given the quantity she was getting, she must have been going through them at a fast pace.

My stomach knotted itself as I realized just how ill she was. Ivan had been holding it all in and she’d been putting on a brave face, but they both must have known that she didn’t have long left.

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