Page 105 of Born in Depravity

For goddamn good.

I couldn’t say I was surprised. Or fuck, even disappointed. I was fucking obsessed at first sight—unlucky for her, because when a man like me got obsessed, there would be very little I wouldn’t do to own her.

And now my brothers wanted her too.

I shifted.

This was like giving a little kid access to all the candy in the world.

We always knew we would share a woman.

Call it a kink, or insanity—or, fuck, abnormal.

It didn’t fucking matter, because Catalina had become ours, and that was all there was to it.

Damien leaned against the wall, a bored expression on his face. I knew better.

He was aware of every little thing going on in this room.

Damien was a little harder for me to read than Mikhail was. Both were quiet men. There was nothing restless about them, unlike how I felt most of the time, but there was something closed off about Damien that even I couldn’t work through, though the man would die for both Mikhail and me in a heartbeat.

He had proven it time and time again, when he got Mikhail out of the brothel and me out of the ring.

It could just be because his birthday was coming up. He would be thirty-six in just a couple of days. Still young by anyone’s standards, but anyone who had known him when he was nothing more than a defenseless boy never thought he would live past twenty.

His birthday always put him in a bad mood.

“How many men do we have stationed around the property?” I asked Damien quietly.

“Twenty,” he answered without looking at me. “Including Maxim.”

Maxim was aBrigadierfor the Bratva. One of the very few men I would trust with Damien and Mikhail’s life, and that said something. But still—

“Is that enough?” I asked.

“Why? Are you scared you can’t handle him?”

I scoffed. “No, but once I kill him, we need to leave as quickly as possible, and I think you're forgetting something. She’s small, and I doubt she weighs all that much, but still, it wouldn’t be possible to make a quick getaway.”

If I wasn’t paying attention, I wouldn’t have noticed the tiny smirk on his lips.

“I think you care more about our little pet than you let on.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“Don’t worry, Nico. All is going to work out, you’ll see.”

That fucking control of his. He always held a tight rein while I felt like I would explode with anger, with emotion, on a daily basis.

“Oh, yeah? Because Petrov is just going to hand over the list? That would make him a traitor. That would be his death sentence. My guess? He probably sleeps with it at night.”

Damien cracked a small smile at that. “Then we’ll just have to wrench it from his claws while he sleeps, won’t we?”

Mikhail came out of the room. I would have thought he’d spend the rest of the day with her. I shot him a look.

“She’s asleep,” he responded to my unanswered question.

I nodded. Mikhail watched Alyosha.

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