Page 26 of Reclaimed Crown

“Tell me,” I order him.

He spits his answer out between pained breaths. “You are,” he says.

I stab the tip of the pick into Pyotr’s abdomen. “Don’t fuck with me,” I growl.

Pyotr screeches, and I give him as much time as he needs to process reality. He can try to fight this all he wants, but there’s no escape.

“Those were the consequences…” he grunts out.

I press the pick further into him. “What are you talking about?”

“I told you… stay away from Tatyana,” he says as blood-tinged spit dribbles from the corner of his mouth.

The pick drops out of my hands and I stumble back. I try to blink away the words Pyotr just said. There’s no way he’d do something so cruel just because I was protecting his daughter when we were children.

Pyotr smiles as he watches me struggle to comprehend. His smile turns into a deranged, gurgling laugh. “I told you to stay away from my daughter. I promised you’d regret disobeying me,” he says with a satisfied expression on his face.

Reality turns into a blur for me. I feel as though I’m watching myself pull the pick out of Pyotr’s stomach and drive it through his chest. He gasps and hacks with the pick standing out of the center of his torso. His breath becomes ragged as his lungs fill with blood. His pain satisfies my need for vengeance over what happened to my family, but not completely.

Not yet. I don’t want him to die with a smile on his face. I lean over, making sure he can see me as he dies.

“If your goal was to keep your daughter away from me, you’ve failed,” I say.

His eyes twitch as he coughs up blood. I grab his jaw and angle his head to me, gritting my teeth at the sight of him.

“The night I came back, I fucked your precious little angel…” I hiss at him.

His eyes spring open in rage. He tries to mouth words but can’t manage more than noises.

My lips draw back into a calculating smile. “We fucked again last night,” I say. “And as you lay here dying, I want you to know that Tatyana is mine. I wanted her as my woman, but now I will take her as my property. I’ll use her as I wish. I will fuck her as I wish, and if Tatyana betrays me again…” A lump in my throat forms at the thought, but I press forward, saying something I don’t want to.

“... I will kill her.”

Chapter8

TATYANA

My cell phone rings, startling me awake. I get up from the sofa and walk to the kitchen counter to pull it from under a pile of mail and newspapers.

It’s the bread delivery driver for the cafe.

“He’s not answering the door,” the driver barks into the phone.

I let out a huff. I’ve asked my father to tell me when he needs me to open the cafe for him.

“I’ll be out in a moment,” I say and hang up before I hear any protests from the driver. I grab some clothes lying in a nearby chair and rush to pull them on, not paying attention to how it looks when put together. When it’s winter, you don’t really dress for style.

The keys to the cafe jangle as I slip them into my pocket and head out the door. The wind is just as angry as the driver sounded over the phone. A snow drift blocks the way outside, but once I push the door far enough the wind takes it, swinging it open so hard I worry it’ll fall off its hinges.

I head towards the back of the cafe where the bread truck sits with lights flashing. When I unlock the door to the cafe, the driver climbs out of his cab. He grabs the stack of baked breads for the day, and as he passes me, he pushes an envelope of cash into my chest.

Arkady’s money.

I roll my eyes and take the envelope from the driver. The driver gets into his truck and speeds off with the rest of his deliveries.

When I walk further inside, I notice the lights in the dining area are already turned on. We always turn the lights off at closing time. My father must have been here earlier. I swing the pass-thru door open and peer further inside, but no one is in the dining room. My lips purse and I assume my father received a last-minute order early this morning. The Bratva send my father on small errands, tedious pet missions they don’t feel like carrying out themselves. But they usually wait until later in the day to send him out.

“Knock, knock,” I hear behind me.

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