Page 100 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

I feel the same for her.

I look away and close my eyes. I don’t want to be conscious anymore. Let the darkness come swallow me up again, perhaps for the last time. I don’t intend to wake up on the other side of it. Too much has happened for that to be a reasonable expectation. I fucked up, I failed the ones I loved, and this is the price.

If you stop, you die.

I have finally stopped.

Now comes the second part.

* * *

“Wake him up.”

The voice issuing the order is gritted and angry, seething with pain. I hear footsteps, then the shock of a bucket of ice-cold water being tossed into my face.

I roar wordlessly. Pain lances through the back of my head. I try to reach up a hand to touch the site of the injury, but I can’t move my arm. When I open my eyes, I realize that’s because I am strapped to a solid wooden chair. My arms, torso, and legs are all secured to the seat with thick leather straps cinched down tight enough that I can’t budge my limbs an inch in any direction. I can only raise my chin from where I was slumped forward and look over to see something I never thought I’d see again.

Sergio is in an overstuffed leather armchair directly across from me. He is leaning awkwardly to one side to make room for the mass of bloodstained bandages wrapped around his upper left chest and shoulder. His left arm rests uselessly on his lap, while his right hand squeezes the arm of the chair as tight as he can to stay upright. His brows are furrowed in a furious downward-sloping V over those incandescent purple eyes. He looks at me, unblinking.

I open my mouth to speak. No words come out.

Sergio snaps his fingers at someone behind me. “Get him water to drink.”

Rough hands appear from out of my field of vision, force my jaw open, and clumsily pour a water bottle down my throat. The sensation of water hitting my parched throat is indescribable. But I don’t show any of that on my face.

“That’s enough,” Sergio says. The water bottle is wrenched away. “Leave us.”

Footsteps retreat away from me. A door opens and closes.

“Now,” Sergio adds, turning his attention back to me. “What were you going to say?”

With the water in my system, I can finally muster up the energy to speak. “Guess I hit my target after all,” I rasp.

His eyes narrow further. “You have some fucking balls to say a thing like that, brother.”

I merely shrug.

“I could kill you right now, you know.”

I shrug again. “So be it.” I was ready to die whenever it was that I last closed my eyes. If it turns out that I was only off by a little bit, then that is all well and good. “My life as I knew it is over. Might as well wrap everything up neatly.”

“Hm.”

“Hm?”

The corner of his mouth twitches up in a smile unexpectedly. “Do you think you can’t suffer anymore, Vito?”

I laugh hollowly. “I have been suffering for thirty-two years, Sergio. How much more is even possible?”

His smile grows one sinister notch. “More than you could ever imagine.”

The first inkling that he knows something I don’t begins to stir in my broken brain. He is too self-assured for a man who was recently shot. I didn’t shoot to kill, and that was intentional, but I did shoot to put him down for a long time.

And yet, there’s a smugness in his face that does not compute. I’m having a hard time stringing thoughts together, but the pervasive underlying feeling is that uneasy anxiety of being on the wrong end of a surprise.

“Well?” he asks.

“What?”

---