Page 4 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

I forgot I’d stashed it in here. The feel of the cold metal against my palm gives me goose bumps. I don’t like guns. It took Dad almost two weeks of arguing to get me to accept it. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He never does.

He just wants what’s best for me, of course. What father doesn’t want his daughter to be safe while she’s attending college across the country? He’s no different than any other dad in America. But his overprotective streak has lasted twenty-two years. I’m fed up with it. I’m an adult now. I don’t need Daddy keeping me safe.

I let the gun drop back into the bottom of the bag and pick up my pace a little bit.

The door to the fitness studio is about thirty yards away. Glancing over my shoulder, I see one of the two suited men prowling through the parking lot, trying to see where I’m going. The other must be …

Shit!

I dive behind a parked car right as the second man rounds the corner ahead of me. His head was turned, so I don’t think he saw me, but I hold my breath and stay crouched low.

Easy, girl,I whisper in my head.Wait for your chance.

I changed buses three times to slip these guys and get here. I’m still not sure how they found me, but it’s kind of a moot point now. They’re here. Safety, though, is just a ten-second sprint away from me. I can see the door.Big Fist Kickboxing Gym, Los Angeles, CA,is embossed on the frosted glass. Even from where I’m squatting behind a gleaming new Range Rover with a Starbucks cup abandoned in the center console—how freaking original—I can hear the sound of padded fists striking the bags and the huffed breath of UCLA’s fit-chick population trying to sweat off another five pounds before the weekend hits. Although, to be fair, I’m about to go join them, so maybe I should bite my tongue and not be so condescending.

The second man, the one who rounded the corner, is checking the windows of each of the shops in the strip mall as he strides slowly down the covered walkway. I duck lower and watch his feet move from my vantage point below the Range Rover. He’s wearing leather shoes with an athletic rubber sole fixed on. Some aftermarket upgrades, no doubt. All the better to chase down twenty-something females who don’t want to be caught by a big, burly guy with such a nasty gleam in his eyes.

My gaze moves up a few inches to the bulge hiding at the side of his calf.

That’s a gun in an ankle holster.

I swallow hard. In the distance, I hear the first guy interrogating some innocent shopper about where I’ve gone. “Have you seen a girl?” he asks the unlucky victim. “Dark brown hair, about this tall, wearing …” The rest of what he’s saying is lost behind the sound of a nearby car engine coughing to life.

I keep my eyes fixed on the man nearest to me. He’s close now, hardly a stone’s throw away and narrowing the distance with each step. He moves toe, heel, toe, heel, like he’s trained in how to walk without making a peep. Probably because hehasbeen trained. He’s been trained in other things, too. Like enhanced interrogation techniques, which I usually understand to mean breaking people’s fingers until they tell him what he wants to know.

He’s almost even with me now. It’s time to make my move. Slowly, I creep around the back of the car in rhythm with him, keeping the vehicle between us so he can’t see me. I stay crouched low to the ground and move the way he does. My sneakers—gleaming white, a twenty-second birthday gift from Mom last week—are as sneaky as their name suggests. Normally, I don’t stay up on the latest haute couture trends like some of the other girls I’m friends with, but I gotta admit, I’m a sucker for the nineties nostalgia throwback wave that’s been sweeping LA fashion lately, including the big, chunky white dad sneakers that everybody and their freaking grandma seem to like. It just so happens that they’re coming in handy right now.

We’re moving around the car in a weird lockstep dance now. Both of us are sliding counterclockwise. He’s at eleven o’clock right now versus my four o’clock. He goes to ten, I go to three. He goes to nine …

And I run.

My timing is exquisite. Someone is opening up the door to the kickboxing studio right as I approach it. I dive through into the air-conditioned interior and immediately fall to the floor, gasping from my all-out sprint effort.

It takes me a minute or two of breathing in a sweaty lump on the ground before I regain my sense of my surroundings. I get to my hands and knees and feel eyes on me.

“Uhh … are you okay?” asks the middle-aged woman who inadvertently held the door open for me to make my great escape. She’s classic LA—Botoxed until her face looks like petrified wood, with fake tits and clothes that cost more than my monthly apartment rent. Her nails are gleaming freshly done, and she’s at least forty-five, but her lips are plumper than a baby’s bottom. Whatever—I resolve to save the judgment for another day. For right now, she’s my freaking hero.

“Fine,” I say with as innocent a smile as I can muster. “Thanks for holding the door open for me.”

“Sure …” she says, still suspicious.

I give her a little waggle of the fingers as she walks away, throwing one final glance over her shoulder that might as well say,Maybe we shouldn’t let crazy people in here.

She doesn’t even know the half of it.

“Milly!” comes a familiar voice from the back half of the building. Anastasia bounces over. She’s got her hair braided into fishtails and she looks as cute and sexy as ever. I still don’t understand how she manages to capture both those looks at the same time. She’s got a real “bang me all night long then cook me breakfast” vibe to her, which makes me insanely jealous.

My sexual vibe is more along the lines of “Uh, well, I guess.” It’s not that I have low confidence. With the right makeup and clothes, I can hang with the best of them. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself. But I don’t hold a candle to Anastasia. She gets hit on all the time.

Guys tend to be more, like, afraid of me, sorta. Anastasia usually says that I just need to be more approachable. “You always look like you’re hiding state secrets,” she’s said to me more than once.

Oh boy,I inevitably want to say back,if only you knew.

Like the name she uses for me, “Milly.” I’ve been using it since I started high school, but there’s still a part of me that cringes every time. I’ve gotten used to it, kind of. I just don’t think it’ll ever be truly me. But with parents like mine, I didn’t really have a choice. Dad, after all, is not the negotiating type. When he handed me a driver’s license and a passport that read “Milly van Der Graaf,” I just took it and didn’t ask questions. Life with him is easier when you learn which subjects not to press him on.

“Hey, girl,” I say to her. I’m still a little out of breath, though I’m trying my best to pull myself together. “What’s up?”

“Was that you who just came flying in the door like a freaking Olympian?”

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