Page 77 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

This was so much worse, wasn’t it? I didn’t just submit to Dante the way I did to Leo. I took over.Iwas the one in charge. And yet instead of killing him for what he’s done to me, or at the very least hurting him enough that I could make my escape from this place, I had sex with him.

Now, two of the brothers have put their hands on me. Two of them have made me moan and whimper and come like a rocket ship.

What’s next?

God, I don’t want to know.

It feels like I’m living in a fucked-up version of that movieGroundhog Day. I need to break this cycle and get my head on straight once more. If I don’t … well, best not to think of it.

I was having a dream before I woke up. Not a dream actually, but a memory.

It was my fourteenth birthday party. I had a half dozen friends over and we were doing a spa party, pretending we were middle-aged divas with cucumbers over our eyes and mocktails in our hands. I remember that I’d cajoled my dad into joining us. I delighted in applying a charcoal mud mask on my father’s face, making him wear a fluffy pink bathrobe that matched the rest of ours. Even at that age, I knew he would do anything for me. Even this, as goofy as it was.

We listened to music, ate snacks, gossiped, and played silly games while Dad looked on in amusement. It was fun; it was sweet; it was one of the last truly innocent moments of my life.

I remember the moment it all ended.

It’s funny that the moment sticks out in my head at all actually, because of how innocuous it was on the surface of it. Mom had gone into the kitchen to make another tray of virgin daiquiris for us. There was a knock at the glass double doors that separated the house from the courtyard where we were all seated.

Dad frowned as Uncle Alexei entered. He was wearing a suit and he looked stiff and formal, just like he always did. He strode to my dad’s side and bent over to whisper something in his ear.

Dad’s frown deepened. He stood up at once and wiped the mask off his face with a nearby towel, tossing the cucumbers onto the ground as he did. Then he swept away without another word. Uncle Alexei glanced back over his shoulder before they disappeared, but Dad didn’t. Dad didn’t look back at all.

I stared for a long while at the mud-splattered cucumbers he left behind. My friends had barely noticed my father’s departure, but it felt to me like an essential part of me had vanished. There was something so sad and forlorn about two slices of cucumber lying on the whitewashed patio, with little flecks of black mud drying on the edges.

I knew where he’d gone, or rather, what kind of thing he had gone to do. I was old enough by then to put the pieces together and understand that my father was not a good man. He was my daddy and I was his little girl, so of course I loved him. But how many times can a girl hear her father whisper ominous threats into a phone late at night before she realizes that he hurts people? How many times did I have to see Uncle Alexei or some other suited goon whisper in his ear and notice how my father’s face hardened into steel? His eyes would slit, his fists would clench, and it was like he became a different man altogether. He wasn’t Daddy anymore—he was Luka Volkov. I stared at the cucumber slices wilting in the sunlight, and that was the moment that I truly understood exactly what everything meant. Who he was. Who I was.

I force myself to sit up. Like I suspected, motion shatters the illusion that my encounter with Dante never happened. But I suppose I don’t have much capacity for self-delusion left in me anymore anyway. I’ve spent twenty-two years trying to hide from my father’s crimes, to pretend they don’t exist. But it feels like they’re finally catching up to me.

I can’t keep pretending.

I try to go back to sleep, but I fail miserably. I don’t know whether it is my body or my soul that needs the rest more. So much has changed since I was first brought here, and yet the basic circumstances are still the same. I’m still a prisoner. I’m still a pawn. I’m still the enemy.

But nothing is ever that simple. Especially not with the men holding me captive. It seems like, the more I learn about them, the less I know. A dead brother, a dead father? How the hell am I supposed to processthattwin bombshell that Dante dropped on me?

The fact is that it just doesn’t compute. I don’t know how to make sense of it, so I choose to ignore it. Dad always told me that sticking your head in the sand just meant someone was going to come along and screw you in the ass—not an expression that Mom approved of by any stretch of the imagination, though it definitely had its own kind of folksy wisdom. But I don’t see an alternative. Seeing these men as living, breathing, loving humans would break everything that’s holding me together. I can’t take that risk.

So I just get up and go wander. I leave my room to pad barefoot down the halls. For the first time, I force myself to stare back at the portraits glaring down at me from the walls. I feel an inexplicable calmness that has eluded me since my arrival. I’m not scared by these ancient Biancis anymore. If anything, I’m annoyed by them, like back home in New York when some creep wouldn’t stop staring at me on the subway. The prevailing wisdom in those days was always to just ignore, to not engage—Lord knows the headlines are always filled with the stories of what happened to unlucky women who pissed off the wrong leering creep. But I always said to hell with that. I’m no one’s eye candy.

“Fuck you,” I whisper to one particularly nasty-looking portrait. It’s an old man with a huge wart on his iconic Bianci schnoz and beady little eyes. “You’re ugly anyway.”

“That’s no way to speak to an ancestor of mine,” comes an amused voice.

I damn near jump out of my skin at the sound of it. Whirling around, I see Mateo leaning against the wall a dozen yards away from me. He’s got a bottle of wine in his hands, but his eyes are raking up and down me. I might just be projecting my own emotions onto him, but it seems an awful lot like he’s got a war going on inside his head, like he wants so badly to look at me but also feels like that’s the last thing he should be doing.

I know the feeling.

“What is it with you guys and sneaking up on me like that?” I demand.

He shrugs. “We learned a long time ago that grand entrances are for men with a death wish.”

I roll my eyes. “I’m not even going to bother trying to figure out what the hell that means.” My gaze falls to the wine bottle he’s holding. “Celebrating something?”

“Not exactly.”

“Drinking to forget, then.”

“That’s a little closer to the mark, I’d say.”

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