Page 92 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

“Not thebikers,” I correct. “The biker. The violet-eyed one.”

Quickly, I explain to them what happened yesterday. The pursuit, the encounter in the alley, how I thought my life was over, how it all ended not with a bang but with a whimper.

Only now as I explain it do I realize that the biker is what ties everything together. He knew my vehicle. He knew my route. He knew where I would go to hide from a pursuer. And if he knew all that—if he knew me down to my bones—surely he knew enough to attack our stash house and now, our castle.

“Who the fuck could he be working for?” Leo asks.

I shake my head. It’s all so fucking clear now. The biker runs through it all like a violet-tinged thread.

“He is not working for anyone,” I whisper. “They are working for him.”

I glance up to my brothers, who all look slack-jawed. For the first time in weeks, since I took the throne, they see me as the don. The man in charge. It is too little, too late though. None of that matters anymore.

“Then who is he?”

They all know the answer before I say a word. But I have to say it anyway, though I don’t want to. If I say it out loud, it will become true.

I wish I had another choice. Too bad I don’t.

“It’s Sergio,” I say, my voice barely audible. “He’s alive.”

Dante staggers like he’s been hit. He slumps against a wall for support. I feel his pain as if it were my own. Sergio was his twin, his shadow. If I feel like something essential has been scraped out of my soul, then I can only imagine how greatly Dante is suffering as it is all laid out clearly. The truth is unavoidable and it has wicked, jagged edges. In all my time as his brother, I have never seen the roiling fire in his eyes extinguished. But now, as I look at him, I swear that the lights go out. He is retreating inwards. I fear we will never bring him back from the chasm into which he is falling.

How could we have avoided this? I have never once believed in fate, not since the day I shut the door on Audrey and turned my face back towards the shadows of the life I was born into. In that moment, I had what felt like a choice. I chose wrong.

But fate believed in me, it seems. It brought us to Milaya. It brought her here. And like a poison, she has seeped into each of us. I know without having to ask that she has corrupted my brothers’ minds the same way she has corrupted mine. Whether with a kiss or a fuck, she owns all of us now. She is an addiction. One that is killing us piece by piece.

This is all her fault.

She and her fucking father did this to us. They turned Sergio somehow. Luka might not have personally fired the bullet that killed my father, but he has played us all like marionettes from the beginning. We thought we were the ones making the aggressive move when we kidnapped his daughter, but it turns out that that too—like so many other tactical errors I’ve made—seems to have been merely part of his plan.

All of which leads to me to one inevitable conclusion: both of the Volkovs need to die.

Once upon a time, I would have killed them both right here and right now. Two quick squeezes of the trigger would end this chapter. What would happen after that, I don’t know, but it would not matter.

That ending is not enough though. They need to suffer for what they’ve done. To suffer as I have suffered, as my brothers have suffered. I want each of them to watch the other one die. I want it to be slow and agonizing so they can feel what I feel—a pain that only death will ease.

But when we hear the clatter of boots coming down the spiral staircase, I know that I will have to delay our retribution a little longer.

“We have to move,” I order.

Mateo points to a door on the far right-hand side of the torture chamber. “Into the catacombs,” he says.

I nod, and we move.

Leo unlocks the door with the key around his neck and we all race in, with Luka and Milaya forced to the front. Mateo barks out directions—”Left! Straight! Down!”—and we venture deeper into the guts of the castle, as Sergio’s troops batter at the door we locked behind us.

It gets colder and colder the further we go. The hallways shrink, until I’m running hunched over and praying I don’t knock myself unconscious on a low overhang. Stone floors give way to dirt that muffles our footsteps, so that all I can hear is our labored breathing.

At long last, we emerge from the smallest corridor yet into a cavern. The stone in here is rough and unfinished. But we can stand now at least, underneath a ceiling that is perhaps fifteen or twenty feet tall.

These catacombs were made long ago as a refuge for an assault precisely like this one. There is a door on the other end of the rectangular-shaped room that will spit us out into the scrubby patch of wilderness on the steep back side of the hill on which our castle is perched. From there, we will find a way to one of the safe houses we keep around the city and decide our next move.

“There,” I point towards the door. “Go that way.” Luka hesitates until I point the gun at him. “Now.”

Sighing, he turns and heads where I have indicated.

But we all freeze when the door opens before we are even halfway across the space …

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