Page 28 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

My skin is burning hot to the touch. I grab the whiskey decanter and draw another long drink from it. It tumbles into my stomach and adds to the heat I feel. Finally, when I can drink no more, I turn and hurl the decanter against the far wall. It collides and shatters into a million pieces instantly. The thing once belonged to my great-grandfather. Now it belongs to the trash can.

Fuck tradition. I am the don now. I will destroy whatever history I please.

When I am drunk and naked, I turn back to the mirror and look at myself. “You fucking weakling,” I snarl at my reflection. “Look at what you are doing. You are riddled with weakness. Rotting from the inside out. You couldn’t save them. You can’t even avenge them. Pathetic. You are fucking pathetic.”

My words seem to dissipate like steam in the bathroom, as if the walls are swallowing them up before they get a chance to reverberate. I sigh, crack my knuckles, and retreat back into the coolness of my bedroom.

What next? Do I slice my wrists open? Bash my head into the stone walls? How much penance must I perform for my moment of weakness in the basement chambers?

Breathe,I counsel myself.Now is not the time to lose your head.

I stand and count to one hundred until I feel myself regaining control. Only then do I open my eyes and take in the room once again.

My mahogany four-poster bed consumes the bulk of the space, though the high arched ceilings overhead make it feel like there is still room aplenty. I pad over to where the nightstand occupies one side. With hands that I notice have begun to tremble, I pull open the drawer, remove the false bottom, and reach within to grab the only thing I keep in there.

The Polaroid picture hasn’t faded much, though it has been nearly two decades since it was taken. Audrey looks the same as always. Raven-dark hair, buttermilk skin, hazel eyes that glimmer and seem to change shade if I turn the picture to one side or the other. She has a soft, enigmatic smile, that Mona Lisa quality where I am never sure if she is laughing with me or at me. She was young here, seventeen or eighteen by my count.

I lean against the poster of the bed and stare at her unblinking for so long that the picture starts to blur and fade. As my eyes struggle to focus, I notice that I am no longer seeing Audrey. Now, it is Milaya in the photo. The same dark hair, the same pale, creamy skin, the same kind of taunting, bewitching smile …

No,I say in my head.

“No,” I hiss out loud.

This is all fucked up. This is all so goddamn wrong. Why is my father dead? Why is my brother dead? Why is all of this happening?

“No!” I say again. The rage bubbles up for the umpteenth time tonight. I am filled with it and keep erupting at unexpected moments like a volcano that has been disturbed. Before I can stop myself, I take the picture in two hands and tear it in half. Taking the two halves, I lay them on top of each other and tear again. Then again, and once more, until the tattered shards of the only thing I ever loved go fluttering to the stone floor, carried to and fro by the faint drafts that seep in between the stones of the castle. I have never been so furious in my entire life. Not even on the night when she was taken from me.

She is downstairs. Not her, exactly, but a girl just like her. I think of Milaya’s terrified face when we entered the room. For the briefest of moments when she opened the door for us, she looked relieved. Like we were there to rescue her. How quickly that changed. How quickly everything has changed.

My cock stiffens at the thought of her bared abdomen as she lay unconscious on the table below. Dante’s teasing finger tracing along the bottom curve of her ribs—that makes the anger flare again. She looked like a butterfly pinned in a shadow box, too beautiful and fragile to be contained by something so sharp and cruel.

Before I know what is happening, my hand has found my hard cock and is pumping furiously. I am instantly on the edge of coming.

Milaya, Audrey, Audrey, Milaya …

That skin …

Those eyes …

That fucking, goddamn, cursed smile …

I come explosively, the final eruption of wrongness in a night—no, a week—full of it.

After I am finished, it takes me a long time to catch my breath again. Only then do I look down and see the torn pieces of photograph. This, too, was wrong. All of it. I shouldn’t have these thoughts of the Volkov girl. She is collateral, nothing more. But Audrey … Audrey was something special. I have tried to destroy her memory.

Falling to my knees hard enough that they scrape the stone floor and draw blood, I hunt frantically for the pieces of the picture. I pile them together. Only when I’m sure that I have every piece of it collected can I breathe again. Carefully, I pick up the stack and place it delicately back in its hiding place. I will fix it in the morning.

For now, I fall face-first onto my mattress and sleep the sleep of the dead.

8

Milaya

My head has never hurt worse in my entire life. My mouth is drier than a desert, my neck aches, my feet hurt. What happened?

I remember my very first hangover. I’d gone to a sleepover at my friend Crystal Simmons’ house with a half-empty fifth of Dad’s favorite vodka tucked into my backpack. She and I waited until her parents fell asleep, then snuck up into her attic and took turns passing the bottle back and forth until it was gone. I can still close my eyes and vividly recall the taste—like battery acid going down your throat—and how you could feel it even after it was in your belly, swishing around with a weird and somehow prickly warmth. We both got giggly and then sleepy in quick succession, and fell asleep in the attic after playing Twister or tag or something silly like that, I can’t exactly remember.

What I do remember is waking up in the early hours of the dawn. Crystal and I were still in the attic, and the gray morning light was filtering in through the tiny gaps between the roof and its supporting structure. I’d fallen asleep funny, so my neck was aching like I’d been stabbed, exactly the way it is aching now. It took me a long time to find my bearings and recall what happened, how we ended up there. “That was stupid,” I said back then. I swore to myself that I would never drink again.

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