Page 35 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

I’m a Bratva princess who has been snatched up by the worst men alive.

I have to get the hell out of here.

“Okay,” I say to her. I don’t know what else to say. It’s a lot to process.

My own supposed best friend sold me out to mobsters. I guess I can’t blame her. She doesn’t know about this side of my life, the underworld I was born and raised in. I don’t even know that much about it, to be honest. My father told me only what I needed to know and tried to shelter me from the rest of it. But I see now that that was a mistake. Because I’m trapped in the lion’s den with no knowledge of why or how or what to do next. I’m helpless, and I can’t stand that.

I’ll have to figure this out myself. I make a solemn promise to myself: I will not die in here. I don’t care if I have to fight all the brothers to the death with my bare hands.

I will either free myself or die trying.

The door to my side of the compartment swings open again before Anastasia can respond. Leo is standing there, swinging the keychain in his hands.

“Time’s up,” he purrs.

I stand up and shuffle towards him. My ankle chain drags across the stone, rasping into the silence. I start to go down the hallway, back towards where we came from, but he puts a hand on my shoulder to stop me.

“Wait.”

He goes over to the other half of the compartment and opens the door. Anastasia stumbles out. Her face is streaked with tears and ruined makeup, but she is dressed normally and I don’t see any cuffs on her. So they really did offer her a deal. Give me up and they’d spare her. Part of me wants to pity the girl. She could’ve had a happy life if she’d never been friends with me.

Look what my family name has cost her.

Everything.

“I’m sorry,” she wails again, and she throws herself at me, wrapping me up in a hug. It’s a sick replay of the hug she greeted me with when I walked into her apartment before the party. I can smell her, feel the softness of her hair. She’s crying with her face pressed against my neck. I have no tears left, though. She did what she had to do. I’m about to do what I have to do.

I reach a hand up to the back of her head as I hug her back. “It’s okay,” I mutter, weaving my fingers through her hair to hold her close. “It’s okay.”

“Enough,” Leo says a moment later.

Reluctantly, Anastasia extricates herself from me and takes a step back. She gives me one last long, mournful look before she turns to look at Leo.

“That way,” he says, pointing the other way down the corridor. “Your ride is waiting for you.”

She nods, swallows, then steps around me and disappears into the darkness.

When she is gone, Leo leads me back towards the rectangle of light that we entered through. We walk through, back into the vast, empty chamber. I see now that it is brimming with sinister-looking blades, wooden crosses, leather tie-downs, all kinds of weapons and torture devices. Bad things have happened here, I can tell. The air itself is humming with it.

Instead of taking me back to the table, Leo guides me towards one of the cells carved into the far wall. He opens the thick metal door made of corrugated steel and ushers me in. Inside, there is a thin mattress, the kind you’d see on a cot, along with a bucket. There is a tiny window cut high into one wall that lets in a sliver of moonlight. Everything else is cold, bare stone.

I step in and turn to look at him. He keeps his ice-blue eyes locked on mine until the very last moment, when the door swings between us and slams shut. The stones reverberate with the sound. I sink to a seat on the floor and pull the blanket tighter around myself.

Leo’s footsteps are faint, but they disappear. I hear the slamming of a second door. So he is gone now.

I count up to five hundred, then back down, just to be sure.

Only then do I pull out the bobby pin I stole from Anastasia’s hair and start trying to pick the locks on my wrists and ankles.

10

Vito

Leo slinks upstairs in that way of his. So feline. Balletic. I might call him a fairy if I hadn’t seen a hundred times over what he can do to an enemy with a KA-BAR knife and a little bit of rage. Women certainly love his aura though. Ever since we were young, scarcely teenagers, and I found out that Leo was fucking the nanny twice a week, I have known that he has a way with the opposite sex.

We’re sitting in the den. It is a massive room with cathedral-esque ceilings. High, dark, drafty as hell. The room is centered around a huge hearth, in which a fire burns. Each of us are seated in one of the five high-backed armchairs scattered around the thick Persian rug. I am drinking whiskey, as is Dante. As I watch, Leo uncorks a bottle of wine from the bar area off to one side and fills a glass for himself.

“Bring the bottle,” Mateo mutters. Leo brings it over and hands it off before taking a seat of his own.

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