Page 57 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

I hesitate, then shake my head and tell him the truth. “I don’t know much. Your names. That’s about it.”

“You’ve heard of us before?”

“No.”

“Our family?”

“No.”

He strokes his chin. “Interesting. I would’ve thought that your father would tell you something about the Biancis.”

“He would have if it was just him, probably. But my mom didn’t like him to talk about anything that might upset or endanger me.”

Leo laughs. “Fat lot of a good that did you.”

I nod. “Sure doesn’t feel like it.”

“Our family is old,” Mateo says with the air of a historian launching into an origin story. “We go back nearly seven generations.”

“Here comes the boring part,” Dante drawls. He refills his wineglass and offers me the bottle to refill mine as well. I bite my lip to keep from laughing as Mateo fixes his wild younger brother with a glare.

“As I was saying,” he continues, “the family business has taken different forms over the years, but it has always been just that—a family business.” He points at the building around us. “This is the Bianci Castle. My grandfather’s grandfather built it nearly two hundred years ago. Since the walls went up, this has been the beating heart of the Biancis. We live here. We work here.”

“You drug and murder people here?” I cut in.

Mateo tilts his head and gazes at me soberly. “When our duties call for it, we do what must be done.”

“That’s some cryptic bullshit,” I argue. “You’re criminals. Don’t act like you’re some holier-than-thou guardians of the city.”

“We do what must be done,” he repeats.

“She’s right, you know,” Dante interjects. “This city is our cash cow, not our fucking ward or whatever. We don’t do this shit for our health.”

“We keep the peace,” Vito says in a quiet, steely voice.

“Wedid,” replies Dante without missing a beat. “And look where that got us.”

“Shut up,” Mateo snarls. “This is neither the time nor the place.”

“What is the time and place then,fratello?Eh? How long are we supposed to play mind games with this fucking Russian whore? Eh?!”

He pounds the table with a fist. I jump at the sudden noise. There’s a tinny little voice in my head that wants to be offended at what he called me. A fucking Russian whore? He’s not exactly mincing his words here. It’s clear that, out of all the brothers, Dante is the most violent one and the one least inclined to keep me alive and breathing. For whatever reason—whatever is the cause of the pain that lives behind his eyes like a wild beast—he sees me as the cause. He also sees my death as the solution.

Vito stands up, his chair screeching out behind him. “You are out of line,” he says to Dante. When Dante starts to respond, Vito jabs his fork through the air. “No. No more. Not in front of the girl.”

“Let him talk!” I blurt.

I want to hear what Dante really thinks. He might hate me and want me dead, but he’s the only one who is willing to speak the truth around here. Vito and Mateo think that they can just crack my mind wide open and rewire me, and Leo doesn’t seem to give a damn one way or the other. Yeah, Dante wants to kill me. He’s honest about it though. For some reason, that honesty seems terribly important to me.

Vito settles back into his chair. He looks so impossibly weary all of the sudden. He can’t be more than thirty-five at the most, and yet the exhaustion in his eyes is decades greater than that. I can see how tired he is in the slope of his shoulders, the grimace he wears at all times. Part of me wants to comfort him, inexplicably. To lay his head in my lap and tell him to sleep, that everything will be okay.

Then I remember who and what he is, and that feeling disappears at once.

“Fine,” he grits out. “The floor is yours. I don’t give a fuck anymore.”

Dante offers Vito a mocking half-bow. Then he turns to fix me with his cold, hard stare. “Our family has had a hand in just about every crime that’s been perpetrated in this city for the last hundred-plus years. Either we did it or we gave permission to someone else to do it. If some granny got mugged on a street corner, the mugger only did it with our okay, or else he got what was coming to him. We ran shit, we took our cut, we hid the bodies when they needed hiding. And it made us richer than God. That’s our story, little Russian. Nothing more to it than that. No matter what my esteemed brothers like to think.”

“Okay,” I whisper. I don’t know what else to say, although “okay” is a pretty stupid answer by anyone’s standards. I mean, am I supposed to say they’re forgiven? That they’re bad men? Dante doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about absolution or condemnation, even if I was in a position to give him one or the other. He just seemsangry.Burning up with such an intense rage that—even now, in the midst of a peaceful, ostensibly classy dinner in his own family castle—it threatens to overwhelm him and anyone in his vicinity.

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