Page 64 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

Then she is gone.

18

Vito

The Next Night

I spent years dreaming about tonight. All through the training of my youth, I endured just so I could get to this moment. It was my birthright, my destiny, my inevitable destination.

Yet here I am, and all I can think about is when it will be over.

The lieutenants—the newly promoted ones, filling the shoes of those lost in the massacre at the Russians’ warehouse—are gathered in the meeting chambers, as are my brothers. The ceremonial knife sits on a velvet-covered pedestal in the middle of the circle. It’s waiting for me to do what generations of Bianci dons before me have done: slice open my palm and declare my reign begun.

Fuck that. Fuck this. Fuck everything.

I was meant to be here, yes. But not like this. Never like this.

“Let’s get this shit over with,” I mutter to Mateo.

“That is a bad way to begin things, brother.”

“Since when are you superstitious?”

He just grunts. Leave it to him to go silent at the worst possible moment. Can’t get him to shut up when he’s lecturing, and yet when all I want is for someone to tell me that I do not bear the responsibility for my father’s and brother’s deaths, he says nothing. Lie to me if you must—I don’t fucking care. But for one second, just one single goddamn second, can’t someone lift this weight off my shoulders?

No. They can’t. It’s my cross to bear. I am the don. I must drag us kicking and screaming into the future. If I don’t, we’ll all die. Those are the only options.

“Let us begin,” I announce into the room.

Everyone falls silent at once.

Mateo looks at me. I give him a curt nod and he begins reading in Italian. I don’t bother listening. I studied the text he’s reading from in my younger days. My thoughts on it haven’t changed since my father first threw it across my desk when I was scarcely thirteen years old. It is all bullshit mumbo-jumbo, the rantings and ravings of a long-dead Bianci don from back in the old country. Practically meaningless today. Nowhere in there is anything that will help me now. Supposedly, it contains the guiding principles of our family. The Bible of crime lords, so to speak.

But there is only one rule that matters anymore.

If you stop, you die.

Simple as that.

It is a long passage, so I have plenty of time to think while Mateo lilts nonsense in our mother tongue. I choose to daydream and reflect on better times.

My thoughts stray to Milaya. She has been upstairs for scarcely a day and a half, and it already feels as though the entire castle has become imbued with her spirit. Her smell lingers in the hallways. I found a stray hair of hers on the bearskin rugs in front of the hearth early this morning and it damn near floored me.

I cannot look at her without thinking of Audrey. And because of that, I am undone, a blubbering fucking mess, at the perfectly wrong time for that to happen. It’s like she is ripping me apart at the seams, merely by having dark hair and pale skin and shining green eyes. How many thousands if not millions of women does that describe? It doesn’t matter to my heart though. It sees what it sees. It wants what it wants.

And it has decided that it wants her.

I should know better. I trained to prevent exactly this. Meditation and fighting and psychological warfare—these were the things that filled my childhood days from sunup until sundown. I was taught to turn myself into an impenetrable fortress. I am failing at that simple task.

My walls were breached once already by the daughter of a mechanic. And now—magnitudes worse—they have been breached again, this time by my enemy’s spawn.

I shudder.

I wish badly that Sergio were here. He always knew what to say in moments like these, or even when to say nothing at all. He would have been able to look at me and, just by placing a hand on my shoulder, ease the pain that has been wracking me since we first brought her home.

But he is dead. He cannot help me. No one can.

The ritual unfolds as it has done dozens of times before me, and as it will dozens of times after me, if the Biancis survive what is waiting for us on the horizon. Mateo finishes speaking and directs me to the middle of the circle. I repeat what he tells me to repeat, then I pick up the knife and cut my hand open and let the crimson droplets drip onto the stone pedestal. I think of Milaya the whole time. I might as well not even be here, for all the attention I’m paying to proceedings. I am on autopilot, wondering what to do, what not to do. What is right, what is wrong. What is behind us, what is yet to come.

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