Page 66 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

I heard her watch beep, signaling the top of the hour. I frowned. “I’m going to have to leave soon,” I muttered.

“No!” she yelped plaintively. She grinned. God, how I loved that grin. “Don’t. Stay.” We were curled together, naked bodies aligned, in a dingy motel in the San Fernando Valley. Far away from prying eyes. We purchased the room with cash, arrived separately, would leave separately. But still, I couldn’t stop myself from glancing at the curtain-covered windows every five minutes, or checking to make sure that the gun I’d laid down on the bedside table was loaded with the safety off. “Enemies are everywhere,” went the lessons that had been as good as carved on the inside of my skull from sheer, mind-numbing repetition. “You can never rest.”

Seventeen years old and I lived like I was ten times that age. So much depended on me. If I stopped, I would die. We would all die.

Perhaps that is why it felt like such a sin to steal these silent, unmoving moments in this shithole motel. To lie there and breathe in time with Audrey was like spitting in my father’s face. I relished every second of it.

I could see the early gray light of dawn peeking through the curtains. My brothers would be waking soon and the day’s training would begin. I had to be on the move before then, so I could take the taxi back to the gates and find the gardener who would let me in the side entrance. If I wasn’t at breakfast with my siblings, all hell would break loose. Questions would be asked, questions for which I had no good answers. It was better to avoid that storm entirely.

So I had to leave soon. But I wanted just a moment longer here. With Audrey’s hair splayed across my chest, her scent in my nose, her hand idly tracing the crests and valleys in my abdomen. “Tell me a secret, V,” she whispered breathily in my ear. “Something you’ve never told anyone before.”

I laughed. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

“I’m serious,” she snapped, swatting me on the arm. She softened. “You can trust me, V. I won’t tell anyone. You’re the only person who matters to me anyway.”

I couldn’t deny the truth of that. Iwasall she had. Her father had passed away two years prior from a heart attack. She was lucky that it hadn’t happened on the castle grounds, or else his body might have disappeared forever. No funeral, no trace to be found. My father didn’t want any police or paramedics to set so much as a single foot on our property, no matter the reason.

As it was, he had died peacefully in his sleep. He had been a hardworking man, a kind man, but an irredeemably sad one. He spent his whole life sweating his ass off just to scrape a meager living together for him and his daughter. And then he died. I almost pitied him. Life was cruel.

I wondered what kind of secret Audrey wanted to hear from me. My life was full of secrets, of course, but not the kind she gave a damn about. The secrets that filled my days were more about offshore bank accounts, the movement of product across state and country borders, the art of making people disappear. But that was all just business, and Audrey hated business. She liked to pretend that I wasn’t: the son of the Bianci Mafia don, the heir apparent, the crown prince. That’s why she called me “V,” I think—so that I was just hers, so that I didn’t belong to my family or my father or my responsibilities. Just a seventeen-year-old boy in a motel room, placed on this earth for the purpose of loving her.

I liked being her V.

But I knew from the tone of her voice that she wanted a real secret. She wouldn’t be content with a joke or a deferral. She wanted truth. Honesty. Vulnerability. Things that were foreign and frightening to me. I could face down a man and kill him with my bare hands, but the thought of baring myself to another human being was incomprehensible. It just did not compute.

And yet, when she kissed me, when she touched me, when she looked at me—it felt possible.

I opened my mouth to answer her question, then let it fall closed again. “I—”No, not like that. Try again. Tell her a secret.“I …” I was floundering. Such a simple question. Just tell her a secret that I’d never told before.Do it, you coward. Open your fucking lips.

I seized the words in my head, the ones that were desperately trying to wriggle away from me, and I let them loose before I could chicken out again. “I am a bad, broken person. I want to kill my father. I want to burn down my home. I want to run away with you and leave all of this behind.”

When I was finished blurting all of that, I fell silent. My chest was heaving with effort, though I hadn’t moved a muscle, and I could feel sweat dripping down my brow.

Saying those things was a violation of everything I had ever been taught. It wasn’t just spitting in Father’s face to say I wanted to leave—it was stabbing him in the heart and watching him bleed out at my feet.

But God, it felt good. I knew I had spoken honestly because of how good and cleansing it felt. I hated my training. I hated the future that had been laid out for me. I just didn’t know it until now. There had never been an alternative. Until Audrey.

She looked me in the face. Those hazel eyes glistened in the dim lamplight. “You are not a bad person, V. You aren’t broken. Not unless you choose to be.”

I wanted so badly to believe her. That urge rose up in me until it choked me out and brought tears to my eyes. For the briefest of moments, I think I actually did. Everything felt possible. There was another future I could reach out and grab. A future with her. A future far from here, free from blood and anger and cruelty and revenge and all the other dark things that clouded my day-to-day. I could have it.

Reach out and take it. Do it, now.

“Come here,” I told her. I turned on my side to press my forehead against hers as I cupped her face in my hands. “I want to make love to you once more before I have to go.”

I pulled her into a kiss and we joined our sweaty bodies together. I bathed in freedom I’d never felt before.

I should have known it was never going to last.

* * *

The man in front of me is scared for his life. As he should be. If I have my way, he will not live to see the dawn.

“You know who I am, yes?” I ask him.

“Da.”

“Speak English, motherfucker,” Dante snarls. He’s standing behind the Russian, who is cuffed and kneeling. One of Dante’s hands is keeping a tight grip on the dog collar that’s been fastened around our enemy’s throat. The other hand is fiddling with his knife. He is antsy to use it, though the blade is already stained with the blood of the other men who were drinking with our target at a grimy nightclub in Brentwood.

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