Page 75 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

“What are you doing out here, Dante?”

“I might ask you the same question.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“I’d rather a lot of things be different than they are,fratello.”

He scowls again, the infamous Leo Bianci scowl that half the city’s female socialites have driven themselves crazy over. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Nor am I,” I tell him. I hand him the flask from my back pocket. Warm whiskey swishes around inside it. He starts to shake his head, then reconsiders and takes it from me. He uncaps it, holds it up to his lips, and takes a long swallow. I watch in mild amusement as the grimace spreads across his face when it hits his tongue.

“Christ, you drink horse’s piss.”

“It’s best not to make your vices taste too good.”

He laughs bitterly at that. “I know too well what you mean.”

“I thought so. Is that what has you prowling the courtyard in the night?”

Leo turns away from me a bit, as if he doesn’t want me to see the emotions that are playing out behind his eyes. He is unusually vulnerable right now, for a man who has spent his whole life burying things deep below the surface. I can see clearly the pain written in his face. It is just like I thought. We are suffering from the same affliction.

“Something like that,” he mutters.

I pause before I speak my mind. If I say what I want to say, I will open a Pandora’s box that cannot be sealed again. But how much longer can it live in the darkness? This thing tearing up each of us will bring the walls crashing down if we don’t acknowledge it. It might already be too late, in fact.

“It’s her, isn’t it?”

He turns back around to face me. The moon catches only half his face, so the other is shrouded in darkness. “You too, then.”

“Me too,” I sigh.

“Come,” he tells me. “Let’s walk.”

We move through the courtyard into the garden that sits at the end away from the castle. There is a dirt path lined with rocks that winds through the shadowy tree trunks. It ends in a white-painted gazebo in a small glade. When we reach it, we sink to a seat on the steps.

Leo hands me the flask and I take another sip. Sins compounding sins. At this point, what is one more? The whiskey may not quiet my demons any longer, but it’s better than twiddling my thumbs idly.

“I can’t close my eyes without seeing her,” he whispers. He keeps his gaze rooted straight ahead like he can’t bear to look at me. I glance at him, though I feel the same burning shame. But he is right—it is too much. I look away too, reducing Leo to nothing more than a disembodied voice in the night.

“We should never have brought her here.”

“Don’t say that,” he snaps.

I arch my eyebrows in surprise but say nothing.

“Don’t say that,” he repeats, quieter this time and less forceful, like maybe he thinks I have a point after all.

“You think it was wise then?”

“I just … I don’t know what I would be feeling if we had killed her on the spot.”

I nod. That was, of course, the only alternative. One way or another, our paths were going to cross with Milaya Volkov. But for that to be the outcome—I shudder at the thought of seeing her dead and broken at my feet. That image dissipates in my head and is replaced with the one of her riding me, breasts bared to the moonlight, holding a gleaming knife to my throat and coaxing me to come so hard it felt like I was emptying my soul into the girl. A wild princess. A savage queen. Owning me, taming me, and submitting to me all at the same time. It was a fucking conundrum like no other.

“It’s too late now,” I offer.

“It’s too late for many things.”

“That too.”

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