Page 97 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

A man steps into the light.

He is almost impossibly tall, with shoulders as wide as a doorframe. He is too far away to make out much of his face. But I don’t need to be close to know what he looks like. I have seen it plenty. Up close and personal, just inches away from mine. How many nights have I seen that face? Too many to count. In real life, in my dreams—it won’t leave me alone. That aquiline nose. Those verdant green eyes, like an ancient forest underneath the canopy of thick, dark eyebrows.

This can’t be real. I’m dreaming. I have to wake up.

But I know I’m not.

How many times over the last few weeks have I tried to pretend I was Dorothy in Oz? How many times did I click my heels together and say, “There’s no place like home”? Too many to count.

But here’s the other thing I’ve learned:

Home isn’t heaven, either.

Home might even be worse than this hell I’ve found myself in. At least, in this messed-up nightmare, the demons announce themselves as such. They don’t hide who they are and what they want.

Home … home is where the devils dress up as angels and say they’re here to save you. Home is a thicket of lies. A hell of its own making, too.

Funny that I should be thinking of home right now. Because the man standing underneath the light is the one who ripped back the curtain and showed me the ugly underbelly of everything I once knew and loved.

He sees me now. I can tell he does, though he doesn’t move or acknowledge me at all. He simply stands under the light, awash in orange. He’s wearing a dark navy suit over a crisp white shirt. Both are torn to shreds and stained with blood. One of his hands is bloody, too. It drips from his fingertips and puddles on the sidewalk beneath him.

His other hand is holding a gun.

I freeze like a deer caught in the headlights. He won’t fire. At least, I don’t think he will. But there are no rules left to be followed. The game has been broken wide open. Up is down and left is right. The good guys are the bad guys and the bad guys are—fuck, I don’t know what they are. Or who they are. Or what they want.

As I watch, another man materializes next to the first. Just as tall, just as broad. His hair is shaggier, hanging almost down to his shoulders. I can see the glint of an ear piercing. I know from firsthand experience that the rest of his body is similarly riddled with piercings and tattoos. The angle of the streetlight throws his five-o’clock shadow into sharp relief. He looks dirty, savage, like a wild beast merely pretending to be a man.

I didn’t know it was possible, but at the sight of him, my heart sinks even lower.

I knew that he was with his brothers, of course. They were all after me, moving as one, as a pack of wolves, of hyenas. But somehow, seeing him here and now, in the dead of the night, is even more haunting than it was the first night I woke up.

He was the first one of them I saw. He sat in the corner of the room they held me in. I heard him before I saw him, actually. The sound of a blade sliding against a whetstone, again and again.

When I opened my drug-addled eyes, I saw him there, casually leaning backwards on a stool propped against the stone wall like this was no big deal. Like he did this all the fucking time. Like sharpening his knife and looking at a bound, captive girl was no big deal. Just another day in the life.

I knew instantly that he was unhinged. His eyes told the whole story. Pain swam in them like molten lava. He had honey-colored irises—if honey had a lethal aftertaste.

I see now that he is holding that same knife. His hands, like his brother’s, are stained with blood.

I start to back away. I want to be anywhere but here.

As I watch, a third man steps into the light. He is jaw-droppingly beautiful. Even now, in the midst of all this whatever-you’d-call-it—chaos? nightmare? hellscape?—I sense his beauty and let out a soft sigh. His jaw is sharp enough to slice you wide open. His lips can say and do such beautiful things to me. I know this because he’s said them. He’s done them. Hell, I asked for it. I begged him to trace his lips down the curve of my neck, between my breasts, past the hollows in my hips, and down … I wanted it so badly. And he gave it to me—in a manner of speaking. But like an evil genie, the wish he granted was somehow everything I wanted and nothing of the sort, all at the same time.

The third man’s eyes are cold, blue, and clear. Right now, they betray nothing. A mountain lake, undisturbed by even the tiniest ripple. Like the first man, he is wearing a suit. The slacks, at least. The jacket must have been lost somewhere in the mayhem that all of us left behind. His white dress shirt is crisply ironed, the first few buttons rakishly undone. Somehow, he made it through everything with only one drop of blood staining the collar.

I count the men again. One, two, three. Green eyes, blue eyes, honey eyes.

But the fourth is missing.

The one who started it all.

The one whose voice, whose touch, whose very essence is seared into my soul like a cattle brand.

Where is Vito Bianci?

I turn and find out immediately.

Vito’s chest is as solid as granite when I turn and collide into him. How he snuck up behind me without making a sound, I’ll never know. There are many things I’ll never know about Vito. He is like an ocean of oil, hiding so many secrets beneath his surface.

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