Page 29 of Gilded Cage (Kovalyov Bratva 1)

“Your beauty sleep,” I finish, rolling my eyes. “If the point was to improve your appearance, I would start by shaving the pubes off your face.”

At that, Cillian sits up and looks at me with mock hurt. “Are you knocking my beard?” he asks pridefully.

“If you can even call it that.”

Cillian runs his hand through the scant blonde hair of his chin and checks his reflection in the car mirror.

“I just have to give it more time to fill out. It’s only been four months.”

I snort. “If four months isn’t enough to turn that dead rat on your lip into a real man’s beard, then you’re shit out of luck, amigo.”

“Blow me,” he retorts. Not his most eloquent comeback.

Four months.Has it really been that long?

An image of the girl’s face flashes across my eyes. I see her swollen lips, her matted hair, the rise and fall of her chest as she watched me zip myself up.

I’d walked out of that club bathroom without looking back.

That was four months ago.

“Is it really that bad?” Cillian asks, turning to me.

“You want my honest opinion?”

“I wasn’t aware that you had anything else to offer.”

“It looks like you covered your chin in honey and rolled around the floor of a barbershop.”

“For fuck’s sake, you’re an asshole.”

I chuckle. “You asked. I delivered.”

“I’m going to deliver a fist to your face if you keep it up.”

“That won’t end well for you, Irish boy.”

He scowls and goes back to examining his sparse blond whispers in the mirror. “Girls haven’t said anything,” he comments after a while.

I raise my eyebrows at him. “You don’t pay them for that.”

“Fuck you again. I don’t pay for sex.”

“You’re paying for my drinks tonight, though,” I remind him.

“Goddammit, you’re really holding me to that?”

I chuckle. “Fair’s fair. You shouldn’t make bets you can’t win. And you can’t hit the broadside of a barn with that Glock.”

We’d been to the shooting range earlier that day and I’d gamed Cillian for all the cash in his wallet. True to form, he wasn’t done betting even after taking such a brutal loss.

So when I’d cleaned him out a second time, he’d offered to buy all my drinks next time we went out.

Maybe that’d teach the stubborn bastard not to bet against Artem Kovalyov.

“Fine. You miserable son of a bitch. Where should we go? Decadente? Shangri-La? Oh, how ‘bout The Jungle? There’s a bottle girl there I’ve been dying to fuck.”

I shake my head. “Nope, nope, and nope.”

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