Page 10 of Immaculate Deception (Romanoff Bratva)

“Hold on, Dima. We should—”

BOOM.

Gennady doesn’t even have a chance to finish his sentence before a huge explosion rocks the room.

I drop into an instinctive crouch and whip out my gun. Next to me, Gennady throws himself on the floor and finds his own weapon.

The windows rattle, the walls shake, and car alarms all down the street start going off.

“What the fuck was that?” I jump up and run to the window.

“Stay low!” Gennady is still sprawled in the middle of the room, though he’s getting back up to his feet now.

I scan the street below. People are coming out of their houses to figure out what the noise was. It isn’t hard to see.

A car on the street exploded.

There’s a smoking crater along the curb where it was parked. Foul black fumes are swirling up into the air and fire is licking at the charred metal remnants. Even the tires are completely melted, turning into a river of dark sludge creeping down into the storm drains.

I feel Gennady walk up behind me and look over my shoulder. “Shit, man. Is that—”

“My car,” I finish for him with a nod.

Fuck.

Gennady starts making calls immediately. But there’s no point, really. As soon as I see the ragdoll corpse sprawled at the side of what was once an absurdly expensive top-of-the-line Range Rover, the conclusion is obvious.

Zotov sent one of his men to rig my car with a bomb. Unfortunately for him, the idiot blew himself up in the process.

His plan didn’t work, but his intentions are now crystal clear: I’m under attack from my own men. We are long past the point of talking this out.

“It’s not running away,” Gennady sighs, handing me a burner phone and his car keys. “It’s regrouping. You need to get out of the city. We can’t put Zotov back in his place if you’re dead.”

“It sure as hell looks like I’m running. Feels that way, too.”

Gennady is ready to tear his hair out in frustration with my stubbornness. “Good! Great! Wonderful! Let them think you’re running. Hopefully, that means they’ll let their guard down. It will be easier to destroy them all if they think you aren’t a threat.”

I hate the idea that I’ll look weak, but Gennady is right. This tiny detour will give me the element of surprise.

Lull my enemies into complacency… then plant a knife right between their shoulder blades.

I look him in the eyes. “Fine,” I growl. “I’ll go. But I’m coming back very fucking soon. And when I do return, I’m returning with a gun in each hand. Zotov is gonna suffer,sobrat.I swear it.”

Gennady nods solemnly. “You go alone for now. One man is less suspicious than a pair of us. I’ll be here gathering more intel. We’ll reconvene when the time is right.”

We shake hands. Then I use the fire escape in the back of his place to clamber out and down to the street.

Gennady’s car is parked on the other side of the block, thankfully, which means it wasn’t destroyed in the blast like mine. I eye the blast site mournfully.

Goddammit. I really loved that car.

As I get in Gennady’s sedan and drive away, I see squad cars squealing onto the scene and an ambulance pulling up along the curb.

And, out of the corner of my eye, I spy the last bloodied fragments of the poor idiot who apparently didn’t do so well in bomb school.

Good fucking riddance.

One less traitor to kill.

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