Page 129 of Immaculate Deception (Romanoff Bratva)

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know the whole story.

My secrets are safe.

“Dima, I swear to God, I will tell you everything. But not right now. We have to leave. People are coming for us and—”

“Leave Arya alone!” comes a tiny voice.

Oh God. Oh no.

Dima and I both look over at the same time to see June striding out from around the car. Ernestine is trying to reel her back in, but the little girl is defiant.

My eyes bulge. “June, honey, go back with your grandma!” I beg. “This isn’t about you.”

It’s like she doesn’t even hear me. As if, instead of seeing me with a gun in my face, she’s seeing her own mother kneeling in the dirt.

“Leave Arya alone!” she cries again. She’s sobbing hysterically.

Everything next happens so fast.

June lunges for the gun…

I dive to stop her…

Dima tries to move out of the way…

And then—

BANG.

A gunshot slices through the night.

My eyes close. Same as I did in Taras’s house, I wait for the pain to come.

But the same thing happens now that happened back then: it never arrives.

I open my eyes and look up at Dima, shocked he would pull the trigger.

That’s when I realize… he didn’t.

Someone else did.

46

Dima

“Get down!” I roar, more out of instinct than anything else.

Arya ducks into the front seat of my vehicle and I follow behind her. The old lady and the little girl go scrambling into the mini-van parked in the driveway and peel out fast.

Just across the street are two black cars with tinted windows. Someone pops up from the passenger side with a gun in hand.

I recognize Fyodor.

The fucking scum found us. I should have hunted him down and killed him when he dared to come after me the first time.

Too late for that now.

“It’s Zotov and his goons,” I curse. “How the fuck…?”

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