Page 14 of Immaculate Corruption (Romanoff Bratva)

Her voice wobbles as she starts to whimper, “Dima, I…”

And then she swings a vicious knee up towards my crotch.

If I were any other man, she would’ve had enough of a surprise advantage to do what she wanted to do: cripple me and run.

But I’m not any other man. I’m Dima fucking Romanoff. I’ve trained my whole life to be goddamn untouchable. And this petite little veterinarian, as fiery as she is, will not be the first one to catch me by surprise.

I leap out of the way of her flying strike. At the same time, I grab her by the throat and use her momentum to swing her into the brick wall behind her. She slams into it hard. All the breath rushes out of her lungs.

She tries to beat me with her free hands, but she’s too weak to do anything close to real damage. They swat helplessly at my shoulders until I snare one wrist in my grasp and pin it to the wall next to her head.

“We’ve been here before, haven’t we?” I hiss in her face. “Me choking the life out of you. You begging me for mercy. But you’ve used up all of the mercy I had for you, Arya. When you lied. When you hid. And now it’s time to pay the piper.”

“You’re going to kill your mother’s son?” she rasps with the last of her breath.

I squeeze tighter, tighter, tighter…

Then I step back, release her, and let her slide into a sobbing puddle on the ground.

I can’t admit, even to myself, what that pitiful sight does to me. I want to pick her up and clean the dirt from her hands. I want to take her in the shower like I did after I saved her from Taras’s house of horrors and rinse all the pain away.

But I can’t. Shehasto pay. It’s the only way. It’s how I was taught, how I was raised, how this world works.

If I forgave her, what kind of man would that make me?

Weak. Cowardly. Not fit to be don.

So it has to be like this. She has to burn beneath the full heat of my rage.

“No,” I breathe down towards her. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to use you instead.”

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, Arya slinks out of the motel room. I’m standing in the shadows beneath the awning. Just out of sight of the people in the room. But I can see them through a crack in the blinds.

The old woman. The little girl.

And my son.

The little girl—June, I think her name was—is playing with Lukas. Tickling his toes and blowing raspberries on his round belly. I can’t hear any sound from inside, but I can imagine the sound of his laughter.

It tears my fucking chest apart.

That is my son.My boy. Mymalyshka.

He’s only a few feet away. I could easily rip this door off the hinges and take him away with me.

But the same question that stopped me from doing that the first time around still persists: what kind of life would he have with me?

I’ve seen so much blood. Both my own and the blood of men I’ve killed. I’ve always tried to use my power to make the underworld a better place. To rid it of the true filth. But there’s only so much one man can do. Even a man like me.

If I took Lukas into my empire… I’d have to mold him the same way I was molded. And I remember all too well how that went. I still have the scars to prove it. Ilyasov does, too.

“How long are you going to keep lurking in the shadows like the world’s biggest creep?” Arya scoffs.

She’s leaning up against a chipped stone pillar, arms crossed over her chest, watching me.

I scowl. “I wouldn’t be cracking jokes if I were you.”

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