Page 138 of Immaculate Corruption (Romanoff Bratva)

No, it’s not a dream—it’s a memory.Thememory. The fork in time where all this shit began.

* * *

Ten Years Ago—The Romanoff Mansion

I’m standing over my sleeping brother with a knife in my grasp. Five minutes ago, Father pressed the blade into my hands and told me what I had to do.

But I can’t fucking do it.

My whole life, I’ve been training for this moment. I’ve learned how to kill. How to lie. How to rule. And now, the Romanoff Bratva empire is right there for the taking.

All I have to do is plunge this knife into my brother’s chest, and it will all be mine. I’ll be the don I’ve always longed to be.

But I can’t. Fucking. Do it.

“Faltering at the final moment, brother?” comes a voice from the darkness.

I blink in confusion. “You’re awake?”

“I’ve been awake since the moment you came in here,” Ilyasov says. He sits up in bed and pushes the covers off. His eyes are wide awake, but they’re as dark as they’ve always been. Like a shark’s eyes, cunning and alert.

“Then why didn’t you do anything?” I ask. “Why didn’t you try to stop me?”

He shrugs. “I didn’t think you could go through with it. Looks like I was right, doesn’t it?”

I let the hand holding the gleaming knife fall by my side. “Fuck.”

Ilyasov clasps my shoulder. “It’s okay, Dima,” he croons. “I have something to show you, too.”

He pulls the blankets off of his lap and shows me what he’s holding: a sharpened knife of his own.

“Father gave me the same task,” he explains. “‘Kill your brother and the Bratva is yours. Kill the thing you love most in this world and you can have it all.’ Does that sound familiar?”

My blood feels like ice in my veins. Word for word, Father told me the same thing in his office just moments ago before dispatching me to end Ilyasov’s life.

Turns out it was a test. A lie. A scheme.

“Don’t fret, brother,” Ilyasov says. “I have a better plan, anyway.”

He tells it to me.

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. But when he’s done, the only sound in the room is our mingled breathing. And I realize: there’s no other way forward.

I can’t kill my brother. He can’t kill me. So this is what must be done.

Without saying a word, Ilyasov and I slide out of his bedroom. We go down the stairs and find the ballroom. This is where Father told us each to come meet him once our task was done. Some sort of twisted fucking symbolism in it that I don’t bother to decipher.

In unison, we pause outside the door.

Ilyasov looks at me.

I look at Ilyasov.

Then he pushes it open.

Father is standing with his back to us, hands clasped behind him. At the sound of our approach, he doesn’t turn. He just snarls in that savage, raspy voice of his, “Which one of you has come back to me alive?”

Ilyasov speaks first. “Both of us.”

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