Page 13 of Shattered Cradle (Makarova Bratva Duet)

Her eyes go wide. The truth is clicking into place, slowly but surely. She wasn’t far from it already. She just needed a tiny little push.

“Are you saying that he’s the one trying to frame you?”

“Clever girl.” I smile.

She stares at me, but I can see the gears turning in her mind. She shakes her head like that’ll change what’s happening. “It doesn’t add up, Aleks.”

“Because the media says he’s some magnanimous superhero? Heisthe media, Olivia. He writes the stories. He shows you only what he wants you to see. If you believe the shit he feeds you, then you’re more of a fool than I ever thought you were.”

“He has… charities!”

She’s floundering in her defense. It won’t last much longer. Her voice is cracking, her resolve weakening.

“So do I,” I scoff. “That doesn’t mean I haven’t murdered men with my bare hands. If the contradiction surprises you, then you’re still not understanding how stories are built.”

“It… You… You’re bad. He’s good.”

I smile. The littlekiskais trying desperately to keep her worldview from crumbling. A kinder man would let her keep it, if only to serve as a pacifier.

Too bad I’m not a kinder man.

“You are only half-right, Olivia,” I rasp. “We both have darkness and lightness in us. Hargrove can help a child with one hand and kill its mother with the other. I can run a Bratva and a charity at the same time. But do you know what the difference is between us?”

“What?”

“At the end of the day, I have a code. He has none. Whatever serves him is what he does. But I don’t hurt women who haven’t earned it. I certainly don’t snatch them up and reduce them to mute, horrified dolls I can fuck.”

The silence that follows is rife with tension. I can practically hear the frenetic thumping of her heart.

The truth is a hard pill to swallow—but it’s the only thing that cures.

“Why should I believe you?” she whispers.

“The better question is, why should you believehim?”

“He’s my brother,” she says.

“And Hargrove?”

She hesitates. “Rob trusts him.”

“We’ve already established that your brother is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He believed Jennifer’s lies.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “He’s been hurt. Byyou.”

“Every single person on this planet has been hurt,” I retort. “Sometimes, you’ve got to take that hurt and harness it. You have to use it to make yourself stronger.”

“Is that what you do?”

“Every. Fucking. Time.”

She lowers her eyes. “I can’t imagine you ever hurting, to be honest.”

She whispers it more to herself than to me. But I feel the words as a throb in my chest.

She doesn’t see the depths of the pain. How it hurts me to hurt her, but how necessary it’s been. She doesn’t see what she means to me.

But I can hardly blame her.

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