Page 52 of Bratva Queen

Stepan picked up a long, sharp knife from the steel table to the side, where other guards stood, swallowing deeply in fear. “You want to flirt with my guards, Isabel? Huh? You want to embarrass me in front of all of the staff?”

“No, no Stepan! That was not at all what happened!” I held the boys behind my legs and pleaded. “We werealllaughing together! It was an innocent joke!”

“Oh, you want to flirt with everyone, then?”

“No!”

“I guess just this one will have to do, to get the point across. Boys, make sure you watch; this will be your first lesson about keeping a firm grip on your household.”

He stood behind the innocent guard and slit his throat in one silent, clean movement. Blood splattered across the floor, staining my dress, a few droplets hitting my sons’ faces. I cried out and turned to hold them against me, to cover their eyes and wipe the blood from their sweet little faces.

Stepan left with one last sneer. “You don’t get to baby them, Isabel. This is their future. They will be ruthless Koslov kings one day; just like me.”

By morning light, I was gone. Swiftly helped out of the house by Lev, I somehow carried all three of my sons, with as big a bag as I could carry, straight into the city and caught a taxi downtown. I’d been saving cash secretly—at least I had that—but I couldn’t stay where Stepan’s interconnected web of spies would find me. We hid out in a motel far across the city for a few days while I planned my next steps. Buy a car, drive into the woods, build a shelter, I didn’t care! I couldn’t go back.

Of course, it was the biggest mistake I’d ever made. We were found, and once back at the house, we were separated. I no longer had access to my children—they were the Koslov heirs, and I’d tried to steal them away from Stepan.

He beat me in front of the crying children; they were screaming and blinded by their tears, but still he carried on. It was the worst beating he’d ever given me. I was no longer pregnant, and frankly, I didn’t think he cared if I died. I’d given him three heirs already, and I was becoming a liability.

I was locked in the room I once called my safe haven and only let out for supervised walks and supervised visits with my sons in their playroom. The nanny took such great pity on me, sometimes she would sneak them into my room while Stepan was out and the guards were all distracted.

But that wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. I missed them and I cried for them, while their traumatized minds blurred out the images they’d seen, and they laughed with childlike joy in their own little prison.

Chapter20

Aleksei

“Thank you, Igor,” I said into the phone at my desk. “I trust you’ll have the delivery ready for next week?”

Gregori walked into my office and sat back in the armchair in front of my desk, resting one leg over the other.

“Good. I’ll have the funds put together,” I said before I put the phone down and looked at him.

He lifted his eyebrows. “Business going well, I see?”

“Nothing for you to see,” I sat back, tipping my head to the side. “You have your own business to worry about.”

He rolled his eyes at me and stood up with a shrug, “Just trying to have a conversation, but okay then! If that’s the case I won’t bother you anymore.”

I watched him leave and close the door behind him. My brother had done well for himself in Saint Petersburg. I hadn’t spoken to him much before, but in the last five years I spent in the city we’d rekindled our sibling relationship, and I’d accepted his invitation to stay in his large city house.

After leaving Moscow and starting a life here as a tainted teen going through drug withdrawal, he’d struggled a lot. But he found himself waiting tables and got to know a regular at the restaurant, who was clearly a man of money. It didn’t surprise me that Gregori approached him and asked him what his secret was. It sounded just like him, looking for a shortcut to wealth. The man, a hedge fund manager, took him under his wing and taught him everything he knew. Gregori was successful; he looked calm, happy, and healthy, and that was all I wanted for him after all.

I wasn’t an idiot; I assumed his fund management wasn’t always above board, but I had my finger on the pulse of the Saint Petersburg bratva, and as long as I didn’t hear of him getting into that particular kind of fund management, it wasn’t my problem. He knew the boundaries; if he so much as made a passing comment about my work in the bratva, he’d get knocked into next week. He’d put me here. I’d made it work. He didn’t get to say a word about it or get involved in any way because then, what was this all for? If he threw away the sacrifice I made for him, then my staying away from Isabel was for nothing. And I wasn’t about to let that happen.

He hadn’t married; he was only in his 30s and still seeing a string of gold-digging women whom he used equally for their bodies. When I accepted his invitation to live with him, I made sure to include the condition that I had my own side of the house and my own office. Which of course, he didn’t always respect.

The phone on my desk rang again, and I absentmindedly picked up. “Chernoff.”

“Alek!” Stepan’s voice surprised me. “You’ve been very successful there in Saint Petersburg, huh?”

“You know that already, boss,” I answered, not exactly in the mood for his playful banter. He knew me, I just liked to get business done. “Was there something you needed?”

“Yes, actually. I want you to come home.”

I sat forward in my chair. “Home? To Moscow? Why?”

I’d tried to convince Stepan to have me go back to Moscow on multiple occasions. After I’d set up a strong, trustworthy bratva team here, after I’d trained a right-hand man to take over from me, I’d done whatever I could to make it easy for me to get up and go back. But he’d always denied me, almost absentmindedly, as though it was an unnecessary trouble.

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