Bratva Beast: A Dark Romance

“All right. And I figure you’ll want to stop at home and get clothes.”

“Ideally, yeah.” I didn’t meet his gaze for a second. “I’ve been thinking about what that guy said last night.”

“About German?”

“Yeah. Your family’s going to keep sending people to kill me, right?”

“They might.” He sounded almost amused. “Though I sort of doubt many people will want to take the job after what happened to Boris.”

“They’ll still come sooner or later, and you’ll be in the middle of it.” I tapped my finger against the coffee mug. This part had been bothering me the most. “How do you plan on handling that? When someone else comes, I mean.”

“I’ll kill him if I have to.”

He said that like it was no big deal.

I sighed and leaned my head back. “I can’t keep asking you to kill for me.”

“You’re not asking me. I don’t murder on command.”

“Except for when your gang leader tells you to do it, I guess.” I looked back at him, frowning a little, head tilted. I didn’t know how a hitman for a mob could possibly say he didn’t kill on command.

That was his entire job.

He smiled and sipped his coffee. “How much do you know about the Morozov family?”

“Not a lot. You’re a bunch of Russians. There are a lot of you, I think. And it’s all run by some guy you call the Pakhan.”

“Pakhan is like the Don in Russian. Our leader’s name is Evgeni, and when I was twelve years old, he saved my life.”

I shifted in my chair and tucked one leg underneath me. “What happened?”

“It’s not a nice story.” He leaned toward me, eyes dark as hate. “Are you sure you want to hear it?”

I should’ve said no, walked away, forgotten about the whole thing. When he looked at me like that, I could remember what he was: a monster, a killer, a beast.

“Tell me,” I whispered.

“When I was ten, my mother died.” He paused for a second, looked away, his gaze tunneling deep into the past where I couldn’t reach him. “Things were bad for a while. My father wasn’t a nice man and he turned his rage on me.” Another pause. He closed his eyes then opened them again. “One afternoon I came home from school and found my front door standing open. My father sat in the living room with a gunshot wound to his gut. Blood everywhere, gushing out of him in slow waves, like his body had a tide. He told me to get towels but I just stood there, staring at him, until another man came out from the kitchen smoking a cigar.

“That was Evgeni. He looked at me with this stare I’d never forget then shot my dad in the face. I remember screaming, clawing at Evgeni, cursing him, trying to kill him, then nothing. I woke up in a room in the back of an unfamiliar house, and ever since then I’ve been a ward of the Morozov family.” He stopped speaking, and I let the horror of that moment sink in.

He was just a child, a little boy still. His mother was gone, and then he had to watch his father get murdered in front of him. I couldn’t begin to fathom what that did to person.

Let alone living with the man that pulled the trigger.

No wonder he was so broken and strange. No wonder when he looked at me, it was like nothing stared out from those beautiful eyes—nothing but hunger.

There were versions of that story in the Doyle family. There were cousins that thought Cormac was the next coming of Jesus himself. They all craved his attention and his approval, and he was stingy with it, probably to keep them hooked on the drug of his loyalty and respect.

Young Mack must’ve been the same—addicted to that feeling of being special and a part of something.

Except none of them were.

The whole thing was a fraud.

I saw through it when I was a little girl. The families chewed up these young, troubled men. It gave them an outlet for their anger and aggression, paid them pretty well, took care of them in a lot of ways, but it also threw them into a world of danger and violence and death.

I saw with my own eyes what my family really thought of their children. The sound of a belt against bare skin echoed in my mine. The screams of my brother as he struggled in the back room.

My helpless tears as I hid in my closet.

Young Mack might not have grown up into a professional murderer if Evgeni hadn’t shown up that day.

He would’ve been scarred. Ruined, even. Maybe dead.

But he wouldn’t be the man sitting across from me now.

Jaded, dark, and ripped to shreds.

“Thanks for sharing that with me,” I said softly. “I was just sitting here wondering who the hell you were.”