Although we hadn’t confirmed that we’d been the ones to hire Arlo Milkovich to take out our father, we also hadn’t denied it. There’d been no secret that there was no love lost for our father.
We’d been nothing to him but pawns to use, pieces to move on the chessboard of his twisted version of life.
And he sure as fuck used us.
I knew he’d been working on selling off our youngest sister, an arranged marriage to a high-ranking Russian who would have ruined her in the most depraved of ways. And then there was Dmitry and I, who had been beaten and torn apart, “toughened” up for the world we lived in by our father's own hands.
I couldn’t count the number of men I killed at my father’s orders, brutal and torturous ways to send a message. This was how it had been since we were old enough to walk and talk, shaped and molded into the warped men that stood in this room today.
And although taking him out would’ve been necessary given the fact he was moving the organization in a direction that would have collapsed alliances and already laid plans for growth, I wasn’t going to deny, and I knew Dmitry wouldn’t either, that killing our father had also been a personal satisfaction as well.
The bastard had needed to be killed.
I relaxed my arms and looked down at my hands, picturing all the heinous shit I’d done with them over the years… all the fucked up acts I’d have to do with them tonight. By the time I left the club the sun would be rising and my palms and fingers would be stained red from taking a life slowly, painfully.
Therapeutically for my fucked up soul.
“We need to expedite your situation.” Dmitry’s hard voice pulled me out of my macabre thoughts and I looked at him. He ran a hand over his jaw, his expression lost in thought. “We need to push up the wedding.” My brother looked at me then but I made sure to keep my expression void.
“Move up?” We hadn’t even spoken about a firm date on when I’d wed the Bianchi girl, but it didn’t matter when it happened, just that it did.
Dmitry nodded. “Yeah. move it up to set things firmly in place.”
Before we hired Arlo to end our father, we set up safeguards in place for growing a Bratva. And that included an arranged marriage between myself and the daughter of Marco Bianchi of the Cosa Nostra.
Although alliances such as this, a bond between families was commonplace, in this regard, where the Bratva and Cosa Nostra were coming together for the “greater good” it wasn’t the norm. Not when we’d been battling for decades.
“We need to let all of those who think to rise up against us know what kind of power we have at our backs.”
And that’s exactly what this move was going to ensure. Anyone in the Bratva who thought to go against Dmitry or myself would see that not only were we vicious in going after what we wanted or taking out a threat, but we also had the west coast Cosa Nostra as a strong ally. And that kind of power would yield a union that was unstoppable.
I didn’t even know what my future wife looked like, didn’t know anything about her aside from her age and name. She could be a homely mouse for all I knew.
And I hadn’t cared enough to research her.
Because It didn’t matter what Amara Bianchi looked like, sounded like, or how she acted. She was a means to an end.
She was mine for better or worse.
Chapter
Three
Amara
I worried at my bottom lip as I stared at the laptop, watching as it seemed to take an eternity for the screen to load.
I felt like I was doing something wrong… searching the Internet for any piece of dirt I could find on my soon-to-be-husband.
Nikolai Petrov, a man notorious in the Russian Mafia as being insane, demented and dangerous.
I closed my eyes and exhaled. And God help me, I was to wed him.
I opened my eyes just as the page reloaded and as I clicked on one of the news articles, it was basically all the same information I found so far. Which is a whole lot of nothing that wasn’t just for face value.
I knew enough about how organized crime worked, the Bradford in the Cosa Nostra not much different in that they did things only on the surface it looked good, while deep on the underground is where the real business happened
I clicked on an article for Nikolai Petrov and started reading.