When he looked back at me, that shame that had been there moments before was gone, and in its place was the Pakhan--the head of the Bratva--I knew he showed others.
A ruthless leader, a savage boss.
I looked down at my plate and swallowed roughly, not sure what to say, how to respond to any of this. I felt like I was dreaming, like I was trapped in someone else’s body.
None of this felt real.
And my mother was no help, not as she sat back and watched everything as if it were her own personal reality TV show and guzzled back the wine. Maybe she thought I deserved this because she’d been forced to marry my father.
“What’s going to happen—” my father said in a frighteningly calm voice, “—is you’re going to sit back down, dorogaya moya, and we’re going to finish dinner. We’re going to move forward because you’re my daughter and you know how things work in our world.”
His tone brooked no argument. And I found myself sitting down, feeling like that little girl who’d been scolded by her father for not following the rules.
And so we finished dinner in all but silence. The only conversation being between the other three people at the table.
I ate quietly, finished off two glasses of wine, and then when the night was over I numbly said goodnight and left, knowing that this was not how my life was going to be.
I was not going to fold over.
I was not going to be a pawn in some Bratva move. I loved my father, but what he was doing was absolutely wrong and I wouldn’t let my life be dictated by him.
Whatever the outcome or consequences of my decisions may be, I was sticking with them. Because the alternative was not an option.
Chapter
Five
Ruin
I’d been called many things in my twenty-five years on this godforsaken fucking planet.
Ubiytsa. The killer.
The devil. A bastard without a soul.
But what I was known as now, the name I answered to, the only identity I connected with anymore was…
Razoreniye. Ruin.
I stood across the street from her apartment building, barely cleaned up from beating a man to death at the Bratva-owned underground fight club, Yama.
I found myself here every night, wanting one fucking glimpse of Anastasia through her bedroom window, knowing it was all kinds of wrong but I didn’t feel those kinds of emotions.
No shame or guilt. No sorrow or sympathy.
What I felt now was this proprietary need. Obsession. Possessiveness. And they all revolved around her. Anastasia.
After the fight, I changed out of my bloody shorts, washed the gore off my hands and chest, off my neck and face, and put on all-black clothing so I could blend in with the shadows and stalk her.
I looked down at my hands, the ones that I used to brutally take lives. I was a killing machine, molded by the very men who ran the underworld. I wasn’t fooled into thinking I wasn’t a pawn, an item to line their pockets. And it was who I’d been for a long time, even before my father had taken me away to be fully shaped into the creature I was today.
They might have taken everything from me, my very humanity, but what they couldn't take from me was the one girl who was in that apartment building and thought I’d abandoned her.
She was all I had. All I held on to anymore.
I had no mother, and my father had died of consumption years before, his death long and drawn out, painful and one that made me feel perversely satisfied. I had no one and nothing but the Russian mafia and my fighting.
And the latter was the only thing I was fucking good at. Killing people in the most savage way was the only purpose in my life now.
I focused back on why I was here, what I planned on doing. It was the same routine every night, and a part of me knew I should’ve felt shame that I stalked her, that I watched her from the shadows, and that I did a hell of a lot more than that.
But it made me feel good, and I was a selfish, sociopathic bastard because I wasn’t going to stop, not when I got a rush of adrenaline and my cock got hard.
I knew the rotation of her guards like clockwork, had been watching them for the better part of a decade. And the little asshole who was currently stationed outside the front entrance of the apartment building had me narrowing my eyes. I could’ve snapped the fucker in half.
I was focused on him when I noticed her bedroom light turn on, and all my attention was trained right back where it belonged. The gauzy curtain that covered the single pane fluttered as she moved by it, and I curled my hands into tight fists as my whole body instantly reacted.