“You’ll also call off your beast’s manhunt for my cousin Indigo. She is now untouchable. Ifanyoneso much as breathes wrong in her direction, their life is forfeit,” Riordan added in. I still glared at him, thinking of all the ways I could fuck him up for being willing to negotiate with my biggest enemy. I was so fucking stupid to think that maybe I meant more to him than the money their alliance made them, but I guess I was wrong. Seamus was nodding along, looking more relaxed and confident that he’d dodged a bullet.
“We’ll also require the head of your brother. The Beast of Boston has savaged his last victim,” Mikhail added, causing Seamus’s expression to darken and his eyes to drift off-screen.
He opened his fat mouth to argue, but Mikhail held up a hand, and the words shriveled up and died on Seamus’s lips. “If you don’t want the weight of the entire Petrov bratva to rain down and wipe you from the face of the earth, you will deliver your brother to me, alive. Gift wrap isoptional, but this youwilldo. I’ve always suspected him in Tatiana’s disappearance, but didn’t have enough proof to act. Indigo has provided me with more than enough justification to kill him, should the other families question my actions.” Seamus’s eyes darted to someone out of view, and he nervously licked his lips.
“You’re not serious? He’s my brother…”
“And Tatiana was my sister. A life for a life,” Mikhail said in a tone that brooked no argument. Seamus blustered a bit, but I could see in his eyes that he’d already decided to sacrifice his brother on the altar of his greed and sick self-interest. I seethed in my irritatingly comfortable chair, wondering why I had to be here for this bullshit as Seamus and Mikhail kept talking when a shadow moving on the wall behind Seamus caught my attention. Seamus was too involved in his greedy deliberations to notice the black barrel of a Desert Eagle .357 Magnum that had inched onto the screen until a finger curled on the trigger and a deafeningbangrang through the room.
The floor-to-ceiling wall screen gave us an up close and personal view of the grisly remains of Seamus Callahan. His head had exploded like the world’s goriest piñata, bits of bone and brain scattered over his desk and the wall behind him in shocking HD. White bone glistened under the overhead lights at the top of Seamus’s spinal cord, the tiny bit of the base of his skull left probably couldn’t even hold enough of his brain to fill a tablespoon. The sound of a door banging open came through the screen, followed by two more deafeningbangsand the thud of bodies hitting the floor. Guess Seamus’s bodyguards wouldn’t be onboarding with the new regime. Riordan and Mikhail were completely silent as rough hands shoved Seamus’s body out of his chair and onto the floor.
Roark Callahan, face covered in a mist of his brother’s blood, sat down in his chair and gave us a lurid grin. “If it isn’t my favoritesobrat… well. I suppose you’re myonlybrother now, eh?” He chuckled like the insane sadist he was. His voice sent shivers down my spine, and not the good kind. The icky, dreadful, bad kind. I had to suppress a full-on shudder, but my uncle and cousin didn’t even flinch at the blood-speckled monster currently leering at us.
“You are no brother of mine,” Mikhail stated firmly.
Roark chuckled. “Such a shame, but then family values aren’t what they used to be. How is my lovely sister? I often think about all thefunCara and I had together. We’re overdue for a family reunion, wouldn’t you say?” Riordan and Mikhail didn’t physically react, but the atmosphere in the room plummeted.
“Keep my mother’s name out of your mouth,” Riordan said in a low, dangerous voice. Uncle Roark laughed, the sound discordant and harsh in my ears. “Oh pup, I’m going to enjoy carving all those pretty pictures off your skin. I think I’ll pin them to a corkboard in my office, so I can look at them any time I want.” A Pinterest mood board made of human skin…everyone was so creative.
In better circumstances, I’d be more than happy to sit back and watch my cousin let his dark side out to play as he spat venom at his uncle, his mob mask now completely shattered. But I was too busy trying to shrink in my seat, praying I’d be too small for Uncle Roark’s notice to pay attention to what Riordan was saying. It didn’t work, but then again, it never did. Thin lips pulled into a sneer as Uncle Roark ignored my cousin and turned his sights on me, causing a tremor of pure, adulterated fear to run up my spine. I mashed my lips together in an attempt to keep my whimper inside. Uncle Roark’s eyes ran over me, leaving a snail-trail of disgust everywhere they landed. I swear, I felt like I could actually feel it, like a film made of shame and evil. An involuntary shudder rocked through me, and a flash of victory shone in the eyes of the monster who haunted my memories and broke me mercilessly.
“So,” Uncle Roark said, redirecting his attention to Mikhail, “it’s come to my attention you’d like to end our working arrangement. All over the disappearance of your whore of a sister? That’s kind of soft, isn’t it, to end a mutually profitable business arrangement over awomanof all things. How disappointing.”
A bitter smile tugged on Mikhail’s lips. “The bratva values family above all else. It’s my duty to protect my family and the brotherhood. If I fail the former, why would the latter ever allow me to lead them?”
Uncle Roark grimaced in mock dismay, his pout comical in its derision. “Not doing a very good job of it then, are you? Tatiana cried for you so prettily before I put the barrel of my gun into her mouth and pulled the trigger.”
If I thought Mikhail was as still and unreadable as a statue before, it was nothing compared to the ice sculpture he now resembled. “You finally admit it, then?” he asked. A vicious laugh echoed over the speakers in the wall, bouncing around the room gleefully at the misery it caused. “Seamus insisted we play along with your farce of a search and demanded we lie to you.To keep the peace, and the money it generated. Fucking tool. Men like us don’t need peace, and I made sure your sister sure as shit never got any. She begged for you while she was birthing her bastard, you know.” Uncle Roark’s manic smile slid off his face, and a look of deranged, feral hunger replaced it. “You have something that belongs to me, and I want it back. Give me the girl and I’ll—"
“Indigo,” I squeaked out in a terrified voice. Hazel eyes flashed at me, surprise flitting through them before rage darkened the rusty-red ring around pupils as black as his soul. I shook in my seat, my hands gripped the table so firmly my knuckles turned white. I felt a foot nudge mine under the table, in what I hoped was a nudge of support. You never really knew with nudges.
I took a deep breath, willing myself to make the first small step in standing up to the man who had tried his best to ruin me. “My name is Indigo, and I’m not anyone’s to give. I belong to me now, and I willnevercrawl back to you.” Uncle Roark sneered hatefully at me, looking at me like I was the lowest, most disgusting piece of shit he’d ever seen.
“Indigo,” he sneered, “is a smoke screen you hide behind because you know deep down inside that you’re nothing. Before, you were a toy to bleed or fuck as I saw fit, so at least you had some kind of value. Now, you’re completely worthless. Nothing.”
“Th—that’s not true,” I said with a shake in my voice that I despised. “I have friends and a job, and I’ve found my family and—”
Uncle Roark cut me off mid-sentence with a cutting laugh. “And what good have you done any of them, hmm? What can you possibly have to offer? You have no skills, no education, no talent. You’re not a friend, you’re a burden. Fuck knows thebratvadoesn’t need you.”
“You don’t speak for the bratva,” Riordan growled at Roark, who continued speaking as if Riordan wasn’t even there.
“Just ask your uncle. He sold his sister to me, knowing what her life would be like. He bought my sister in the same deal, and bred her tomake an heir.” Roark’s eyes were like two dark caverns, pinning me in place as the endless black sucked me under and held me fast. All my bad bitch courage melted away in the face of his cruelty. “And you can’t even do that. Have you told him exactly how useless you are? I hope you didn’t have any dynastic ambitions when it comes to the girl, Mikhail. I made sure a long time ago that she’d be a genetic dead end.”
I felt what little blood I had left in my face drain out of me as Riordan and Mikhail turned their eyes to where I was huddled in my chair. “What is he talking about?” Riordan asked in a low, controlled voice. I closed my eyes tightly, unable to face the looks of disgust or disappointment that were bound to be on the faces of my uncle and cousin. Uncle Roark’s sinister chuckle made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, and I began to shake.
“She didn’t tell you? Oh, this is really too good.”
“Lisichka?” Riordan whispered in a hushed tone, but I refused to look at him.
“Well, I couldn’t have her taking after her whore of a mother and getting pregnant, could I? The family knows a veterinarian with a gambling addiction and flexible morals. It was too easy to spay the bitch and make sure when I finally put her down that there wouldn’t be any loose ends to tie up.” The shocked silence that blanketed the room was suffocating, and I wanted to die and then throw up, and then die again. I’d never told anyone about that night. About what they did to me… what they took. I’d stuffed the horror into a locked box, duct taped pillows around it, and hid it in the back corner of the crawlspace in my mind.
Sometimes its shrieks could no longer be muffled, no matter how loud I scream-sang in my head, and I’d trip down a rabbit hole ofwhat-if. The what-ifs tasted like ash, and their serrated edges cut jagged and deep. The wounds they left got harder and harder to patch up every time I dragged myself out of memories of that horrible time.
“And to think,” Mikhail finally said in a voice as sharp as a razor, breaking his silence for the first time since Uncle Roark admitted to killing his sister, “all this because you weren’t man enough to make my sister fall in love with you.” Uncle Roark snarled in anger, but Mikhail wasn’t finished. “Your pathetic obsession with Tatiana turned a mad doginto a ravening one. I suggest you run fast, and run far, because when I catch you—and I will, have no doubt about that—I will destroy you in the most painful and grotesque fashion. No one will miss you, and no one will mourn you.”
“Girl,” Uncle Roark barked in a gravely tone, causing me to flinch as if actual rocks had struck me. “You will return to your cage, or I will bleed out every person you care about and fuck you over their remains. I’ll destroy everything you’ve come to love until you understand that there never has been and never will be a day that’s dawned when you didn’t belong tome.”Uncle Roark ended the call, but not before my eyes met his and I saw in them the death of the life I could have had.
I stood, bolted to the bathroom, slamming the door and whirling to the toilet just in time to vomit.
