Prologue
Cameron…
“What do you mean, you’ve gone in!”
“I’m sorry, we had to. They had a convoy of trucks coming in for the girls.” Ferr, my second is shouting into his phone, I can hear glass shattering and gunfire in the background.
“Hamish, how close are we?” I ask my driver, low and urgent. I don’t want Ferr to know how far away we are. We’d just landed at a private airfield outside of Moscow. His team was supposed to wait so we could storm the warehouse together.
“Boss, we’re still thirty minutes away,” he whispers, stepping on the gas. “At least.”
“Ferr, you listen to me. You get the hell out of there. Mow those fuckers down but do not stay put, understood?”
“...Girls… still too close… hold off and…” The sound of bullets gets louder, drowning out his voice and then something worse.
The roar and rushing sound of flames. The screaming of my men.
Then, nothing.
Chapter One
In which this is the worst wedding ever.
Morana…
It’s my wedding day.
And I am so screwed.
The hideous old troll waiting at the altar for me is close to sixty. He has red veins running through his nose and cheeks ruddy from decades of heavy drinking and a heavy, oily tobacco stink coming from his pores.
I’d discovered all of this when I met him last night for the first time, when he cornered me and kissed me. Bile rises in my throat and I take a couple of deep breaths. If I vomit down the front of my Monique Lhuillier wedding gown, my father will take his belt to me.
Not that my husband-to-be will be any better.
Vadik Stepanov is one of the Moscow Six, the Bratva families that rule the crime world. He’s made most of his money in human trafficking, strip clubs, bordellos… he is the lowest form of life that profits from human suffering, he’s next-level evil.
Anatoly Ivanov, my father, is giddy with joy over the match. My life will likely be horrific - and if I’m lucky, short - but his only interest is in the alliance my marriage will bring between the Stepanov Bratva and his.
Our family’s organization under his father’s rule was fearsome and powerful. The Ivanov Bratva no longer strikes terror in the hearts of men, and oh, how my father misses those days. Bad luck and dwindling connections have shrunk our reach. I could say that it is thecurrentPakhan’s sloppy leadership and poor business decisions that have brought us so low, though that would mean a beating I may not come back from.
If I’d had the choice to plan anything about my wedding day, I would have loved to have been married in one of the exquisite little chapels at St. Basil’s Cathedral near Red Square. It’s some of the most brilliant, colorful architecture Russia has to offer. But of course, the spectacle both Bratvas insist on can only be contained in the massive Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the biggest Russian Orthodox church in Moscow.
“Turn your head, Miss.”
The stylist is a stern German woman who’s roughly brushing my hair into a complicated updo. I don’t know where they got her from, but she looks more like a prison warden than a stylist. She had walked into the bride’s dressing room at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and told me to remove my clothes.
I could see two Ivanov guards in the hallway, grinning at me. “I’ll do it as soon as you shut the door,” I said coldly.
Thank god, she didn’t put up a fight about that, using her energy instead to wrestle me into a wedding dress that makes me look like a cake topper. It’s a gigantic chiffon monstrosity lavishly encrusted with Swarovski crystals that sounds like a wind chime when I move.
Fortunately, I’m completely covered up by the time the door opens without a knock.
“Your father sent me in to make sure you were behaving and not crying like some spoiled little bitch.”
“Artim Ivanov, my dear cousin,” my reflection in the giant mirror shows I’m giving him a grin that looks like I want to take a chunk out of his face, which I do. Since he has no sons, Artim is my father’s heir.
Artim is an evil fuck. Possibly, worse than my father. “If anyone knows how to cry like a spoiled little bitch, it would be you.”
