Shit.
I went to stand up, but Dmitri’s large hands pushed me back into my seat. I pressed my feet into the ground and tried again. But his muscles didn’t budge an inch as he held me in place.
“If youeverbring another mark into a business under my protection,” he said, switching into Russian. “Then we’re going to have a fucking problem, kotenok.”
I hadn’t realized he was running a protection racket here before I’d walked into the bar. I’d only chosen the location, because this was my target’s favorite haunt.
Just my luck.
“Now be a good girl, and leave.”
Irritation welled up inside me and seeped into my glare.
“Don’t push me, Alisa.” His fingers tightened bitingly into my shoulders. “Leave.”
Electricity sparked on the spot he’d dug his nails into, and scattered like lightning bolts across my skin. Before I could brush off that feeling and reply, Dmitri had already strode away without so much as a backwards glance.
Aidan shuffled out of the bathroom, and I debated taking him out into the night and trying my luck at killing him there. But there was a reason I preferred to poison my targets at our initial meeting point.
It was a seemingly simple strategy: kill my targets with poisons that mimicked mundane things like heart attacks.
But I added a bit of a twist. I slipped the drugs intomy own drinks, and offered my targets a taste.
No one ever suspected you’d drug your own drinks. After all, who would go to such an extreme?
When he was alive, my brother used to affectionately call me the ‘Poison Princess’. But I never felt like much of a princess when my body was bearing the brunt from constantly microdosing and taking antidotes. It made my body weak, which was a liability in the Bratva’s competition.
And my body’s weakness was one of the many reasons I didn’t like to take my targets into a second location once we’d made contact. Too risky.
Aidan stomped my way, and my heartbeat quickened.
As I watched him approach, a door clicked shut behind me. Dmitri wasn’t even going to bother to see if I followed through with his order.
Anger flared through me. He was so sure that I would submissively follow along with his every wish just like everyone else. He’d upended my life and then ignored me for years. Now, he marched back in unannounced, and endangered my life by making me take Aidan to a second location.
Fuck that.
When Aidan’s dilated pupils and irritated expression came into view, my decision was made. There was no way I was taking a man in a manic mood into a dark alley.
A small rational part of me warned this was a bad idea.
Instead, I settled into my bar seat and patted the seat beside me.
Chapter two
Alisa
Natalya walked inside the Pakhan’s massive meeting room, and settled into a folding chair beside me.
“Alisa, you look like shit,” Natalya Markova, my only friend in the Bratva, said in her typical blunt manner.
I glanced at the small needle pricks inching up my wrist. My doctor, nicknamed Dr. Poison in the underworld for his unorthodox methods, had taken a liter of my blood yesterday. If only his treatment had stopped at that then my skin might not have looked nearly translucent.
I sighed. Microdosing myself with poisons didn’t do wonders for my complexion.
After starting a new regiment, coming here was the last thing I’d felt like doing today. But when the Pakhan called all the candidates from his competition in for a meeting, you showed up.
“Appreciate the compliment,” I said dryly.
