SAINT
It’s obscenely early when I reluctantly leave Isla alone in bed, make myself a cup of coffee, and meet up with Lucky in the kitchen of the safe house. Yesterday was a whirlwind of dealing with the fallout from the bombing and getting our most vulnerable targets as safe as possible. This morning, it’s time to get down to business.
“You could at least try speaking with her, you know,” Lucky says quietly as I fill my mug.
Obviously, he’s thinking about a different kind of business. The wrong kind of business.
I fill my mug to the brim—I’m going to need it—and try to be patient with my youngest brother, who’s always been far too idealistic for his own good.
“Antonella is the least of our worries right now,” I point out. “We’re going to war with the Russians.”
“Are we going to war, though?”
“They bombed our fucking restaurant. What else would you call that?”
“A death wish.”
An image of Isla, handcuffed to my bed, naked and terrified, rises in my mind, and my fury is so visceral I can taste it. “They also broke into my apartment and scared Isla.”
I haven’t told either of my brothers the full extent of the shape I found Isla in. I don’t need them to start asking questions about why she was naked and in my bed in the first place. It’s none of their fucking business, and I don’t have any good answers for why, other than that I’m obsessed with her.
“They did some incredibly stupid shit, and they deserve to be hit for that, but are we really going to do this while Priest is away?” Lucky asks.
I’m not the don, and I know it. I’ve just been doing my best to hold everything together until our eldest brother is back stateside.
I sigh. “I think Scorpion may have taken away the option of waiting when he decided to kidnap Ekaterina Sidorov in retaliation.”
Lucky winces. “Yeah. That was also pretty fucking stupid. We go at them hard, then? Is that the plan?”
“The plan is that we don’t have a plan yet,” I admit, taking a sip of my hot coffee. “First, we need to figure out why the hell the Bratva attacked us. Isla told me that the Russian who broke into my apartment said the Andriani crew is responsible for getting some of their guys thrown into prison.”
“So this is all payback for something we didn’t even do?”
Lucky looks as confused as I feel.
The sudden Bratva vendetta came out of nowhere. Years of a truce with the bastards, gone in the span of a few days.
“According to the bastard who warned Isla about the bomb they planted, yes.” I set my mug down on the table with more force than necessary. “I did a little research last night, and it looks like a major sting operation just went down. Over twenty arrests for illegal gambling, all of them with ties to the Bratva.What I don’t understand is why they think we had anything to do with this.”
“Could have something to do with the fact that the Pakhan appears to have disappeared and Mikhail Sidorov has obtained his throne,” Lucky points out. “We haven’t had a whole lot of time to put out feelers, but word on the street is that Sidorov clipped Ivan Aleksandrov. One of my guys heard Sidorov strangled Aleksandrov to death with his bare hands.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me. Sidorov is a fucking wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
He’s notoriously lethal and violent, but you wouldn’t know it, judging by his appearance alone. Unlike his brother Dimitri, who’s as big as a mountain and built like an MMA fighter who could destroy a man with one solid punch, Mikhail looks more like a prince than a deadly assassin.
“So we’re dealing with a new Pakhan, a string of arrests that have knocked the Bratva’s bread and butter out of order, and Scorpion holding the Pakhan’s sister hostage. Not to mention the explosion that demolished our restaurant. All while Priest is on his honeymoon.”
“And the Bratva believing we’re responsible for the sting that wiped out a bunch of their key players,” I remind Lucky grimly before drinking more coffee.
That’s the part I understand the least about this whole fucking mess.
My brother shakes his head. “Why the hell would someone finger us for something like that? And who would do it?”
“That’s what we have to figure out.”
We have more than our fair share of enemies. Warring factions within the families, jealousy, power grabs, territorial disputes—you name it, we’ve dealt with it. Most recently, when we merged the Andriani and the Revello families, we had to clip Amedeo the Animal, the biggest threat to our power.
“Do you think this is somehow related to what went down with the Animal?” Lucky asks like we’re on the same frequency.
