Her brows drew together. “A what?”
“Pakhan. Mafia boss.”
That made her sit up a little straighter.
In her eyes there was a flicker of innocent unease that she didn’t know how to hide. She didn’t have a clue what it meant to be tied to someone like me. Having been raised outside all of this, she wouldn’t be able to grasp the weight behind the wordbratva—let alone the violence that came with it.
And yet, she was here. In my world now.
I took another drink.
“Being born into that kind of power doesn’t make you strong,” I said. “It makes you dangerous—or dead.” I set my empty glass on the coffee table. “It’s not exactly the kind of legacy you shake off. You don’t grow up at the table with men like that and come out clean.”
She quirked her head to the side like a puppy listening intently.
“Everyone assumes a son like me eventually takes their old man out. That’s how the story usually goes. But no, despite the rumors, I didn’t kill my father. But my choices…they did play a part in his death.”
Her expression tightened, but she didn’t ask how. Smart girl.
“He was a brutal man,” I said. “No boundaries. No line he wouldn’t cross. He would’ve sold a girl like you to someone like Delgado without blinking. And he would’ve carved her up first just to make sure she didn’t talk.”
Lyla shivered.
“It’s a good thing he’s dead,” I muttered.
I didn’t bother hiding the venom in my voice.
She asked quietly, “What about your mom?”
I scrubbed my hand over my jaw. How could I explain to a girl with parents who had showered her with love and affection that I’d been bred as a human killing machine?
“She survived,” I finally said. “Escaped back to Russia. And now she’s latched herself onto the next most powerful bratva boss she could find. Just another piece of jewelry on a rich bastard’s arm.”
“That word…bratva,” Lyla said, squinting. “Trina—at the coffee shop—she mentioned that once. I asked what it meant, and she blew me off.”
“Brotherhood,” I told her.
But these weren’t the kind of brothers that held your hand through life.
“It’s a world where loyalty is currency, violence is tradition, and betrayal is paid for in blood. Every man earns his place through brutality, and every woman is claimed, owned, or discarded—depending on her usefulness. There are no innocent players in the bratva, only survivors and corpses.”
I let that sink in before finishing. “You don’t join it. You’re born into it. Molded by it. Or destroyed trying to escape it. And the few who aren’t born into it—men with rare talents, the ones who can kill without blinking or the ones who can disappear behind a keyboard—get pulled in, tested, broken, and rebuiltuntil they prove they’ll bleed for the brotherhood like the rest of us. You either come in dirty—or you get dirty fast.”
“Oh.”
I watched her process it. She couldn’t understand the full meaning of all of this. Not yet.
“My mother was always cold,” I added. “Selfish. Calculating. She’s the kind of woman who only cares about appearances and power.”
Lyla tilted her head. “So…I’m guessing family dinners were a blast?”
I huffed. “Family dinners…”
The pinch of her lips and the tug of her brows told me she felt sorry for me.
“Did you always have such a hate-filled relationship with your parents?” she asked.
I gave her a humorless smile. “Let’s just say hate would’ve been a cakewalk.”
