The choices she made weren’t the ones I would have wanted, but they were the choices she had.
“Yeah,” I say finally, my voice rough with emotion. “Yeah, I forgive you.”
She brings my hand to her lips, pressing a kiss to my knuckles. Tears fill her eyes, all the armor finally stripped away.
“I never stopped loving you,” she whispers.
“I know. Me too.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY-THREE
KIRILL
The compound ison the outskirts of Queens, all concrete walls and razor wire, the kind of place that doesn’t officially exist on any map. Marina’s soldiers let us through, the heavy steel gates rolling open the moment our SUV approaches.
Matvey drives, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. Dem sits in back, chain-smoking, ash accumulating in the cup holder. We haven’t spoken since leaving the hospital.
What is there to say?
The compound’s main building is utilitarian, no frills, just function. Marina’s lieutenant, the woman with the shaved head and the scar, meets us at the entrance and escorts us to the basement, although dungeon is a more fitting term.
The place reeks of mold and piss and the sour stench of death. A fitting place for Ruslan to end his days. It’s not just him here. Marina captured everyone who had a hand in the trafficking network.
Ruslan is chained to the ceiling, hanging in the center of the room from his wrists. His face is already bruised and swollen from whatever Marina’s people did to him when they broughthim in. He’s stripped naked. No dignity in the end. A touch I appreciate.
His head lifts as we approach, and he glares at us like we’re the enemy. Traitors to the family.
He’s more fucked up than I ever imagined.
I close the door behind us, and Matvey and Dem flank me on either side.
“Come to gloat?” he husks out. “Do you think I’ll beg for your mercy? You can turn around and leave right now because I’ll never fucking apologize for doing what I had to do. There’s a reason the Baronovs rule New York and it’s because of me.”
“You don’t rule shit anymore. Look at you. Pathetic.” I circle him while my brothers stand perfectly still, watching him with cold, dead eyes. “You tell yourself that you did what you had to do, but we all know you did what you wanted to do. Because you’re a sick fuck.”
“You murdered our mother,” Matvey says, his voice shaking with barely controlled rage. “You killed her and let us believe it was an accident for eighteen years.”
Ruslan glares and spits blood onto the concrete, knowing better than to try and defend his actions.
Dem steps forward and pulls the cigarette from his mouth, pressing the burning tip directly into Ruslan’s left eye. The sizzle is immediate, followed by the stomach-turning smell of burning flesh and singed hair. Ruslan’s scream is music to my ears: guttural, animalistic, echoing off the concrete walls.
For several long seconds, he hangs there gasping, his body shaking, sweat dripping from his face onto the concrete. Then, slowly, his remaining eye focuses on Demyan.
“There it is. There’s the violence. Maybe there’s hope for you after all, Demyan,” he rasps through clenched teeth.
“Shut the fuck up,” Demyan hisses, his fingers tightening like a vise around the old man’s throat.
I tilt my head to look up at him where he hangs suspended, his feet barely touching the ground.
“I spent my entire life trying to earn your approval. Trying to be the son you wanted, the heir you needed. What a waste of fucking time.”
“And you failed,” he spits. “You chose a woman over the Bratva.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I chose love over your empire of suffering. Your empire doesn’t exist anymore. You don’t exist anymore. You won’t even be a footnote in history. Our children will never know your name. We’ll tell them you died along with our mother in that car accident. That’s how insignificant you are.”
He created a legacy of pain, but that ends now.
