Page 28 of Bratva Sacrifice

My fingers wrap around the phone, pulling it from the depths of the pocket. The screen is still glowing with the text message notification. One new text: I’m never coming home.

I must’ve texted Alyosha by mistake. There’s so few contacts in my burner phone. I just pulled up the wrong text string.

But I didn’t. A shiver slips down my spine as I compare the two screens. I sent the text to Nicky. And this other phone in my hand—it’s not Alyosha’s. It’s not the slick, expensive smartphone I’ve seen him use before, on which he receives the occasional text in Cyrillic. He’s never cared whether or not I see them. Maybe because he knows I can’t read them.

This phone is bulky and cheap. A rough, hard, plastic exterior. A burner. Like mine. Like Nicky’s. My breath backs up in my lungs as my fingers find a scrape across the side of the phone, like it’s sustained damage from a hard fall on concrete. There’s a rusty brown substance dried into the cheap plastic casing. Blood. It has to be. A strange, electric jolt runs through my veins.

Alyosha has Nicky’s phone.

Why does he have Nicky’s phone?

The phone clatters to the counter as I shove my hand back into his coat pocket, fumbling for the wallet I know is in there. Cool leather touches my fingers. I yank it out. It’s thick, stuffed with dozens of hundred dollar bills. There’s an ID. An Illinois ID.

Alexei Morozov.

A shattered sob claws at my throat. I never asked. We’ve been dating—have we even been dating?—such a short time.

But now I know. I’ve been so stupid. So fucking stupid and careless. He’s not my boyfriend, not the man I thought I was dating. Morozov—I know that name.

He’s the man my family sold me to.

My heart is racing; my pulse is pounding in my ears. I have to get out of here. I have to run again. My clothes—most of them—are strewn across the living room floor. My muscles tense to spring into action.

A hard arm wraps around my throat. “Too bad, Catalina,” Alexei croons at my ear. “I think I could have kept you sweet a little longer.”

Chapter Fifteen

Alexei

Katya fights me like a wildcat, her fingernails clawing frantically at my arm. I hear her suck in a breath, filling her lungs to scream.

It makes no difference if she does. The only one close enough to hear her is Anatoli. These Minnesota houses are built solidly, well-insulated. Even those neighbors with whom I share the street will hear nothing.

Her scream tears through the air, and my ears ring with it. Her bare feet drag upon the floor as I haul her bodily toward the couch. She cannot hope to win—not against me—and still she fights. Desperately; bitterly. I can be proud of her for that. Proud that she fights even when she is beaten.

Another fierce scream burns my ears as I maneuver her down to the couch on her back and pin her with the weight of my body. She’s carved wounds in my arm with her claws. I feel the wetness of blood as I extract her nails from my skin and wrestle her hands above her head, holding her wrists in one hand. “Christ, Katya. Enough.”

“Fuck—you!” she screeches, her body bucking beneath me. With fury, not passion.

“You’ll hurt yourself, koshechka,” I tell her as she rages. Already she has pulled out several of her own hairs by the roots in her thrashing. She wears nothing but my shirt, and it twists around her, riding up her hips. She is going to give her soft skin friction burns.

“Get off of me, you fucking psycho!” Her pulse is racing in her throat. Her breath comes in pained catches, as if she forces her anger through her grief.

Probably she wishes now that she had come for a shower with me. It was reckless of me to leave Nicola’s phone in the pocket of my jacket. But she was already growing suspicious of Anatoli sharing the train with her, and this game was always going to end.

I wish I could have enjoyed her sweetness a little longer. A few days at least; perhaps as much as a week.

With a feral shriek, she wrenches up her knee in an ill-fated attempt to strike me in the balls. It is a simple matter to pin her flailing limbs, and it evokes another ear-splitting screech of raw outrage.

Ah, well. I like spicy, too. And Katya burns in this moment.

Distantly, I hear the front door open, the press of the buttons that will disarm the alarm. Anatoli appears in the doorway of the living room a moment later. His expression is bored, as if Katya’s screams have succeeded only in annoying him.

For just a moment, Katya’s struggles still as Anatoli’s arrival snares her attention. I see the moment she realizes that the help she has sought with her shrieking will not be forthcoming. The recognition that dawns in her eyes, the understanding that I set him upon her. That he has been following her at my instruction.

As she works herself back up to screeching again, Anatoli mutters in Russian, “Jesus Christ, she is loud.”

I respond in kind. “Can anyone else hear?”