Page 74 of Forced & Owned By the Bratva Boss

“Still counting.”

I exhale. My pulse drums in my ear with the suffocating demand for blood. I nod, pat Ruslan’s shoulder, and walk past him into the wreckage.

Emiliano has torn my pride down to dust, broken bottles and glasses, shattered tables and pools of blood.

A movement to my left catches my attention. Paramedics wheel someone past on a stretcher, and my heart stops beating when I see who it is.

Lola.

Her blonde hair is soaked with blood, her face almost unrecognizable beneath cuts and burns. An oxygen mask covers her mouth while one medic desperately presses gauze against her abdomen.

Her eyelids flutter. When she sees me, tears gather in the corners of her eyes. “Boss,” she gasps.

I step up beside the stretcher. “Lola?”

“They...” She coughs violently, blood staining her lips. “He was dead when they brought him in. He was…” Her voice trails off.

The medic pushes the stretcher faster. “We’re losing her!”

They disappear into the waiting ambulance, and my stomach twists. Lola has worked for me for almost eight years.

She doesn’t deserve this.

None of them do.

She was talking about someone. Someone who was brought in dead. I wonder who she was referring to. She wouldn’t have mentioned it if it wasn’t important.

“Boss.”

I turn to find Dimitri standing several feet away. For the first time since I’ve known him, his eyes are teary and his lips are dry to the point they’re chapped.

I know it’s more bad news coming, and I brace myself for it. I can survive anything as long as Audrey’s alive.

“We have another victim,” he says, then pauses for a moment before he continues. “Matthew.”

The world around me goes silent. Out of everyone who works for me, Audrey was closer to Matthew than anyone else. They’d been even closer when he worked at one of my smaller clubs a year ago, before we broke up.

And now…he’s gone.

In that moment, I know Emiliano brought Matthew in dead. Dread twists in my stomach as realization starts to dawn on me.

It was never as simple as I thought.

There’s a pretty good chance Emiliano threated Audrey using Matthew’s life. It could be why she kept the truth from me.

I close my eyes for exactly one second before opening them again. Grief has no place in my world. It never has.

But revenge does.

“Find Emiliano,” I order. “I don’t care what it takes. I need him alive.”

Chapter Twenty

Audrey

The first thing I hear is the steady beeping of a monitor somewhere nearby.

I blink three times before the ceiling above me comes into clear view. It’s white and smooth, nothing like the one in my apartment or Igor’s mansion.