Page 12 of Violent Pawn

PART 2

THE MORE RECENT PAST

REUNIONS

9

SAVING VANESSA

Anastasia

Three people drop to their knees in surrender.

It’s vindictive, knowing the attack Lev, Dimitri, and I led on Mancini was successful. With the threats neutralized, we’ll find and save Vanessa from her entrapment in this place.

Zeno Mancini is closest to us, trying to shield a younger girl who’s barely past being a teenager. She’s staring at the ground with wide eyes and hair that conceals her face, and while I’d like to believe she’s innocent in this, I once looked like that and people underestimated my strength. My submissiveness was an act meant to lure and trap, so hers could be too. She’s someone to keep an eye on.

As my face heats with the pressure that comes from being stared at, my attention slides from her to the third person. Distantly, Zeno and Dimitri are exchanging heated words, but it all tunnels into the man kneeling across from me. There’s something familiarly haunting about his eyes. A deep blue, like an ocean at dusk, that travels the length of my body, a wave threatening to drown me. Dark hair, handsome—all the features one would expect of a⁠—

And then it hits me.

Old images flicker to life in my head. First, the initial fire that creates smoke, and then the larger the flame, the more the smoke clears, a face from my past materializing. The longer I stare at him, the clearer he and the past becomes

It can’t be.

It’s not him—definitely not. The coincidence rocks me, destabilizing me even as commotion occurs in the background when Vanessa appears uninjured at the top of the staircase. My best friend deserves all my attention, yet an eleven-year-old memory traps it. There’s no way that the Italians who kidnapped Vanessa are the same.

No. Fucking. Way.

For years, the universe has fucked with me for its own amusement. It doesn’t need to disrupt me like this.

His lips tug up in the corner, sealing my thoughts and causing my hold on the gun to falter. It’s the same one he wore in a hallway a decade ago, like the years haven’t passed. The dimple in the corner of his mouth, the slight tilt of his head—all identical.

Yet his expression shows no sign of recognition either. Maybe I’m lucky. Maybe this is simply him flirting or whatever and not because he recognizes me.

Though a very small part of me wishes he would so he can answer my lingering questions.

Distracted by the stranger, I miss Vanessa descending the staircase until I’m urged to follow the others, at her request to speak with Zeno alone. I linger for a few seconds longer, both out of care for her and resistance to leave him. If I go, the vision shatters, and the strange coincidence goes with it.

Nero Amato.

I later learn his name when Vanessa recounts her time in the villa. The girl is Mancini’s sister—and strangely enough, Vanessa’s half sister. There’s a forged marriage certificate that got her illegally hitched to Zeno. And Nero is his second-in-command.

All I’m dying to know is how a person good enough not to kidnap a girl got himself the second-highest position within the very organization that first ordered the job.

Nero

Anastasia Petrov was impossible to forget when I knew she was somewhere in Russia, alive.

When we learned that Ursin Volkov’s daughter, Vanessa, became the Bratva’s Pakhan following his death and built up her Elite, the names included in that list had me laughing at the sick coincidence.

Dimitri Volkov.

Lev Petrov.

And Anastasia fucking Petrov, the ballerina from the Poland performance—my old assignment.

For two years of Vanessa’s rule, it’s become harder to not seek her out, considering we now run in the same kind of circles. After learning of her new position, it was tempting to slip into Moscow and see for myself. The risk was too great if found encroaching on enemy territory, and there’d be no explaining that one to Zeno.