“Annie, go to your room so your father and I can talk.” She sounded like she was about to cry.
“But—”
“NOW.”
I didn’t dare resist. The warbling edge in her voice was frightening.
I made my way back down the hall to my bedroom, closing my door but pressing my ear against the crack in the bottom.
I didn’t hear everything they said to each other, just bits and pieces.
Drugs. Packages. Bratva. Money, someone owed someone, and someone was going to get hurt if they didn’t pay someone. Bricks, warnings. It didn’t all make total sense, but by the time I heard my mother pad past my room, I knew enough to be afraid. Daddy had gotten us mixed up in something really bad.
That wasn’t the first brick through the window, either.
But I would’ve preferred a thousand more bricks, a brick every night for the rest of my life, compared to what came next.
It was a few months later. Things were worse than ever. I walked on eggshells when I was at home, terrified of making my dad even angrier than he normally was. My mother had stopped eating and was wasting away to skin and bones. Whenever I asked about the bruises on her arms after she and Daddy had been up all night arguing again, she just snapped at me and told me it was nothing.
“Annie!” I heard her calling me from the kitchen. “Annie, go check the mail!”
I walked outside and saw a package leaning up against our doorframe. Picking it up, I noticed the bottom was sticky and wet. It must have been raining outside.
I walked into the kitchen and set the box on the crowded countertop, then went over to the sink to wash the cardboard residue off my hands. I noticed the water turned red as it rinsed my skin.
“Mom, the box is leaking something.”
She came over, picked it up, then sat down with it at the kitchen table, knife in hand to slice the tape off.
Then I heard the knife clatter to the floor. My mother screamed. My heart froze.
I ran over to her. “Mom, what, what is it?” Her eyes were wide with terror, face pale, hands trembling. I looked down at the opened box.
It was a finger.
A bloody finger.
Bile clawed at the back of my throat. I pulled away from my mother and ran back to the sink to puke. Tears fell from my eyes as I retched again and again. Was that my father’s finger? We hadn’t seen him for two days.
“Is Dad dead?” I looked up to see she hadn’t moved from her seat at the table.
It took her a long time to answer. “I don’t know, Annie.”
Neither of us slept that night.
Eventually, my father did eventually come home, bloodied and beaten, scabbed-over stump where his right middle finger had been. He’d been tortured by the Bratva for failing to sell enough product once again. How much longer could this dark secret persist? What would happen to him if he couldn’t make things work? What would happen to us?
Fate decided that for us. And our dark secret became public news when we woke up after another night without my father home, to find his face plastered over the front of the local paper.
Arrested. Charged with racketeering, intent to distribute, possession of a mind-boggling amount of illegal drugs. No bond. No hope.
We lost our house; assets were all frozen. With no living relatives left to help and no friends willing to open their doors to the family of a criminal, Mom and I had to move into a homeless shelter.
Mom eventually found a job as a secretary and we made some ends meet. A new city helped us put some distance between the bricks and bloodied fingers that still haunted my dreams. I buried myself in my studies to try and forget.
But forgetting was impossible.
My father ended up dying in jail. It was no more and no less than he deserved for what he did to me. To my mother. To our family.
I swore I’d stay far away from the kind of men who had taken everything from us—the men with cigarettes and dirty shoes on the coffee table. The men who slapped my mother if she messed up their drinks. The Bratva was no sexy fantasy—it was a living, breathing beast. And it had ruined my life.
***
I look around the room from the stage once more. So much for my promise to myself, because the reality is that my past has come back to haunt me. I’m once again in the belly of the beast I’ve spent my whole life trying to escape.
But this time, there’s no getting away.
Chapter Six
Nikita
I swallow hard, hypnotized by the scene up on the stage.
The beautiful brunette continues to pique my interest. Her fighting spirit, still scrapping even though there’s no way out, is admirable. And her innocence. So rare. Two traits that shouldn’t naturally blend together but, in her, they do. Marvelously.
The delicate skin of her breasts is similarly captivating. But her fire is what holds my attention. She holds a hand to her cheek, a red handprint visible even this far back from where that fool in the front struck her. And while a mix of tears and makeup streams down her face, she recovers and glares at the man who even now lingers on the stage.
I fight to keep up the appearance of complete control and utter disinterest. But the truth is the girl has touched a nerve in me. Too much. It’s becoming harder to look away. I turn to Eitan. “Where did Augustin get this woman from?”
He shrugs, his attention on his iPad. “Not sure. I know he scouted a few clubs tonight with some of the other men. She must’ve been at one of them.”
“She’s too innocent to have been a hooker. Maybe a runaway?” I steeple my fingers and press them to
