Page 43 of The Bratva’s Stalked Pregnant Bride

Now it was personal, if it was someone tied to the rogue organization going after my family. It was impossible this was a coincidence. What bothered me was that there shouldn’t have been any way for the Collective’s castoffs to know that my restaurant even belonged to me. I was nobody in this town. The place had no sign because we still hadn’t come up with a name, and was hidden under so many shell corporations I’d be hard-pressed to prove I owned it if it came down to it.

What bothered me more was that Laurel’s ex still might be involved in it, because it seemed pretty far-fetched that one of his employees happened to be moonlighting for the mob.

But was he involved to make Laurel pay for leaving him or to take down my family?

Or was she behind it all, feeding them information?

It was time to find out.

Chapter 25 - Laurel

I woke up with the feel of hands around my neck, but it was only a bad dream. It took a few seconds to remember how I got home and into bed. The sun was still out, and when I grabbed my phone to check, it was late afternoon. So much time had passed. More than I remembered at first, because I wasn’t coming out of a fog from Rand’s attack, but a far worse one.

So much noise and confusion. That sudden burst of gunfire, louder than someone rattling a can full of rocks directly next to my ear. The terror I felt when Mik disappeared from my view after he shoved me to safety. How was he so quick to act? He couldn’t have known what was about to happen.

I had barely registered how odd it was that the truck door was sliding up on its own from the inside, and a blink later everything was chaos. Once again, I had turned to jelly, first crawling as fast as I could back into the restaurant, then getting up and jetting through the dining room screaming for help.

At the first glimpse of another gun being pulled out by one of the construction workers, I really lost it, and after he pushed me into Mik’s office and told me to take cover, I shrank into a ball, completely frozen.

Now I felt sick. Once again Mik had taken me home and tucked me in bed like a frightened child, and that was about how useful I was in the whole situation. It was at moments like that when I wished my mother were the sympathetic type.

I would have loved to get all my feelings out to someone who wouldn’t judge me too harshly. My mom didn’t fit that bill, and it was unlikely she’d even take my call. It had been weeks since I spoke to her, and she didn’t know about the change in my marital state. She only took down my new address in a bored manner, never asking why I moved.

My old friends in Virginia hadn’t heard from me in so long they probably all gave up on me. I tried to keep up with them when I first moved to California, eager to start my career, but once Rand got his hooks in me, he was always so jealous about everything. He accused me of putting women’s names in my contacts to cover up calling old boyfriends, and when I let him hear their voices on speakerphone, he accused me of getting some random sister of the imaginary boyfriend to cover for us.

It was too much work to have friends, and I let them all slip away, only understanding when it was too late that Rand had been carefully isolating me so I’d have no one to turn to but him. Nell was too close to the situation, still working at the winery, and I had never called her back after promising her I’d tell her everything so she’d agree to pretend she didn’t know me.

I wasn’t sure Mik was at home and didn’t want to bother him if he had to return to the restaurant and deal with the aftermath, but the feeling of being alone was beginning to be worse than leftover stress from the shooting.

After staring at the new contact in my phone and hovering my finger over it for several minutes, I finally called Mila.

“News travels fast in this family. I know everything,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Not really,” I confessed. “I’m not hurt, just…”

“I get it, having someone shooting nearby is scary.” She sounded bizarrely calm, going on to say that it was a rite of passage to hear gunfire in Los Angeles. “I’m just glad Mik was prepared.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t expecting the construction guys to be packing, but I guess I’m glad they were.” My voice broke as a new memory pushed its way in. Mik had tried his best to guide me out of there without seeing anything, but the tarp-shrouded body with the red stain seeping through loomed before me.

“Don’t be sorry about anyone who got himself killed doing something that reckless,” Mila said. “You know what they say about playing stupid games.”

I sniffled, trying to be as dispassionate as she was. She was right; that man could have easily killed Mik, or me, or any of the other people at work today.

“Why?” I asked, not expecting an answer. “It doesn’t make sense. There are some valuable things there, but nothing I’d expect would be easy to pawn. Is there a big black market for kitchen supplies?”

She laughed humorlessly. “There’s a black market for everything.” There was a long pause before she said, “It was probably random, or the idiots got the address wrong, or some kind of gang initiation.”

“I loved going there every morning,” I said, trailing off.

Now I didn’t want to think about having to face the place again anytime soon. What if I went tomorrow morning and saw a deep red stain on the floor where that covered body had been? It was going to be a while before all the bullet holes were filled in or smoothed over.

“It’s never going to happen again,” Mila promised. “Mik’s going to have security, more cameras, and an armed guard to bring in deliveries from now on.”

“That’ll go down great once we’re open.”

“Don’t worry, they’ll blend right in. You might not even notice any changes. He’s not going to let anything happen to you, Laurel. You can count on that.”

It was nice to believe that, but she was operating under the assumption that Mik and I were truly in love, and that our marriage was real. “I’m going to have to start writing down how many times he’s saved my life,” I joked, or tried to.