AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Smiling, I reached down to my pocket, his gaze following, his body leaning over slightly.
“Here it is,” I said, waiting for him to lean down a little more.
My knee made contact with his face, his muscular form falling with a huge thud.
Smirking, I wiped off my hand on his expensive shirt and opened the door to the room.
Feeling anxious and a little lost, I hid behind the curtain. I didn’t hear any noise. It was early morning, after all. It was probably around two a.m. or so.
I hadn’t seen my sister in three years, and she’d been missing for one of those years.
The last time I saw my happy, sassy sister was in Russia at the ballroom studio. It was a week before I had left. The scars of that day’s lashing had seared pain in my back with a memory I’d prefer to forget.
Father had watched me perform a tango with Sasha. I had practiced for hours. I was forcing myself to replay the steps over and over until I moved without telling my body to do so but purely off the beat of the music.
My sister was in the front row. Her smiling face cheered me on as Sasha and I swirled around the dance floor. I had won. The medal felt heavy on my neck. I remembered the feeling of the weight of the trophy and how I had always imagined it being heavier when I was growing up.
But then screams started. My father slammed into my sister, covering her from the spray of bullets, screaming at me to shield our mother.
My feet were unable to move, and I swore she was moving in slow motion, watching my innocent mother as she ran to me. She wanted to cover me when I should have protected her. Her white dress, dark wavy hair, and smiling face were a pure reflection of my own features…then there was so much blood.
Crimson lines and puddles were everywhere from the bullets—they had painted her red. Her body fell onto the ground at my feet, and my father and sister screamed in horror. More people fell as they, too, were painted with red. A black, maroon pool began splashing until a tide of it swallowed my ankles, and I was sure I was going to drown.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Shots just kept coming, and my ears rang as my father shot the men who shot my mother—every single one of them.
To this day, his agonized roars still echoed in my ears. The way he cradled my mother’s head and the way his rage and torment carried throughout our family became my burden. That metaphorical lance had sliced my back and my blood, which had joined that of the fallen.
I had left that night, flying off to America. I learned how to be a hunter and protect those I loved. Finally, I learned to kill. I didn’t tell a soul. My father sent his lackeys, eventually finding me in New York, but by that time, I had been a ghost long enough to rebuild myself and create a home.
In America, I wasn’t just the son of Moya Kotva, the mafia’s leader. I was Lucius Vasiliev. I didn’t want to look at my sister and see that weak, pathetic man I’d left behind so long ago in the reflection of her eyes.
“Who is there?” A small voice said—a feminine Russian voice. So much like my mother, it brought tears to my eyes.
“Privyet…It’s me, Eilizaveta,” I said, my voice breaking.
“You’re Bratva?”
Seeing my sister was even more painful than I could have ever imagined. Her body was so broken and marred. Her torture on the outside was not even close to what they’d done to her soul.
I felt my chest tighten. Markus’s words in my ear, “I did it for you. So you have the power!”
My sister was put through true hell because of me.
“Do not say that name,” she said numbly. “I am Ivy now. The girl Eilizaveta was taken by monsters and destroyed.”
A tear slipped free of my face. It landed on her dark hair.
“I missed you, sestra. I searched for you…I never thought our Kotva would do this—”
She stopped my rambling. Her frail hand came up to wipe at my cheek. Not realizing I had tears flowing down my face like a fucking baby.
Her hand was so soft. So much like my mother’s, the tears kept streaming down my stupid face, and I couldn’t stop them.
