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It was a preamble to their real reason for being at Basil’s, a kind of foreplay. The VIPs invited to the underground fight club at Basil’s weren’t interested in clubbing and hooking up, not until the fight was over anyway.
They wanted violence. Blood. Pain.
It was all hidden under the veneer of the drinks and music that took place before the fights, but they could have gotten that anywhere. They came to Basil’s to scratch their itch for pain, all of them too scared to face it more personally.
Roman held them no ill will toward them. The spectators were part of the fun. Without them, there would be no fighting at Basil’s. Besides, everyone had itches that needed scratching.
Roman wasn’t one to judge.
He’d been able to table his guilt when he’d been talking to Ruby in the loft, explaining the playroom and the bedroom he’d had made for Olivia. There hadn’t been room for the shame that weighed on him like a lead blanket on the way home from the warehouse after they’d found out about Valeriya’s murder.
Then Ruby had retreated to her room, something she did when she was trying to process something, when she wanted space from him, and it had all come crashing back.
Valeriya Orlov had been killed on the cusp of her freedom and it was Roman’s fault, although that wasn’t what the media was reporting. According to them, Valeriya Orlov, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the world, was mugged on her way out of a restaurant, shot for her Gucci handbag and whatever it held.
Roman knew better. Valeriya always traveled with a bodyguard.
Always.
It came with the territory of being Vladimir Orlov’s daughter.
Which meant her bodyguard had either been (intentionally) derelict in his duty or he’d pulled the trigger himself.
Either way, Roman had no doubt the order had come from his father. Who else when Valeriya’s own father was dead? Who else had a stake in keeping Valeriya from inheriting all that money?
And Igor did have a stake in it. Valeriya had broken off her engagement with Erik, withdrawing the promise of her dowry. Even if Igor hadn’t known about the arrangement between Valeriya and Roman, he’d know the money wouldn’t be coming to him, and not getting what he wanted was reason enough for Roman’s father to exact revenge.
Roman nodded at the spectators and staff who recognized him on the way to the makeshift locker room. None of them knew he owned Basil’s, that he‘d purchased it for the purpose of creating the underground fight club in the basement.
It was one of very few places where no one looked at him with either reverence or disgust. Here he was just another man looking for a fight.
He entered the changing room and shut the door, leaving behind the noise of the basement, the crowd getting rowdier as the hour got later, the fight imminent.
He stripped off his shirt and rolled his shoulders, then twisted from side to side, testing the gunshot wound he’d taken to the chest in Ruby’s apartment. The stitches had long since been removed but the wound could still be tender. It wouldn’t stop him from fighting, but he liked to know what he was working with before stepping into the figurative ring.
The music disappeared and a roar went up from the crowd. Kellen, the MC, was probably making his way to the front, getting ready to hype them up as he introduced the fighters.
Roman didn’t know who he’d be fighting and he didn’t care. It was irrelevant to his usual purpose — beating another man bloody — and irrelevant to his purpose tonight.
Normally he bounced on his feet to get the blood flowing before a fight, psyching himself out for the fun ahead. Tonight he sat on the bench, resting his elbows on his knees, thinking about Valeriya.
About Ruby. About Olivia.
He was an atomic bomb. A destroyer of everything in his path.
Because of him, Ruby and Olivia were separated. Ruby had been kidnapped and held prisoner. Olivia was living with a man Roman wouldn’t trust to watch a dog, let alone a child.
And Valeriya was dead. She wasn’t as innocent as Ruby and Olivia, but in her own way, she’d been a victim too — of her environment, her upbringing, her father.
What chance had she had to choose another life when her father had made sure she was equipped only for the life he’d sanctioned?
She hadn’t deserved to be gunned down in the street.
For the first time, Roman wondered if the bratva was worth it. Even his vendetta against his father seemed small compared to the lives that had been ruined in his exacting of it.
He wondered if it was time to call it quits. Approach his father with an agreement: leave Ruby and Olivia alone forever in exchange for Roman’s withdrawal.
He could leave the country. Start over doing something else. Somethinghonest. Wasn’t that what people said?
