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Cormac shoots me a weak smile. I shudder at the missing front tooth and the chaos of tattoos etched into his neck.
“Talk to me real fast, T. Give me all the complaints.”
Taryn reads from his phone, something he hacked from the court’s database. The details sicken and infuriate me further.
“Ana Michaels, how do you plead?” the judge asks.
“Not guilty.” Her voice forces my eyes on her again.
I detect a New York accent with a touch, just a touch of something I heard growing up in Astoria.
“Bail is set at ten-thousand dollars.”
“Motion to set aside bail, your honor,” her lawyer argues. “My client has been held against her will by her co-defendant. He stole all her money, her phone, and kept her a virtual prisoner. He forced her to help him commit these crimes in exchange for food and shelter. She did everything she’s accused of under duress.”
Anger fires through my veins.
Deep inside, I’m just as ruthless as my brothers. I want to put Cormac on lockdown myself to punish him. Punish him for putting all of us at risk.
“Who’s her lawyer?” I whisper to Taryn.
“Public defender, young kid, just out of law school.”
I roll my eyes. She’s toast.
“She’s also eight months pregnant, your honor,” her lawyer continues. “I’ve arranged for her to live in a shelter for battered women. She has no passport and will wear an ankle monitor.”
I think about when Ginnifer was that pregnant. Christ, she was miserable, and this woman has to go live in a shelter wearing an ankle monitor.
Something hits me like a bolt of lightning. If that’s my brother’s baby, it’s technically my baby, too.
Identical twins share the same DNA.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Approach.” The judge waves the woman’s lawyer and the prosecutor to the bench.
The woman looks around, and her profile starts the beginning of my heart attack.
First, at her utter and astounding beauty, despite the wrecked and ravaged state she’s in.
Next, a deeper rage has me ready to scream.
“No fucking way.” I must have said that out loud because she turns around and our eyes lock.
Anastasia Koslov.
The missing Bratva princess who was kidnapped from Astoria.
She’s pregnant with Cormac’s baby.
He may not have been the one to snatch her from her bed, as the mafia rumor mill about her being kidnapped by an unknown enemy has churned for more than two years. But if she’s telling the truth, Cormac kept her a prisoner here in Vegas and forced her to commit crimes.
If her father, the vicious Astoria pakhan, finds out what my brother did to her, he’ll slaughter my entire family.
Our gazes connect, and something rearranges inside me.
I’ve watched her grow up into the sheer, flawless beauty she is. Or was, the last time I saw her.
