Bratva Prince (Bratva Series Book 2)

Once we got back to the house, I quickly herded Drea back up to her room before my father noticed she was with me. She wasn’t happy to be taken back to her room. She pleaded to not be locked away again, even though it was a perfectly nice room to be locked into. She’d dragged her feet and tried bargaining with me. When that didn’t work, she went on the offensive, kicking and screaming at me.

Little did she know, however, that I liked it. I liked it when she fought against me. It eventually got to the point that I had to hurl her over my shoulder and carry her to the room while she beat into my back with her fists.

The entire thing gave me a sense of nostalgia, reminding me of the first time I’d met her, dragging her from Nero’s house in the same fashion.

God. That felt like a lifetime ago now.

It was easy to forget I was actually holding her hostage. Most of the time, Drea didn’t act like a prisoner. She seemed content with what was going on, just going with the flow and waiting for the meet with her brother (which I had scheduled for the day after tomorrow).

I’d messaged Juan shortly after leaving Drea the afternoon she’d called him, telling him where and when the meeting would take place. Considering I held all the leverage, he didn’t really have a leg to stand on, negotiation wise. He had no choice but to accept my conditions.

We were meeting at one of the buildings we owned downtown at noon. We were both permitted to bring one man. One. Any more than that and it would be considered an act of aggression, which meant any hope of a deal between the cartel and the Bratva would be off the table.

The ideal outcome would be a ceasefire between us, as well any assistance the cartel was providing the Outfit to stop. Immediately. If an agreement was made, it would mean Drea would be leaving with Juan.

I’d gotten so used to having her around, to being able to see her whenever I wanted that the idea of her leaving made my chest tighten with anger and distress.

But I had to put those thoughts and feelings away and deal with them later. I couldn’t afford to be distracted. I needed to be focused. Calm, in control.

And the only way I could do those things was if I put Drea far out of my mind.

“Is she awake yet?”

I turned at the sound of my father’s voice, watching as he walked into the room.

“Not yet.” I looked back at Rayna dangling from the ceiling, thick, metal chains wrapped around her wrists and pulling her arms tightly. Her bare feet barely touched the concrete floor as her body swayed lightly through the air.

A table was up against the wall. It was lined with various torture implements, all crusty and rusted with dry blood.

They served two purposes. First, to intimidate. To scare. The moment Rayna saw them, she would understand the full gravity of the situation she was in. And second, to be used on her to get her to talk.

That’s what I was looking forward to the most.

Father circled Rayna’s unconscious form, rage burning in his eyes. “Any problems bringing her in?”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle.” I inclined my head to the two men in the corner, one with a hole in his head and the other bound by his wrists and ankles, his head slumped forward.

Father grunted. “Good. She say anything?”

“Nothing of importance. At least not yet.”

Nodding, Father moved to the table, studying the weapons with a sense of nostalgia, like they all brought forth fond memories for him.

They probably did. Father liked to torture people almost as much as I did.

“We’ll wake her when your brother gets here. How’s the boy going?”

I blew out a breath, pushing off my spot on the wall. “As well as can be expected. He’s similar to Lukyan in a lot of ways. Brimming with potential, but he lacks the drive to really tap into what he’s capable of. He handled himself well with The Dirty Vultures, even if he did throw up.”

Father chuckled. “He’ll get desensitised to that very soon.”

Yes, I suspected he would. Speaking of The Dirty Vultures…

“Any more problems with the MC?” I asked, fighting the urge to pace up and down the room. I was eager to get started. The sooner we dealt withRayna, the sooner I could get back to Drea.

Considering I only had limited time left with her, I wanted to take full advantage of it. There was a large part of me that feared that the moment she left here, that would be it. I would never see her again.

I knew she was attracted to me, knew she enjoyed the sexual aspects of our time together. But beyond that? That I wasn’t so sure of. There was this voice inside my head telling me she was only with me to help pass the time of her imprisonment, and that once she was free, she wouldn’t come back.

It made me hesitant to let her go.

What if she left with Juan and I never saw her again?

I didn’t care if she didn’t want to be here. I wanted her here, and that was all the incentive I needed to keep her.

“None,” Father answered, pursing his lips. “They’ve been very quiet since your…incident with them. Too quiet.”

I frowned at the unease lacing his voice. “You’re suspicious.”

“Very. They’re planning something. I know it. I feel it. It feels like something is about to happen, something bad.”

“If you’re worried, why don’t we just do a pre-emptive strike? Take them all out before they have a chance to make a move?”

Father considered it. “Let’s deal with this first. Once Rayna and Dominik have been dealt with, we’ll take care of them.”

I nodded. “Alright then.”

Nik jogged into the room a few minutes later, slightly out of breath, sweat glistening on his forehead. “Sorry, I got here as fast as I could.”

“Where were you?” I asked, arching an eyebrow.

He glared. “None of your business.”

He was with Tatiana.

If we were alone I would have pushed harder, but now wasn’t the time.

Since Illayana moved out, Tatiana’s visits to the house have basically been nonexistent. She still runs her usual route every day, which takes her right past our house, but that was the extent of her presence here.

If Nik was with her, it meant he’d tracked her down, and it made me curious. I would bring it up with him later.

“Let’s get to it,” Father said, cracking his neck. “Wake her up.”

Nik picked up the bucket full of piss and shit that sat in the corner (which was from the original occupant of this room before we moved them to another) and threw it all over Rayna.

She startled awake, coughing and gagging at the bodily fluids now running over her skin. “Oh my god, oh my god,” she cried, retching. Her lips quivered, her eyes darting around the room in a panic. “What are you doing?!” she shrieked, flailing wildly. “Let me go! Let me go right now!”

Father, Nik and I watched her with bored expressions, waiting for her to tire herself out, which didn’t take long. Once she settled down, Father looked at me and inclined his head towards Rayna.

Nik frowned, his gaze darting between the two of us.

I was just as confused as he was, but I refused to show it. I’d done plenty of interrogations in my life. We all had. But when Father was in the room, he always took control. He wasn’t the type to sit back and let his boys do all the dirty work. He liked to get his hands bloody like the rest of us.

Why was he all of a sudden handing over his control? First the meet with the Los Zetas and now this? What was going through his head?

I moved to stand in front of Rayna. She breathed hard, whimpering as she tried to pull her arms free.

“I’m going to give you one chance, Rayna. You tell me what I want to know and I won’t kill you.”

She eyed me suspiciously. “I don’t believe you.”

Couldn’t really blame her for that.

I moved and grasped the table holding all our torture weapons, pushing it over to Rayna. I stopped it directly in front of her, giving her plenty of time to look over them all as I ran my fingers over each one.

Pliers, knives, axes, daggers, machetes, stun belts, spiked batons, hacksaws. The list was endless.

She swallowed, fear flashing across her face.

I took my time picking the one I wanted. I had favourites (like I’m sure everybody does). The spiked baton, for example. But today I felt like getting up close and personal, so I picked up one of the curved daggers, holding it up in the air.

This would do very nicely.

“Aleksandr, wait—”

I stepped around the table until I stood in front of her. My head tilted to the side as I studied her closely, wondering where I was going to cut first. There were just so many options. I wanted her to hurt, to bleed. But I didn’t want her to die. Not yet, anyway. Not until we got the answers we needed.

Rayna was as vain as they came, so I decided to start with her face.

I ran the tip of the blade across her skin, from the middle of her forehead, down the bridge of her nose to underneath her eye.

She stiffened, staying absolutely still, too scared to even breathe.

“Why did you hand Illayana over to Nero? Why did you betray us?”

She licked her lips nervously. “You’d seriously hurt me? A woman? Your own cousin?”

“You think being a woman will save you? That being related to me will make me hesitant to hurt you?” I tsked, shaking my head in disappointment. “I really thought you knew me better than that, Rayna.”

I didn’t go out of my way to hurt women, but I also wasn’t afraid to do it if I needed to. If a woman was coming at me with a knife trying to kill me, you bet your damn ass I’d end her before she got the chance to end me.

Women were just as, if not more, dangerous than men.

“I do, I do. I know family means everything to you and I-I’m family Aleksandr, I am. I—ahhhh!”

I slashed the blade down her face, making sure to slice right through her eye. She screamed, flailing back as blood poured down her cheek.

“You are not family, Rayna. Family doesn’t do what you did. Don’t try to appeal to that side of me, because you’re just going to piss me off.” I grabbed her, holding her still as I placed the tip of the dagger over her other eye.

“Wait! Wait! Please don’t,” she begged, crying.

I loved it when they cried.

“Why did you betray us?”

When she didn’t answer, I started from her hairline, dragging the dagger down her forehead towards her eye, her skin splitting open. She screamed, flailed, twisted, trying everything to get herself away from the pain.

As the blade sliced through her eyebrow she screamed, “Because my dad told me too!”

I stopped, a mere millimetre away from taking her sight completely. I glanced over my shoulder at my father. His whole focus was on Rayna, his body tight with tension and anger.

Rayna continued, her words coming out in a rush. “He told me to hand her over, okay? I had nothing to do with it. It was all him. Him and his stupid plan.”

“What plan?”

“How the fuck should I know? You think he includes me in his plans? He doesn’t tell me shit,” she spat, groaning in pain.

There was a small part of me that believed that.

Dominik was very much a singular person. Whatever this ‘plan’ was, I doubted he involved her in the fundamentals of it, even though she was his daughter. Rayna was so desperate for his approval, she’d do anything for him without question.

Still…she knew something. I was sure of it. Call it an inkling, or intuition, or just your average gut feeling. Whatever it was, it was screaming at me that she knew more than she was letting on.

“He told you something though, didn’t he, Rayna?” I asked, lowering my voice.

She averted her gaze, hissing at the pain from the small movement.

Just like I thought.

I sighed, shaking my head in disappointment. “Honestly, Rayna, I would have thought you’d know better than this.”

A sneer streaked across her face at the tone of my words. My voice was laced with reprimand, the same kind I’d heard Dominik use on her time and time again—which was exactly why she hated it.

“You might not have been actively involved in the Bratva, but you know how we deal with people who betray the family. Now, I’m willing to be lenient with you. I swear on my mother’s grave, I won’t hurt you anymore—and I won’t kill you—if you tell me what you know.”

She eyed me suspiciously, trying to figure out if she could believe me. If she could trust me.

In the end, she decided she could. She knew that when it came to my mother, I didn’t fuck around.

“Look, I don’t know much, okay? I swear. Just that he had some sort of deal with Nero. The guy wanted your sister. He wanted to use her to get Dimitri to back out of the fight between the Outfit and La Cosa Nostra. My dad offered to help him.”

“In exchange for?” I highly doubted Dominik would do a damn thing unless he was getting something in return.

She glanced nervously behind me, no doubt looking at my father, who I’m sure was letting his anger show.

I clicked my fingers an inch away from her face and her eyes darted back to me. “Don’t look at him. Look at me. What did Dominik want from Nero?”

“Once Nero was done with Illayana, he was to give her to my dad so he could use her to force Dimitri into giving up control of the Bratva.”

Nik scoffed, joining in for the first time. “That never would have worked.”

Rayna arched an eyebrow condescendingly. “Are you sure about that? Parents aren’t meant to have them, but they all have favourites. I should know. My brother was my dad’s favourite, and he died in the womb. Hadn’t even been born yet. Did that stop my dad from loving him more? No. If he could trade my life for the life of his dead unborn son, he would have. Illayana is Dimitri’s favourite, and we all know why. It’s because she looks the most like your mother. He would have done whatever he needed to do to get her back safely.”

Silence fell over the room.

She was right. If Dominik had succeeded in his plan to use Illayana as leverage, it would have worked. There was nothing—nothing—my father wouldn’t do to save her life, because Rayna was right. She was the favourite.

My brothers and I, we all knew it. We didn’t care. Father loved us all. He just had a real soft spot for Illayana. We all did, really. She was the baby of the family. The youngest always got babied, regardless of how old they were.

I was actually quite surprised, even a little impressed. I never would have thought he’d be able to come up with something so…well…devious. Smart.

I glanced over my shoulder, locking eyes with my father. Anger radiated from every inch of him, his eyes burning with the need for vengeance. To hurt. To kill.

I recognised the look. I saw it in the mirror every day.

I expected him to take over, but he just inclined his head at Rayna again, his own silent way of telling me to deal with it.

I’d find out what that was about later.

I turned back to face Rayna. “What does Dominik have planned now?”

“What makes you think he has something else planned?”

“Don’t bullshit me, Rayna. We both know how tenacious Dominik is. Getting to Illayana in New York surrounded by La Cosa Nostra would be next to impossible for someone like him with limited resources. So he would have come up with another way to get what he wants. What. Is. It?”

“I don’t know,” she whined in pain. Whether it was from the cuts still bleeding down her face, or the pressure being suspended in the air like that put on her wrists, I wasn’t sure.

As long as she was in pain, I was happy.

“I swear, I don’t know what he has planned next. I don’t.”

“What were you doing at the café?”

She hesitated for the briefest moment. “Meeting a friend.”

A friend? Right. I called bullshit.

“I’m sorry, I should have been more clear with you about what happens if you lie to me.” I moved back to the table, putting down the curved dagger and picking up another weapon.

“I’m not—” her words died off in her throat when she got a look at what was now in my hands.

The pliers.

“For every lie you tell me, I take a tooth.”

She whimpered, trying to get away from me as I made my way back to her. “A-Aleksandr—”

“Choose your next words very carefully, Rayna,” I warned, darkness dripping from my voice.

“Okay, okay,” she breathed out, licking her lips. “I go there once a week to meet someone.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

I gripped her face, shoving the pliers into her mouth and clasping one of her central incisors, the teeth at the very front.

“No, I really have no idea who he is!” she mumbled around the pliers, tears bursting from her eyes. I pulled the pliers out, giving her a chance to talk. “My-my dad just told me to meet the guy there. I don’t know his name. I don’t know a thing about him, apart from his horrible sense of personal hygiene. I just meet him at the café, take the bag of cash he gives me and leave. That’s it.”

“What do you do with the cash?”

“I get a text with a location shortly after and I drop it off there.”

“Where’s your phone?” She didn’t have it on her when I kidnapped her. I know, I checked.

“In my handbag back at the café. I wasn’t anticipating getting jumped,” she said angrily.

That’s unfortunate.

“Who picks up the money?”

“I don’t know. I’m gone by the time they get there.”

Goddamn it. Dominik was being extra vigilant in covering his tracks. So far, all her answers seemed genuine. I was pretty good at being able to tell if someone was lying to me, and my instincts weren’t screaming ‘lie’. So I was inclined to believe her.

Whoever this guy was, he was paying Dominik for something. The question was, what? Dominik had the same connections we did. Was it guns? Or maybe protection?

There was still this nagging feeling in my gut telling me Rayna was holding something back.

“You might not know who he is, but you have an idea, don’t you?”

She eyed the pliers in my hand, picking her words carefully. “I saw him get on the back of a motorcycle once. He wasn’t wearing a cut, so I didn’t think anything of it at the time. But today when he pulled up at the café, I saw there were a bunch of other bikers riding with him.”

“What MC were they a part of?”

“I didn’t get a good enough look at their patches.”

Her information was both helpful and useless all at the same time. Dominik was clearly in league with an MC. But there were dozens of different MCs in this corner of Vegas alone. Finding out which one it was would take time.

I was inclined to think it was The Dirty Vultures. They could have easily turned to Dominik when my father refused to work with them.

I moved onto the last question. One I was fairly sure I knew the answer to already. “Where is Dominik?”

Rayna scoffed. “Your guess is as good as mine. I haven’t seen him since Illayana’s wedding. He calls me when he wants me to do something for him. Always from a different number.”

And like the good little bitch she was, she always did it without question.

I looked back at my father. He gave me the briefest nod before turning on his heels and leaving the room.

“Okay,” I said, putting down the pliers. “Then I guess we’re done here.”

“D-done?” she stuttered. “What does that mean?”

“What do you think it means?” I smirked.

“You bastard!” she screeched, flailing wildly. “You swore you wouldn’t kill me if I told you what I know! You swore!”

“Yes, I did, and I’m a man of my word Rayna. So don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you.”

She breathed out a huge sigh of relief, her entire body slumping as if all the energy left her at once.

“Your life isn’t mine to take.”

Her head snapped up, her brows lowered in confusion.

Behind me the door opened, the click-clack of high heels hitting the concrete floor echoing throughout the room.

“Fuck,” Rayna choked, her eyes widening in fear. Liquid splattered on the ground between her legs, the stench of urine reaching my nose, and I laughed.

Yeah, my sister had that effect on people.

I turned, a smile spreading across my face as Illayana walked in.