Page 118 of Bratva Menace

“Smart. Delivering the information about the compound was more important, and crucial to the success of our mission.”

More important than what? My life?

“I’m not sure this is the right course of action anymore, Lev.”

He stiffened, his whole body turning to stone. Confusion streaked through his eyes, replaced quickly with anger. “This is because of that fucking kid, isn’t it?”

“Lukyan isn’t a kid,” I gritted out behind clenched teeth.

“Have you seen the way he acts? ’Cause I’d beg to fucking differ.”

“He’s wild and carefree, exactly like me.”

He shook his head, his frustration mounting. “I knew I should have given you a different job the second I saw how obsessed you got with Lukyan Volkov. I fucking knew it. You’re too easily influenced. You allowed that fucker to manipulate you!”

Lev couldn’t have given me a different job because he had no one else to do the dirty work for him. No one else he trusted, anyway. The money he’d inherited when he turned eighteen allowed him to hire mercenaries and security guards, but they could only be trusted with his life, never information about his decade-long revenge plan.

“He didn’t manipulate me.” He did. He totally, totally did. It was just completely unintentional on his part. “I fell in love with him and married him.”

“You what?!” Lev roared.

I didn’t flinch under his harsh tone or his fury-heated gaze. He didn’t scare me. Kane’s eyes flicked to me in the rearview mirror and then back to the road. His hand moved away from the steering wheel and disappeared around his side.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out he’d just palmed his weapon.

I didn’t move my eyes from Lev’s as I pulled the ring out of my pocket and slid it on my finger. “I married him.”

He seemed utterly gobsmacked. “Why the fuck would you do that?! How the fuck did you do that? You’re telling me you got Lukyan Volkov, the playboy of the Bratva, who’s never been seen with the same woman twice, to agree to marry you?”

“The details of it are not important,” I grumbled. He didn’t need to know the particulars. All that mattered was that we were married. “And I did it because we’re meant to be together.”

“No. You did it because you thought it would save him, and it won’t,” he spat.

My eyes narrowed dangerously. “He’s my husband, Lev.”

“And that means you’ll choose him over me? Is that what you’re saying? Your own fucking brother?”

I said nothing. The truth of it was, I could never hurt my brother, but I could never allow something to happen to Lukyan either.

“Your problem is with Dimitri. Not his children.”

Lev punched the seat in front of him. “When are you going to learn?! Everyone knows hurting his children is hurting him. It has always been our plan to kill them all. Wait for the best opportunity to kidnap Dimitri, use him as bait to pull all his children in, and then when they come to rescue him, we kill them all in front of him. Make him fucking watch as we cut them up piece by piece. It will absolutely destroy him, having to watch them all die for his sins. You can’t just decide to pull out now. I won’t allow it.”

“You won’t allow it?” I repeated, aghast.

Lev was older. Bigger. Stronger. But he wasn’t better. I knew that, and, more importantly, he knew that. Some people were born to give the kill orders, and others were born to implement them. Born to take lives.

Lev was the former; I was the latter. He couldn’t beat me, no matter how hard he tried.

Seething anger flared across his face before he was able to mask it. “I would never force you to do something you don’t want to do,” he tried to clarify, though his words came out rough and strained. “But you can’t just back out on me now. Not after all the work we’ve put into getting here. Dimitri deserves to suffer. I want to make him suffer. I want to make him bleed and cry for what he did to me—us.”

The image of Papa D crying wasn’t really one I could conjure. It was hard to imagine. But I knew if there was one thing in the world capable of making the Bratva Butcher cry, it would be the deaths of his children.

“I just don’t see the point anymore,” I said honestly. “It’s been ten years, Lev, and whether you want to admit it or not, Dad kinda deserved it for what he did to Yekaterina Volkova⁠—”

He slapped me across the face. The shock of it froze me solid. Lev had never struck me before, not even when I’d accidentally snipped the top of his ear off when I tried to cut his hair when we were kids. He’d even lied to our father about what happened, saying he’d done it himself to save me from his wrath.

It wasn’t until this moment that I realized he was no longer that brother. Our parents’ deaths had changed him. Molded him into the man sitting in front of me. Someone who once used to protect me, but would now strike me in anger.