Episode 2

Gavril

One Day Earlier

I braced my hands on my desk and listened to Sveta’s rants as she was escorted down the hall. I hadn’t expected her to react like that. I had expected tears, maybe even some begging. But she had reacted to my plan like a hellion, fighting my men and threatening to kill me.

Maybe she had more of Stanislav in her than I realized. I expected a woman who would be afraid of me, one that would be crying for her father, a father she never knew, to come save her.

Instead, I found a woman who had defiance in her eyes, and hell, it stirred my cock nearly immediately. Were it not for protocol, I might have stripped her then and there, bent her over and used her until she was a trembling mess.

A woman with fire was dangerous, but also a hell of a good time.

In that moment, I almost wished that she wasn’t to be my wife. I didn’t want excitement in my marriage. I didn’t even want to think about her other than to finish my plan and have her give me a child.

That was I planned for her.

Now that I had her in my home, I wanted to marry her immediately to ensure that my plan was going to stick.

Well, and to bury myself deep between her legs and make her scream until her throat bled.

Taking in a deep breath to calm myself, I walked away from the desk to the window that overlooked a small garden. The fountain shone in the evening light. This home wasn’t to be our final stop, but it had been my compound for the last few days as the time grew near to taking Sveta.

It was closer to the city than my mansion was and put me right where I needed to be.

I had Sveta in my grasp. It was hard to believe that my plan had gone off so flawlessly. Anatoly had done his job well. And now I was eager to move on to the next step.

More importantly, I wanted to squelch any notions that I couldn’t pull this shit off. I was always underestimated, and if Sveta thought that I was going to take any leniency on her because she showed some fight in her, then she was wrong.

They were all wrong.

Still, it didn’t matter what sort of person Stanislav’s daughter was. I wasn’t going to change the course of my plans. For months I had thought about this from every angle, trying to find some hole in it.

Even my brigadiers thought I was crazy for going this far. But it was a necessary step. Fortune favored the bold, and this would be the boldest thing any Bratva Pakhan did. With Stanislav and his son Dimitri’s deaths at the hands of the Marchetti twins, the pieces couldn’t have fallen in place better than they had. His Bratva—the Krasnaya Bratva—had no leader, and no one was going to point them in the direction of power.

No one until me.

I would marry Sveta and assume my rightful place on top of both the Krasnaya and Belaya Bratvas, so that I could assume the power I craved

The power that I deserved.

A smirk crossed my face as I sat back in my chair, waiting for Anatoly to return. He had been the one to grab Sveta from LA, following her into an apartment that she’d been stashed in and bringing her to my home in the city.

I wondered if she’d made as many threats toward Anatoly as she had to me. The girl was a fighter, no doubt about that. From the moment she saw me, I knew that she’d never love me. That she’d never be devoted to me.

Which suited me just fine.

I didn’t need her love. I didn’t want her devotion.

The only thing I wanted was to pry her legs apart and plant my child in her womb. Once our bloodlines were mixed, then no one would be able to undo it.

No one would be able to disavow my claim on the Krasnaya Bratva.

It was an age-old remedy to protecting bloodlines and conquering claims to the dynasties of the past. Hell, families did it every day to ensure that they were part of the elite. They married off their children like cattle so that they could strengthen their empires.

What I would be doing was no different.

Whether my bride-to-be was willing mattered not. I’d have her dragged down the aisle if need be.

If she played her role correctly, she wouldn’t even need to be in the same bed as me. I didn’t need her to satisfy my lust. I had many others that would jump at the chance to share my bed, and there was no doubt in my mind that once I had Sveta a few times, I would grow bored of her.

No woman held my attention for long these days.

I certainly didn’t expect my wife to do so either.

Anatoly appeared a moment later, looking as if he had gone to war with a tiger and lost. “She’s in her room again.”

I chuckled as I saw the red marks on his face. “Are you all right?”

He shrugged his massive shoulders in indifference. I knew personally that he had suffered worse injuries before, from both men and women alike.

“She’s a fighter. That’s good. Maybe she will give you strong sons and daughters.”

It was. I could appreciate her willingness to fight. It would serve her well in her new life. “I want her transported to the mansion. She needs to prepare for the wedding.”

Anatoly arched a brow. “Are you certain you want to go through with this? Poroshenko, Puzanov, Kovyalyov, and the rest will not have kind words to say about it. Especially since they know exactly what you’d do to their Pakhan’s precious little daughter.”

I shrugged at the names of Stanislav’s brigadiers. “Leave that to me. Those men understand protocol.”

“Join or die,” Anatoly finished the thought.

“Da.”

There were very few men who would be able to question my intentions like this and live to tell the tale. Anatoly Danilov was one of them. Some would call him a friend, and others would call him my private killer on a short leash. The truth was somewhere in between. We had been through a lot of shit together. He had been there when I had taken over, and he was the one person I could trust with my life.

And most importantly, the man stuck to the thieves’ code. He had honor. True honor—not the kind motivated by money or power.

I pushed away from the desk. “Make certain that the boys know that she is not to be touched. Or I will deal with them personally.”

Anatoly chuckled. “I’m sure that was clear the first hundred times you said that, Pakhan.”

A mirthless chuckle escaped my lips. “It never hurts to make sure that orders are clear.”

“Koneshno,” he replied.

Despite his size, Anatoly was a year younger than I was. I had given him a life he wouldn’t have had otherwise in Russia. I’d brought him off the streets of St. Petersburg and elevated him here in the States. He was the brigadier of brigadiers. A man who took care of the finer details, which left me to handle the broader strokes of the Bratva’s businesses: imports, exports, new business deals, and strategic marriages.

Even my own.

Speaking of. It was time to turn my attentions elsewhere now that Sveta was safely under my roof. “Come, we have to go to the docks.”

Anatoly and I walked out of the home and to the waiting car, where I slid into the leather seat with Anatoly flanking my right. Some Pakhans relied completely on their guards and associates to protect them. And I knew that Anatoly would give his life for mine.

Me? I preferred a more equal approach at times. I would do everything in my power to keep Anatoly alive. He would never let me, of course, as his job was to keep me protected.

While Anatoly was very handy with knives, I had my own already strapped to various parts of my body, skilled in both hand-to-hand combat and weapons training. I had been raised on the ruthless streets of post-Soviet new Russia, where violence was the only language that people understood.

It was a life that no one in America could ever understand. I had killed my first man when I was a teenager with nothing more than my bare hands and a few seconds’ worth of time. And he had done his best to kill me.

The car pulled out of the drive and into LA traffic, a city that had become my second home. While I preferred the allure of my homeland, there were far more opportunities in LA. Here, I was the boss and could control my shipments without the interference of the Russian government.

Also here were the Marchetti and Krasnaya Bratvas, two of my rivals that I couldn’t very well just let rule LA without my interference.

And interfere they did.

“Shipments will come easier now that Krasnaya and Marchetti are in disarray,” I remarked, stretching my legs.

“There will be trades up for grabs now,” Anatoly replied, crossing his arms over his chest. “It might not hurt to expand and line our pockets with more money.”

I frowned, thinking about the fall of the Krasnaya Bratva to the Marchetti Mafia.

Stanislav had grown old, and in his advanced age, he had grown complacent. That had been his downfall.

There was a moment that I thought Roman Marchetti would step in and do exactly what I was planning to do. But then he’d started a war, all for a woman, and nearly set all of Los Angeles on fire with that.

Fucking idiot.

There was no one who could make me step away from my destiny, no one that could make me want to give up my Bratva and the power I was going to get from marrying Stanislav’s daughter.

Still, I had to thank Roman for doing what he did. After all, he had rid the world of Stanislav Orlov. Hard to believe that the man had done all that work, lost all those men—his own twin brother among them—all for a woman.

Well, no matter.

Once I put the ring on Sveta’s finger, even Stanislav’s staunchest supporters would have no choice but to follow my lead.

I just needed to jump on my plan before anyone else found Sveta and did exactly what I was planning to do. I doubted that with the chaos Roman had left in LA, anyone would have thought to take the only surviving member who could hold the key to folding the Krasnaya Bratva into their organization.

But then again, until just a few weeks ago, nobody even knew that Sveta Orlov existed.

Stanislav was an old-school man who had dodged the KGB. It didn’t surprise me he could keep such things secret.

And now he was dead. And in a few more days, my plans would be complete. I would let everyone know that I had married her. Then, I would be stepping into the old man’s shoes and combining the two Bratvas together. Krasnaya and Belaya—red and white—old foes back in Russia, brought under a single roof.

It was almost poetic.

“You know,” Anatoly remarked as the car weaved its way to the docks. “There is a good chance that both sides will just end up killing each other the moment you announce the wedding.”

“The Krasnaya Bratva is on shaky legs at best,” I told him, watching as the city passed. “And without a leader, they will be looking for some order, someone to build them back up to their former glory.”

“Tell me how you are going to keep your wife from killing you,” Anatoly smirked. “Because she doesn’t seem to be a fan of yours right now.”

I hid my smile. Sveta wasn’t a fan of me at all. But that didn’t matter.

In time she would come to realize that marrying me was the right thing to do in her situation. The only thing she could do.

I would be her provider, and once I planted my child in her belly, her role would be complete. Sure, she would stand by my arm on occasions when she needed to and play the part of the obedient wife. But I would ultimately cast her aside.

“She looked older than I thought,” Anatoly continued as the car passed through the gates to the dock on the far side of town. “I thought she was supposed to be young.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I bit out, straightening my cuffs and wiping my hands on my pants.

I didn’t even fucking care what she looked like as long as she got pregnant. Sveta had been hidden in Ukraine if stories were to be believed, and that country was going to hell in a handbasket. It didn’t surprise me that she would look older. War did that to people.

And at any rate, her father would have married her off anyway, using her as a pawn to make him a successful business match to bring in more money and alliances.

In this world, marriages weren’t built on love but on mutual interest. The wives needed not be willing. They just needed to be fertile.

My marriage to Sveta would be no different.

The car slowed to a stop and Anatoly climbed out first, holding the door so I could step out into the late afternoon myself, buttoning my suit coat as I did so. The smell was ripe with the sea and fish, the sounds of seagulls crying in the distance grating on my nerves.

I needed a drink and a few hours in bed, but business couldn’t wait. “We need to look into alternate supply routes,” I finally said to Anatoly. “Give them something to work for.”

“Who?”

I looked over at Anatoly. “The Krasnaya brigadiers—Poroshenko and the rest of them—when they come to join us.”

If they didn’t, well, they wouldn’t walk the earth much longer. Like I said: join or die. The simplest choices were the best choices.

Anatoly just shook his head and walked off to find those that were supervising the shipment’s arrivals.

He thought my plan was shit, but it was so much more than that. My plan was going to work, and in a few more days, there would be no going back. In a few more days, I would have claimed Sveta, put my child in her belly, and the name Krasnaya Bratva would never be uttered from anyone’s lips ever again.

All without a single shot fired.