Hunted By The Bratva Beast: A Bratva Stalker/Captive Romance - Jagger Cole (the ebook reader .TXT) 📗

“This roof over your head, the food you eat, this life I give you?” Fyodor shakes his head. “You’re not out there on the street taking it in the ass, are you? No?” He glares at me. “No, you are not. Because you have family, with me. You might think I am a cruel man, Kostya. But I am just preparing you for a cruel, cold world. A world that will fuck you and hurt you every chance it can.”

He frowns and glances from me to Dimitri and back.

“With me, you will learn to be men. You will learn the way of the Bratva, and how to fight for what you want in life. Da?”

“Da,” Dimitri nods solemnly. “Yes, sir.”

Fyodor turns back to me and offers me a hand. I take it, and he brings me to my feet.

“Respect, Kostya. Respect, strength, and no mercy. Da?”

“Yes, sir.”

He grins. “Good boy. Now, go get me a beer.”

“Da.”

The slap comes hard across my face. I wince, but I already know how I’ve failed him.

“Yes, sir,” I grunt.

He smiles and reaches out to ruffle my hair. “Good boy, Kostya. Remember; we are family. No one else will care for you or help you. Only me. You understand that, yes?”

“Da,” I nod firmly. “Yes, sir.”

“Good boy.” He turns to walk over to the TV. “Don’t forget my beer, Kostya.”

Present:

She moves like an angel through a dream. I watch her through the lens of the telescope, as I do most nights. Tonight, she’s wrapped in a towel, and I groan at the sight of her smooth, creamy skin—the way her long dark hair hangs wet down her back.

The urge to take that hair into my fist, to pull her head back enough to have her moaning for me is overwhelming. I’m throbbing hard, my balls aching for a release that only she can bring.

This is how it always is, with her. This is my life now. Watching her; protecting her, as she once protected me. Though I’m quite sure she doesn’t remember that. Or she’s blocked it out, as any normal person would after the trauma and horror of that night more than ten years ago.

She was so young then. And yet so brave. She was broken—as broken as I was, perhaps more. And yet still, she found mercy in her. She saw a beast, and she saved me.

That was then, though. Now, we are here; ten years later. Now, she’s no longer such a small little creature. She’s grown up. I suck in a breath as my lust surges inside of me. She’s certainly grown up.

What I felt for her back then was not what I feel now. When I felt her small arms around me, and when I thought of her all those years away in my hell, it was not lust or desire I felt. Fuck no. I knew men like that in prison. I killed those men, slowly.

No. What I felt before for this angel was something closer to love of a sister. Love for God or religion, perhaps. The devotion or reverence you might feel for a surgeon who pulls you back from the eternal black abyss of death.

That has now changed. What I feel for her, and about her, has changed. Radically. Many things changed that night, three months ago.

I watch Nina through the big floor-to-ceiling windows of her living room. She prowls through her apartment, curiously with a gun in her hand. But I smirk when I see it. I know that gun well. Its muzzle is imprinted on my goddamn chest.

Bullet-proof vests are good, but they won’t stop a .45 at point-blank range. They will mangle and slow the bullet, though. They will turn it from a death sentence into a torture session lasting months.

I wince at the memory of the pain—the pain that still lingers from time to time. I’d managed to haul myself through the chaos of the shooting to a service elevator that night. I’d dragged myself, bleeding my life out through the hole in my chest, through alleys and darkness. But finally, I’d found my way to a doctor loyal to the Volkov Bratva.

He helped me that night. He patched me together and kept me alive with the blood loss. He took most of the fragments out, too. I’m healed now. But my obsession has grown darker; deeper.

Before, I revered her. Now, I crave her. I look at the woman my angel has become, and the desire to claim her is almost more than I can stand. I know now that should I get my hands on her, I would never, ever have my fill of her. My beauty. My queen. My obsession.

Her shooting me in the chest and almost killing me should have, well, stopped the desire for her I felt when I laid eyes on her the night of the party. It should have me hating her. But it’s done neither of those things.

It’s only made me crave her even more. It’s made me lust for her. It’s made me hard for her, for months now.

I went to that party to take something Viktor Komarov held dear. What I found was something I held dear and had lost ten years before. I can’t trace the paths the universe has taken. I don’t have the pieces of the puzzle to show me how the bruised and damaged angel who saved me from death in a dirty alley in Moscow ten years ago is now the sister of one of the richest, most powerful men in the Kashenko Bratva.

Shot in the chest or not, the memories of that night on the rooftop are forever etched in my psyche. I grabbed her. I meant to take her. And then when she turned, and I saw her eyes, my whole world broke in two.

And then, she shot me.

I groan as I watch her. She steps back from the window. But I can still see her.