Page 3 of Heartless Sinner

Marla

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I focused on the paperwork and ignored my mother as she paced back and forth in front of me.

“I just want you to find a good man,” she was saying.

Alina Preston had expressed some variation of this sentence every day to me for the past five years. Like my life had ended the moment I hit twenty-five. Now I was almost thirty and according to my mother I had one foot in the grave, romantically speaking.

“Mom.” The one word came out more sharply than I’d intended, and I reigned in my impatience as I pulled another list of reports closer to read through. “Can’t you see I’m a little busy working?”

Mom made a tssch noise of dismissal. “I’d already given birth to both your brothers by the time I was your age!”

“It’s the 21st century, Mom,” I pointed out, not for the first time. “Pretty sure I’m okay if I haven’t had a baby yet. And Papa needs these reports turned in, so can you let me finish reviewing them without you belaboring my lack of a spouse?”

My brothers were both busy handling other aspects of the family business, so I dealt with things like expense reports, spreadsheets, and profit and loss statements. Working for my father wasn’t ideal but it was a way to put my accounting degree to work while I figured out how to have my own life free of the mafia.

Papa wasn’t happy about my desire to leave what he believed was family traditions, but I’d grown up seeing the violence, and the high price we all paid by being a part of the mob. Even though it was the only life I’d known, I didn’t want any of that for myself, my marriage, or the children I might have one day.

And while I’d never tell my mom this because she’d just go on a rant about how spoiled I was… I didn’t want just some random mafioso to be my husband so I’d end up under his thumb, my every move monitored and controlled. I wanted a man I fell in love with who actually worshipped me, who thought I was amazing and smart, who would be sweet and caring—even if it was only for me in private.

But I also wanted a man who was confident and strong, a man who would treat me with respect despite my own mind and independence, a man who was, well, man enough to handle me. . .in the bedroom and out of it, without breaking my spirit.

Where the hell was I going to find a guy like that? Certainly not in our inner circle where all the men seemed to be dominant, arrogant, (and sometimes) abusive assholes when it came to their wives.

I refused to be any man’s possession. Ever.

My older brothers, Alexander and Dmitri, hadn’t helped matters by scaring all the decent men away. God forbid a man so much as glance in my direction. If they did, they’d be all over that poor unfortunate sucker’s ass.

My grandparents might have changed our last name when they’d come over on the boat, from Popov to Preston, but we were Russian through and through. My brothers especially, with their tempers and macho attitudes. It drove me up the damn wall.

“We just want you to be with a man who’s not afraid of us!” Dmitri would say. “If he’s scared of us, he’s got no balls. He won’t keep you safe. He’s not the man for you.”

Yeah, but if the guy did have the balls to stand up to my brothers, they’d consider him a threat. Enter Papa with his itchy trigger finger. There was no way to win in that fight.

If you asked me, that was a big part of the reason we hadn’t climbed further up the ranks in the mafia underworld. We were still just a middling family, not one of the big players like the Russo’s, but for-fucking-bid Papa ever listen to me when I tried to…

Shaking those thoughts from my head, I took a deep breath and ignored my mother as she continued to pace and rant. Papa would make his own decisions about how to run the family, and it didn’t matter what I thought, because I wasn’t going to be a part of this world much longer. I was going to get out, and I was going to have my own life separate from the family business, the mafia, and—

The door to the office was abruptly thrown wide open as Samuel, one of our trusted soldiers, staggered in. He looked alarmingly pale. There was only one reason he’d barge in without knocking and it wasn’t to make a social call.

“Ma’am. Miss Marla.” His eyes were wild, his broad chest rising and falling rapidly. “You need to come quickly.”

“What has happened?” Mom asked.

I stood immediately, the reports on my desk already forgotten as my stomach churned with dread. “Is it my father?”

Samuel shook his head. “No, Miss Marla. It’s your brother, and we don’t have time to waste.”

Mom let out a small cry and I took her arm, hustling her out of the room while trying to hold on to my own composure. Samuel led us outside to where a car waited for us, and we slipped inside. My heart raced wildly as a dozen question crowded my mind. Which brother? Was he injured? Had he gotten arrested? What the hell was going on?

The entire drive over, Mom murmured prayers under her breath while she stared out the car window. Her hand gripped mine like a vice so that by the time we arrived, my whole arm was numb. Mom had grown up in this world, and she’d married Papa, knowing the crime and violence and potential death this kind of business brought. But I supposed it was different when it was your child involved. You could never prepare yourself for that possibility, or get used to it.

This was exactly why I wanted to leave this world. I didn’t want to raise a family surrounded by brutality and bloodshed.

The car pulled up in front of an innocent-looking pharmacy and weed shop. Now that marijuana was legal it was even easier for us to use the stores as a front for our criminal activities. God bless capitalism.

My heart dropped when I realized where we were, though. A weed shop and a pharmacy? That was never good. We tended to use pharmacies as fronts for our doctors. Easily obtained and perfectly legal drugs would be on hand for medication and medical procedures.

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