Page 109 of Sinister Promise

The bullet had only grazed me, but it cut deeper than I had originally thought.

Nothing vital was hit, but I was bleeding a lot, and I would be left with a brutal scar that would mar the tattoos I had covering my side.

The annoyance at the ruined art was almost as bad as the pain itself. That piece had taken forever. It was slow and excruciating. Not only the tattooing itself, but the itching afterward was brutal. Now it was ruined.

Coming home to my fiancée covered in blood was not how I wanted the night before our wedding to go.

I had intended a quiet night where we talked, and I told her what our lives together would look like. I would give her the rules she was expected to live by and the new freedoms she would have as my wife.

The gunfight had been…unexpected.

The Colombians were proving to be more of a threat than Damien had led me to believe.

They should have barely had enough men or firepower to be anything other than an inconvenience.

After they kidnapped Yelena, Damien had all but wiped them out.

The ones who terrorized Alina should have been barely more than low-level street thugs.

Last time any of us had dealt with them, they weren't even on our radar. They ran some poker rooms and Solovyov had tried to steal a gun shipment from us using their muscle.

That firefight resulted in a bonfire that I thought wiped most of them out.

It didn't.

Either they had funding I was unaware of, or something else changed.

They were different now—better organized, better funded.

Something about their power structure had been altered, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

Their sudden discipline, their influx of cash—it was a serious problem that had me considering calling Roman in again, despite how pissed Gregor had been when he learned I used him to kill Solovyov.

Satan himself would love to get his hands dirty, and it had been too long since I had seen my favorite unhinged cousin.

Gregor and Artem weren't going to like it.

They loved Roman like the rest of us did, but there was something in him that we had all grown out of in our teenage years.

We all had a darkness to us.

We were unafraid of death or pain, and we took what we wanted.

Roman was in a league of his own.

Blood spill was a sport to him, a game to be played with either a surgeon's precision or reckless abandon.

He had this wildness to him, this untamable core that made him…unpredictable.

Both Artem and Gregor could appreciate Roman's skill and passion for his work, but that wild unpredictability made him a liability.

They would get over it...eventually. I had no issues pissing off my cousin and brother if it meant getting rid of the Columbian threat and keeping my girl safe.

Besides, after the way Roman took care of Solovyov, I owed him a drink.

The immediate crisis, however, was the wound bleeding through my shirt. I needed to focus on that first.

Alina ignored my command and stepped into the bathroom.

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