Page 18 of Captive Prize

If it were only me? Fine.

But if I fucked this up, it wouldn’t just be my life on the line.

Pavel was counting on me to get him out and back to his wife and child.

We needed to vanish before anyone realized we were gone. If shots were fired, we were both dead.

“No pressure,” Kostya had said earlier when I told him the plan.

Fuck that.

Give me pressure. Stack the odds. Raise the stakes.

That was where I thrived.

I expected these men to be sloppy.

But I wasn’t prepared for how pathetic they actually were—undisciplined, unfocused, easily manipulated.

The air inside the warehouse stank of cigarette smoke, stale beer, and whatever narcotic they’d laced the skunk weed with. Like someone tried to mask the stench of a corpse with drugstore potpourri.

If anyone under my command ever behaved like this, they’d be executed.

Deliberately. Visibly. As a warning to the rest.

Men like this weren’t assets. They were liabilities—and I was going to use that.

It should’ve taken days to gain their trust. Weeks.

Instead, I met Mateo at an underground fight club and had a job within the hour.

Fifteen minutes of booze and bullshit was all it took tonight before they were spilling everything the second Zoya left the floor.

These men didn’t respect her.

And that was dangerous.

Not every boss starts with a legacy name—I got that.

But when you were in charge, you earned loyalty with money, fear, or pain.

Zoya thought she’d bought theirs.

She was wrong.

And it was going to get her killed.

But that wasn’t my problem.

My problem was the two-hundred-pound Russian in the basement with a broken femur.

I’d planned for him to sneak out once the coast was clear—until Mateo got high and decided to work out his aggression by turning Pavel into a punching bag.

And snapping something. Pavel roared.

No one escaped unnoticed with a shattered leg.

Pavel was tough, but he wasn’t Jesus.

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