Page 7 of Captive Prize

I didn’t need their money. That wasn’t what this was about. In truth, I really wasn’t sure whether my determination to destroy the Ivanovs came from a place of wanting revenge as much as a need to protect my reputation.

“Tie him up. He will wake soon, and I don’t need to lose more men to an attack by him,” I said to one of the other men.

“He is outnumbered. What could he do? I will tie him when he wakes,” he responded in a heavy Colombian accent, not even bothering to look up from cleaning his nails with the tip of his knife.

Idiots. Never underestimate an Ivanov. Even an injured one.

“Did I ask for your opinion?” I took a step toward him, my hand on the hilt of the dagger at my thigh.

Lip curled, he kicked off the wall, the knife in his hand clattering to the metal table as he reluctantly went to obey me.

I stared at the knife. Black carbon handle and stainless steel blade. It looked like the one I used the first time I took a life.

Like all Russian women, I was underestimated. No one thought I would kill my husband, but I did.

Now I was reclaiming my inheritance. Once the world found out what I did—how I got my retribution—my family name would be restored to its former glory. A name of strength, fear, and vengeance.

No one would talk about how the Ivanovs eliminated my brothers or how it drove my father to madness. They would talk about me. The daughter who was so ruthless she took back her family’s honor, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake.

Flying that mission myself was a calculated risk. One that had to be taken. It was one thing to order my men to abduct an Ivanov, but to go myself? To put myself in harm’s way? That took it to an entirely different level.

It was a gamble, but it also showed my strength and my willingness to get my hands dirty just like any other man under my command. I was not above taking deadly chances.

Calculating risks, showing my strength firsthand and channeling my rage into every action taken against my enemy were the only things my piece-of-shit father, Egor Novikoff, taught me.

No, that wasn’t true. He also taught me how to be truly cruel. How to ensure my enemies feared me.

That was why he was now rotting in a Siberian asylum. With just enough medications to keep him lucid, but suffering.

My father may have inadvertently taught me how to make my enemies cower, and how to never underestimate them. But he underestimated me.

The blood staining my hands was his fault. He had thought me weak because I was a daughter and not a son. A girl, meant to be traded or sold to strengthen his empire.

He had always held me below my idiot brothers. It didn’t matter that I was more cunning than they were. That they didn’t have the same strategic mind as me, let alone the same common sense to rule our bratva empire.

No, they were all about instant gratification, and throwing their dicks around like it made them important.

I wasn’t surprised when they were gunned down by an Ivanov sniper.

Once those two idiots got themselves killed, it changed things. My once cruel father became even more brutal. There was no more pretense of civility.

He sold me. His only living child. Sold me to the highest bidder, like I was livestock. Determined to get the money to wage his war.

One day I was at school, earning a degree. The next I was shoved into an ugly wedding dress that was made for another woman and delivered to the priest.

The man who paid for me was an eighty-year-old psychopath who had already been widowed twice. Both of his wives dying under mysterious circumstances.

In our world, a woman dying under mysterious circumstances was simply code for she got old, or nagged too much, or she just didn’t make her husband’s cock hard anymore. Whenever a man was tired of his wife, he got rid of her and bought a younger woman to warm his bed.

Thankfully, that monster underestimated me, too.

I did my homework. He thought he was buying a sweet, innocent little virgin who would open her young, pretty thighs for him.

He was expecting a mafia princess whose father raised her to do what she was told. Bred and sold to cook, clean, and raise babies.

I’d never held a baby. I didn’t know how to cook much, and I would sooner die than scrub that old bastard’s toilet.

But I knew how to survive. I was prepared on my wedding night.

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