Page 76 of Captive Prize

There was only Zoya. Only war.

There wasn’t room for my mother right now.

VPB 8554.

I’m coming for you, printsessa. And God help the men in my way.

I repeated the license plate number over and over as the world around me faded into nothing and I lay there, collapsed in the cold mud.

CHAPTER 19

ROMAN

Igritted my teeth as the needle pierced my skin over and over.

Each pull of the thread wasn’t just pain—it was punishment.

Fire streaked through my shoulder, radiating down my chest and into my spine.

Sweat clung to my skin, salty and cold.

My vision blurred at the edges, but I held still.

I needed to feel every second of this.

Mikhail was stitching me up, asking me again if I wanted an anesthetic.

I didn’t.

I had fucked up and let them take her.

There wasn’t a single bit of pain that I hadn’t earned.

If I was smarter, stronger, faster, then Zoya would be safe.

No, I would take my punishment like a fucking man, and I would use this pain as a reminder of my failure and make sure I never failed her again.

God only knew what they were doing to her.

She had looked so scared as she called out to me.

I knew she had an iron will; she was smart, cunning even, and a fighter. But that didn’t erase the image I had of a scared girl standing in the middle of a firefight wearing nothing but my thin T-shirt.

We were all in Gregor’s house, his wife with one of the other wives and the kids.

I was lying on the fucking kitchen table, with Mikhail’s talented and only slightly sadistic hands working on stitching me back up, while the rest of the men in the family were discussing the plan.

No fancy medical clinic for the mongrel Ivanov, I guessed.

It wasn’t Mikhail’s needle that had my temper boiling and my fists clenching. It was the conversation taking place on the other side of the fucking room.

They were grouped just inside my peripheral vision, but even if they hadn’t been, the smoke from the Cuban cigars that I’d brought to congratulate Pavel on his wedding and the splashing of whiskey in crystal as one of the men filled the others’ glasses from the decanter that someone had given Gregor as a wedding present would have been dead giveaways to their presence.

So many wedding gifts, people would almost mistake the Ivanov boys as domesticated, civil even.

They would be dead wrong.

All anyone would have to do would be to listen to the cold, calculating words that came from their lips to realize they were the same frozen-hearted bastards they had always been. That we all had always been.

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