Page 72 of Brutal Union
I stay still. Silent. Letting him speak.
“Hopefully you’ll be smarter than she was,” he murmurs, his tone soft but loaded. “You won’t use that beauty to manipulate a man you claim to love.”
His hand moves again—slides up to my chin, curling his fingers under it and forcing my face away from the mirror. I don’t resist. My gaze lifts, not to him, but to his reflection just behind mine. It’s the eyes I can’t avoid—bottomless, black as pitch, pulling me in with their impossible gravity. Every time I look into them, I feel like I’m tumbling into a void I’ll never crawl out of.
He’s the last parent I have left. The only man who’s ever made warmth feel like something sharp.
“You know the price of loyalty, right?” he asks, not because he expects a response, but because he wants to hear the words echoed back.
I nod slowly, the motion mechanical, like I’m a doll whose strings are tugged too tight.
“You fail,” he says, and his thumb presses hard enough into my jaw to leave a bruise, “and you pay with your life.”
The darkness rushes up to meet me then, swallowing everything—the vanity, the mirror, even his voice—until I’m falling with no bottom in sight.
My body jerks as I wake, lungs aching as I drag in air too fast to feel real. Sweat clings to my skin, cold and suffocating, and my sheets are tangled around me like restraints. My chest rises and falls in shallow bursts, and I barely manage to push myself upright. My heartbeat rattles in my ears, and for a few panicked seconds, I have to convince myself that my father has been missing for the last three years.
Sho is not my father. He will not demand my life in exchange for disobedience. He will not weigh my worth in blood or punish me for stepping out of line with the same hand that once held mine. I have to believe he is something softer, something more forgiving—even if I have given him no reason to be.
Because my father was never a man who forgave.
He killed my mother for an affair that brought Nikolai into the world. That single act of violence unraveled our family and handed the Bratva to a son who was never truly his. Nikolai took what was never meant to be his not through birthright, but by default—because Aleksandr, the rightful heir, was discarded. And because I, his daughter, was deemed too emotional. Too chaotic. Too much like her.
My father expected, perhaps even wanted, us all to know the truth. That Nikolai didn’t belong. That my mother had sinned. So he showed us in the cruelest way possible—by cutting her apart and sending us the pieces, one by one.
The first pieces he sent to me were her eyes.
Those beautiful, bright blue eyes—my eyes—dulled by death and fear, wrapped in silk and sealed in a box as if that could somehow preserve what was left of her. I remember holding them in my hands, unable to cry. The tears didn’t come untillater, when I found myself back in the chambers where we kept him locked beneath the house, screaming at the bars like a child having a tantrum.
Why would you do this to me?
Why would you destroy her?
Why would you make me look like her, only to despise me for it?
He never gave me real answers. Only monologues. He told me he was raising me to be stronger than she was. That my mother had been a lesson. That she acted out because he didn’t control her well enough. That love had nothing to do with freedom—it was about obedience. And he was teaching me to be better.
I don’t know why I kept going down there, why I visited him long after I should have stopped. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was guilt. Or maybe it was the worst kind of madness—the kind that makes you believe if you just try harder, if you just play the part well enough, the monster might finally love you.
I begged him to see me. Not her. Just me. Nadia. His baby girl.
But I was never anything more than her replacement in his mind, a shadow he tried to mold into submission.
And I let him.
That’s the part I can’t escape. I let him. I let the hope live inside me, even when it was hollow and cruel and rotting at the edges. I was weak enough to chase a ghost of his approval, and even now, I’m still dumb enough to question whether it might have been worth something.
Even now, some twisted part of me still wants to ask: If I had been more like the woman he wanted—would he have spared her? Would he have the heart to spare me?
None of that matters now. Boris has been missing on all accounts for three years. I have killed all of his loyalists that prayed for his return throughout the Bratva, and when I see him—despite the gapping need I have to want his approval— I will kill him to show my strength asVor v Zakoneof the Bratva. I will kill him to keep my brothers, their wives and their children safe. I will kill him for our mother, and the brightness of her eyes. I will kill him for never believing in me as a leader. As an equal. As a woman.
In all honesty, I may just kill him to watch his eyes die when he realizes his end didn’t come in battle or glory. It came at the hands of a woman pissed and proper enough to take her rightful place on the throne.
It sounds so victorious. The kind of plan that should end in glory and blood-soaked triumph. And maybe it will. But for now, it’s the only reason I’m awake when the Yakuza breach the white picket fence of Nikolai’s picture-perfect New Jersey home. It’s the reason I’m sitting in the breakfast nook at two in the goddamn morning, drinking lukewarm water and staring into nothing, instead of being in the next room with the twins where I should have been.
The reason I hear the faint hiss of movement—too smooth to be wind. The reason I catch the almost-silent pop of a suppressed weapon, followed by the dull thud of something soft hitting something solid. The reason I stand, heart already slamming against my ribs, just before the air is ripped from my lungs.
Then everything goes black.
