Page 20 of Bratva Prisoner
“I have to go,” I tell her, already moving toward my discarded clothes.
“Is everything okay?”
“Family business. Nothing for you to worry about.”
I despise lying to her, but what am I supposed to tell her? That I’m rushing off to deal with corpses that showed up in my shipping containers? That my “family business” involves the kind of thing she ran away from Troy for being involved in?
She climbs out of the pool, and water runs down her body, making it nearly impossible to concentrate on anything else. “How long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know. A few hours, maybe longer.” I pull on my pants without bothering with the shirt since I’ll have to change anyway. “Harrison will make sure you have anything you need.”
“Maksim.” She wraps a towel around herself and asks, “Is this about me? About Troy?”
“No. This has nothing to do with you or your situation.”
Although I don’t actually know if that’s true. The timing feels suspicious, but the Bratva has enough enemies to keep us busy without Troy’s amateur operation getting involved.
I walk over to her, unable to resist touching her face one more time before I leave. “Stay here. Don’t go anywhere alone, don’t answer the door for anyone except Harrison or my brothers. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Good little kitten.”
The drive to the warehouse takes exactly fourteen minutes, during which I force myself to think about damage control instead of the way Alyssa looked emerging from the poollike some kind of water goddess. My brothers are going to need me focused, not distracted by memories of wet lace and soft skin.
The warehouse looks like a crime scene from the outside, which it technically is. Police cars line the street, their flashing lights painting the building in alternating red and blue. Dimitri meets me at the entrance with a scowl on his face.
“How bad?” I ask.
“Bad enough. The bodies are clean; no identification, no fingers or teeth, and no obvious cause of death. Someone wanted them found but didn’t want them traced.”
“Any idea who?”
“Working on it. Grigor’s inside with the detective in charge, working his charm. Aleksei’s handling the media angle, making sure this doesn’t hit the morning news. Akim’s coordinating with our cleanup crew.”
“And Nikolai?”
“Someone had to stay with the wives and the kids. Grigor insisted.”
Good. Keeping the women and children safe is always the priority.
Inside the warehouse, the scene is controlled chaos. Police officers take photos and measurements while our people work to minimize the damage to our reputation. The three bodies are laid out on tarps, and the stench of death hits me so hard I have to cover my nose with the inside of my elbow. I’ll never get used to that smell.
“Execution style,” Grigor explains when I join him near the detective. “Single shots to the back of the head, no signs of struggle. These men were killed elsewhere and dumped here.”
“Anyone we recognize?”
“That’s the interesting part. Two of them are from the Kozlov family, one’s from the Ukrainians. Someone’s trying to start a war between them and pin it on us.”
The implications make my blood run cold. The Kozlovs and Ukrainians have been circling each other like hungry wolves for months, looking for an excuse to settle old scores. If they think we’re playing both sides against the middle, we’ll have two enemy organizations to deal with instead of staying neutral.
Detective Maddox approaches us, a heavyset man in his fifties who’s been on our payroll for the better part of a decade. “We’re going to get this scene processed quickly. Too many uniforms here means too many questions, and we have enough officers here as it is.”
“How quickly can you get it done?” Dimitri asks.
“Two hours, maybe three if we’re lucky. After that, I can’t guarantee containment.”
Two hours to figure out who’s trying to frame us and why, then make the problem disappear before it becomes a war. Just another Tuesday night in the Barkov family business.
