Page 36 of The Russian's Innocent Prey
But death, I’d learned, didn’t always end vendettas.
My finger traced the family tree that branched out from Taras’s name like roots of poison oak. Brothers, cousins, sons—all marked with the same Cossack codes of honor that valued blood debts above human life.
Petro Kozak.
The name at the bottom of the page made my jaw clench. Taras’s younger brother, forty-eight years old, built like a mountain and twice as immovable. After Taras died, Petro had risen to lead the Ukrainian syndicate with the kind of ruthless intelligence that made enemies disappear in the night and allies wake up grateful to see another sunrise.
The psychological profile painted a picture of controlled brutality wrapped in traditional Cossack mysticism. He didn’t just kill his enemies—he turned their deaths into theatrical lessons for anyone else who might dare cross him. Saint Michael tattoos, ritual prayers, bodies arranged like altars to some twisted sense of divine justice.
But it was the last line of the report that hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest:“Cossacks hold grudges for decades. Blood debts are considered sacred obligations, passed down through generations until justice is served or the family line ends.”
My gut tightened with the sick certainty that I was staring at our executioner’s resume. Petro had to be behind Dad’s murder. The Saint Michael tattoo, the ritualistic nature of the attack, the timing—it all pointed to him settling accounts that had been accumulating interest for twenty-seven years.
But one thing didn’t add up, and it gnawed at me like a splinter under the skin. Why attack Anya? She was Maxim’s sister, not related to me. At least, not until yesterday. Petro couldn’t have known about our marriage before he’d ordered the hit on her mansion.
Unless….
Unless there was another player in this game. Someone else with their own reasons for wanting Anya dead.
My phone buzzed against the desk, shattering my concentration.
Trev.
I answered on the first ring. “What—”
“Lev.” His voice was strained, tight with pain and something that might have been fear. “I’ve been hit. Outside Dad’s mansion. They got me good, but I’m alive.”
The world tilted sideways. All the anger, all the resentment, all the walls I’d built between us crumbled likepaper in a hurricane. My brother—my twin, my other half, the piece of myself I’d mourned for twenty-seven years—was hurt.
“How bad?” I was already moving, grabbing keys, checking my weapons.
“Shoulder. Clean through. I’ll live, but Lev….” His voice dropped to a whisper. “They sent a girl. Young. Professional. This wasn’t random.”
A girl. My mind immediately went to the intelligence reports scattered across my desk. Petro Kozak was old school, traditional. He didn’t use female assassins.
But someone did.
“I’m coming,” I said, ending the call.
The drive to the hospital passed in a blur of Chicago traffic and mounting dread. Every red light felt like an eternity, every slow-moving car an obstacle between me and the brother I’d just gotten back. The rational part of my mind knew that if Trev was well enough to make phone calls, his injuries weren’t life-threatening. But logic had no power over the primal terror that gripped my chest.
I’d lost him once. I wouldn’t survive losing him again.
***
The Bratva Hospital sat on the edge of the medical district like a fortress of secrets and shadow medicine. No questions asked, no records kept, no authorities notified. It was where people like us went to bleed in private.
I burst through the doors of the private wing, my footsteps echoing off polished floors that had seen more blood than most battlefields. The familiar scent of antiseptic and controlled violence hung in the air like incense.
Room 314. I pushed through the door without knocking.
The scene that greeted me stopped me cold.
Hannah—my mother, older now but unmistakably the woman who’d sung me lullabies and kissed my scraped knees—sat beside the hospital bed, her weathered hands wrapped around Trev’s fingers. She looked up when I entered, and her face crumpled with an emotion so raw it felt like looking directly at the sun.
“Lev,” she whispered, and the way she said my name broke something inside me I didn’t know was still intact.
But it was the sight of Trev that made my vision go red.
