Page 185 of Ripped Veil (Ripped Bratva)

My blood goes cold. I’ve never heard him speak like this before.

“Vitya, how do you know that?”

“He… he told me,” Vitya cries. “The man who came to see me, he told me everything. That’s why they killed Aurora. That’s why they took my grandson away from you. They’re dead because ofyou!”

Matvei’s looking at me with alarm but I can’t take my eyes off Vitya. The man is coming undone. I’m dangerously close to coming undone as well.

“Vitya!” I yell. “Who told you that?”

“The man! The man!”

He’s a slip away from falling. One toe in the wrong place and we’ll watch him die here and now.

But the things he’s saying are horrifying me. “What man, Vitya? Was he Japanese?”

He shakes his head frantically.

No?Fuck.I’d been so sure that Sakamoto was the one who’d abducted Vitya from the psychiatric ward.If it wasn’t him, who did it?

“Vitya, it’s important you tell me what the man told you. Did he give you a name?”

“Yes,” Vitya replies, through tears. “But not the name you want. He gave me the name of the next person on their kill list. I saw my daughter’s name on that list. And my grandson’s… Both crossed out.”

A chill spreads through me. I haven’t felt anger like this in a long time. Those fucking bastards. They make war as if it’s a fucking game. They kill for sport, for pleasure, for the sheer fucking thrill of it.

“Whose name did he give you, Vitya?”

But I already know the answer. Even before he says it, I know.

“Your name,” Vitya replies, so softly I can barely hear it. “He gave me your name.”

And then he jumps.

I know the moment I see the trajectory of his fall that this is the end for him. It’s not just the way he gives himself up freely to gravity—it’s the hopeless expression on his face.

He has no intention of surviving.

I look away. I hear it, though—the sound that will haunt me for the rest of my days.

It’s an undignified sound to end a life.

The silence that follows is a void big enough to swallow me whole. Same with the thoughts and memories surging through my head.

Primm.Aurora begged me not to go out on the mission. She held my forearm, clung to my clothes, wailed and wailed and wailed.

“I have a bad feeling,” she’d sobbed. “You won’t come home.” She cried so hard her tears stained my shirt. But I’d pushed her aside and left anyway.

She was wrong—I did come home.

But she wasn’t there when I did.

The mission was a success, as far as the original objectives. I’d killed three Astra Tyrannis operatives, freed a dozen helpless women and children, destabilized an entire region of human trafficking.

But now I know—in cutting off Astra Tyrannis’s arm, I had unknowingly left myself open and vulnerable.

They’d come for my heart that very same night.

And they’d ripped it right out of my chest.

---