Page 203 of Ripped Veil (Ripped Bratva)

“Goodbye?” Josiah asks with raised eyebrows.

I nod. “I shouldn’t have left the way I did.”

“Oh, Elyssa,” Josiah sighs. “You have nothing to mend. This is where you belong. Where you’ve always belonged.”

“No,” I say with absolute certainty, despite the anxiety creeping around in my gut. “Maybe I did once. But not anymore. I’ve changed.”

He smiles sagely. “Why, of course you have! Change is the natural order of things. And change is the only way we can evolve. Look around you, my lost lamb.” He turns and sweeps his arm to encompass my parents’ decaying little hovel. “Your mother and father have suffered in your absence.”

I stiffen. All I can do is nod. The more I look, the more I see. The missing roof tiles. The cracks in the sagging windowsill. Paint peeling away, desperate to be replenished in its fight against the Nevada sun.

His gaze comes and settles back on me. “Come back home to them, my dear. Take your place among us once more. Continue the trajectory you were always meant to complete. I will always be your shepherd, Elyssa Redmond.”

I flinch at each word. It’s like a barrage of heavy hands trying to press me back into the cookie-cutter mold I broke free of a year ago.

I see an image in my mind of the blood-stained wedding dress I was wearing the night I ran. I remember the feel of it, wrapped around me like a vice. I remember how it smelled when Charity and I burned it that same night.

I shake my head and take a step back from him. “Father Josiah…”

“Josiah,” he corrects. “Please.”

“Josiah,” I repeat numbly. “…no. I can’t. I won’t.”

I let my eyes flutter closed and wait for his anger. A line from a sermon he gave years ago strikes through my head like a lightning bolt: “God has a righteous fury, and as men made in his image, it is good and just to be angry. Women are a nurturing kind but wrath is how men shape the world to our liking.”

Anger would make sense. I hurt him. Ran from him. Abandoned a night, a marriage, a future.

This kindness he’s showing just does not compute. So I tense and wait for the fury.

But it never comes.

When my eyes open again, Josiah is right where I left him. Tall and graceful and composed. He simply looks… disappointed.

“You may think your life is outside these walls,” Josiah murmurs. “But you’re wrong. This is where you belong.”

It’s the second time he’s said that to me. And now, I can sense something underneath the words. A promise I don’t want to keep. A memory I refuse to acknowledge.

“No,” I say softly. “It’s not.”

With that, I turn tail and run. Back to Vlad. Back to the real world. Back to Phoenix and Theo and Charity.

No one stops me.

42

Phoenix

The Graveyard

“You were tracking us?”

Eiko is more diminutive in stature than his brother. His features are finer, too. But the same dark gleam lives in his eyes.

“Of course we were. We didn’t just deposit Vitya outside your warehouse and leave,” he says solemnly.

He glances around at my men. “I must say, I’d expected more. They told me to be careful. But really, the warning seems rather unnecessary.”

My men bristle at the insult but they know damn well we’re badly outnumbered and outgunned.

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