Kostya: A Dark Mafia Romance (Zinon Bratva), Nicole Fox [life changing books txt] 📗

I lie back and throw my arm over my eyes. I’m not worried about the “help” patrolling this pristine villa, toting rifles the size of the couch I’m on. If they were going to hurt me, they’ve already had plenty of opportunities. Besides, the adrenaline crash has arrived.

I’m exhausted. My muscles ache, my feet ache, my eyes ache, like I’m just plain sick and tired of seeing the world. I want to snap my fingers and have some nurse come and pump me full of enough morphine to make me sleep for days and days and days. However long it takes until I can wake up and have a normal life again.

But despite the fatigue, my brain refuses to shut down. All I can hear are Kostya’s words: why did it have to be you? I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t take a freaking CIA code cracker for me to know it isn’t good. Probably bad enough I’m going to lose my job and end up on the wrong side of the Russian mob. Maybe end up dead, if I played my cards badly enough.

That is, if Kostya is who I think he is. And how can he not be? There are five guys—heavily armed guys—with full body armor standing at the entrances to this house. And I don’t know where the guys who brought me here went, but I imagine they’re probably guarding the outside. That’s an awful lot of artillery and ammunition for a property developer.

He’s gotta be Bratva. There’s no other way to slice it.

But so what if he is? He donates millions of dollars to children’s charities and hospitals. And the way he is with Tiana is … adorable. No way can the guy who reads to her at bedtime, who sits on the floor and colors with her, be the same someone responsible for all the illegal things—some of which I can’t bear the thought of—I’ve read about being credited to the mysterious Russian mob here on the West Coast.

My thoughts go around and around like a carousel all night long.

By the time I can finally feel my eyelids start to droop with weariness, I’ve considered every profession I can think of and still can’t justify the shooting outside the hospital gala, the firefight at the Baltzley, the number of men with guns always around Kostya, with any explanation besides the obvious one: Kostya is who they say he is.

A killer. A mob boss. A beast.

On the other hand, I also can’t reconcile the man who kissed like a lover, with a man who passes down orders to kill. It just doesn’t make sense. Two plus two is equaling five, and no matter how many times I redo the math, it keeps coming out the same way.

There is no peace to be found in my head, despite how hard I keep searching for it. Hours come and go like waves on the beach as I wrestle with the same questions and the same mountain of evidence that screams guilty.

Sleep, when it finally comes sometime in the early dawn, is restless and uncomfortable. I have feverish, hazy dreams of dark figures coming for me, chasing me down endless hallway after hallway. And while I run, the scene is punctuated by Kostya’s words, again and again.

Why did it have to be you?

Why did it have to be you?

Why? Why? Why?

“Charlotte.”

I sit up and there he is. Safe. Disheveled—tie unknotted, shirt untucked, hair tousled—but still gorgeous. Powerful. He speaks to the man at his left, the one holding an AR-15. “Leave.” The guy gathers his friends and no more words are exchanged as they walk out.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” I blurt. The thought escapes before I can stop it. I know it isn’t the right thing to say, but I can’t help myself.

His smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “We should talk.”

I agree, but I don’t like the anger simmering behind the steely blue of his eyes. I haven’t moved and he hasn’t come closer, but there’s a pull. Part of me wants to throw myself at him and part of me wants to throw a vase at him.

“Okay.” I gulp.

“Charlotte, the men who were shooting at us were given information from inside the … company.”

So it’s true. He thinks I’m stupid. “‘The company’? That’s what we’re calling it?” What the actual fuck? “Seriously. ‘The company’?”

All of a sudden, my blood is boiling. Maybe because I shot someone and have yet to deal with it. Maybe because someone shot at me. Maybe even because he’s still treating me like I’m too stupid to know the real deal about him and his business. “Why don’t we just be honest and call your ‘company’”—I use air quotes—“what it is: a fucking criminal organization. You’re a criminal, Kostya. You should be in jail.”

“Be careful, Charlotte. There’s a reason I’m in the position I am.”

I don’t care anymore. I’ve been cooped up in this house all night with mute thugs who have treated me like a prisoner. There’s a lot of pent-up anger just dying to explode all over Kostya. Threats or not, killer or not, I’m beyond caring. I didn’t even know I was mad before, and yet now, in the light of the dawn, I am more than mad—I’m freaking furious.

“Because you kill people.” And now everything seems so clear. “That’s the reason you’re in the position you’re in. You’re a cold-blooded murderer.”

Kostya moves toward me, fierce and threatening. “Be careful. Life is not so black and white, Charlotte.” He’s close enough I can smell the leftover cologne on his clothes, see the flecks of deeper, darker blue at his pupils, hear the rumble of a growl in his throat. “I am who I was born to be. I didn’t have a choice about it. It was my destiny, and I embrace it because it is who I am.”

“A murderer.” It feels gross coming