Hunted By The Bratva Beast: A Bratva Stalker/Captive Romance by Jagger Cole (books to read in your 20s .txt) 📕

I turn to smile at my brother. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I do.”

I reach out and take his hand with one of mine.

“I should have had people there with you,” he growls thickly. His eyes cloud with fury as he shakes his head. “I fucking should have—”

“Viktor,” I say quietly, patting his hand. “I’m okay.” But then suddenly, I pale. “Fuck, Vik, I was carrying, and I shot back—”

“It’s been taken care of,” he smiles thinly. “The first cops on the scene are… friends. Your reports are being written now about how you were caught in the middle of a terrible gang shootout.”

“And the gun?”

“What gun?”

I smile wryly.

“For what it’s worth,” Lev grunts from across the room. “That was some pretty fucking incredible shooting, Nina.”

“It… it was?”

“Girl,” Fiona raises a brow. “You took out like ten guys.”

I frown. My mind flashes back to my blind shooting out through the smashed windshield, in the rain. But then suddenly, everything comes rushing back. I gasp when my mind replays the thud of him on top of the car, like he dropped out of the fucking sky to save me or something. I remember the machine gun fire, and the would-be assassins dropping and falling back.

Viktor frowns. “Do you remember anything?”

“No,” I lie. Because I do remember. I remember his hands. I remember his eyes. And I remember his lips—I’ll remember that kiss for the rest of my life, actually. But for some reason, I know I can’t tell anyone about that. I know I can’t mention the help I had, either. I can’t mention that I know a beast of a man has been watching me, maybe even stalking me. Just like I haven’t mentioned his presence back at the rooftop shooting, when he grabbed me, and I shot him.

So he stays a secret; my secret. My dark, heart-pounding, skin-tingling secret.

“Anything at all?”

I shake my head. “I was out to dinner, but it didn’t last long. I was in my car at a red light, and they—this truck just slammed into me out of an alley and knocked the car over.”

“Jesus, Nina,” Fiona murmurs, taking my hand again and squeezing it.

“Any ideas who they were?”

Viktor’s mouth thins. “Yes and no. The men you shot were just hired muscle—Russian, some with some Bratva connections. But no one of note. This wasn’t a move by another family or anything.”

“It feels like there’s a ‘but’ in there somewhere.”

He nods grimly and turns to glance at Nikolai for a second before turning back. “The business last year with Fyodor Kuznetsov…”

I scowl. My eyes slip over to Lev and Zoey, and I see him take her hand and squeeze. Months ago, Fyodor, who was actually Lev’s estranged father, tried to have him and Zoey killed in retaliation for a business deal Lev screwed up for him. Through the ordeal, it seemed for a minute that Nikolai, one of my brother and Lev’s top captains, was actually working for Fyodor. But in the end, it turned out he was only playing Fyodor to get close to him.

The very short version of the story is, Fyodor had assaulted a cocktail waitress in Moscow years before. The result of that horrible assault was Nikolai. And years later, he exacted his revenge on Fyodor, by killing him and ending the whole ordeal involving Lev and Zoey.

“Is this blowback from the Volkovs?” Technically, Fyodor worked for the Volkovs, a rival Bratva family. But Yuri Volkov, the head of the family himself, has assured Viktor several times that Fyodor was acting on his own, and that there is no aggression between the two families to rattle the fragile peace agreement we have with them.

Viktor shakes his head. “No. But there’s some new information on him.”

Lev steps forward, frowning. “I left home when I was eleven, Nina. But it seems after I left, Fyodor took to taking in ‘proteges’—boys he saw potential in as…” he scowls. “Thugs, I guess. Kids he could inflict his cruelty onto, molding them into fighters, or soldiers for his own fucked up little squabbles.”

I frown. I’ve spoken to Lev briefly before about his biological father—who wasn’t that dissimilar from Bogdan, my foster dad. Both cruel, merciless, abusive pieces of shit.

“There were two of these proteges in particular that went on to become forces to be feared in the Bratva world in Moscow. Ten years ago, though, one of them was killed, and the other went to prison—a Siberian gulag known as The Hole.” Lev frowns. “It’s where the worst of the worst go. It’s a black hole where they throw evil so that they may forget about it. Like nuclear waste.”

I bite my lip. “Lev, why are you telling—”

“Because, Nina,” Nikolai says quietly, stepping forward. “A few months ago, this gulag had the first escape they’ve ever had. A man broke out of the hole—Fyodor’s protege. His name is Kostya Romanoff. But inside, they called him The Beast.”

I shiver, feeling my pulse quicken. “Why—”

“Because he’s a wild animal,” Nikolai grunts. “Because he’s a savage, brutal, emotionless killer. And I’m more than slightly worried that his breakout coinciding so close with me killing Fyodor is no accident.”

A heat pulses deep inside of me. The Beast. That’s the man who kissed me tonight. The man who saved me, but also the man who tried to take me. The man watching out for me, but also watching me.

The man I can’t decide whether or not to be terrified of or hopelessly lusting after.

It’s a back and forth I’m still trying to figure out when Viktor and the rest of my family leave. I’m still pondering it when the dozen armed guards and three uniformed policemen that my brother has set up as my personal hospital watch checks in with me.

When the nurses come in with some meds to help me sleep, I just nod. Because my every thought is on The Beast—the monster who almost stole me, and who just stole a single, perfect kiss.

The room fades