Chapter 2

LUCCA

In my heart, I know that for as loyal as we both are to Grigori, we would not have his support. He’d believe anything that bastard told him to worm his way out of his guilt.

Grigori Ivanov is afflicted with the same curse every leader of a criminal organization suffers. Greed.

That’s his deadly sin. The business he owns, and we all work for, is Nova, a private bank that has been in the Ivanov family since Tsarist Russia. It has branches in Russia, England, Switzerland, and Italy. And thanks to Raphael it has five branches in the U.S.

Nova is the source of income that makes everything else we do possible. Gun trafficking and other arms dealing, gambling, and smuggling certain goods across countries. Nova also buys the loyalty and silence of the right people. Nearly every crime syndicate I know funnels money through Nova, and those who use it for cleaning dirty money and other shit the underground gets up to pays Grigori a handsome fee for his services.

Ninety percent of all that success is off the back of having the governor of California eating out of the palms of his hands.

“What do you want to do, Damien?” I grate out.

“I want to deal with this myself.” He pulls in a ragged breath. “I want to get rid of that motherfucker once and for all and sever his ties to our Brotherhood. I want to destroy him the way he destroyed my son and take everything from him. All that he holds precious. I don’t care how long it takes. But to do it, I need your help. I need your loyalty to me, Merciless.”

That’s what they call me. It’s what I became that day so long ago when my heart blackened like coal.

I rest my hands on his shoulders and nod with surety.

“You know you have me, and my loyalty will always be to you.”

“Thank you.”

I take Raphael’s ring from him. “You have my word that I will take everything from him. Keep what you want for your loss. Then I will annihilate him. When I’m finished with him, there’ll be nothing left to bury.”

Raphael De Marchi will know the meaning of merciless.

And I know exactly where to start weakening him.

The image of long beautiful black hair, cinnamon-colored eyes, and rose-red lips come to my mind.

She’s never been far from my thoughts, even though it was more than a decade ago that I was told to stay away from her.

She is what he holds precious.

His daughter.

His family. 

***

PRESENT DAY

I lean against the panel of the open French windows and gaze at the beautiful woman asleep on my bed.

Aria De Marchi looks just as beautiful sleeping as she is when she’s awake.

The mass of long black hair sprawled out around her looks like a velvet cape, and her dewy, ivory skin reminds me of the porcelain dolls my older sister used to collect. What always holds my attention, though, are those rosy, red lips that could easily blend in with the cascade of roses my mother grew in the courtyard when she was alive.

I always have the same thought when I see her. It’s because she hardly looks different each time. No matter how many years pass, that ethereal beauty remains the same.

Ethereal and innocent. Both symbols of what a man like me shouldn’t have.

But I’ve been torturing myself again by watching her for the last hour.

She’s been out cold since last night. It’s late morning now. I knew she’d be out for a while because of the tranquilizer I gave her.

It’s better this way, a sort of courtesy.

The same as it’s better, she doesn’t remember anything about me.

It was weird talking to her like we were strangers who’d just met.

I’ve watched her go from the shy little girl to this woman before me with a body every man would love to explore. Of course, like any other man, I would have done exactly that if the circumstances had been different.

Last night was my first time seeing her awake since the accident.

The last time we saw each other was a failure on my part to fulfill the promise I made to Damien. The time before that is a night I don’t want to remember.

This way is kinder, so she’ll always think of me as the monster.

Not that it matters.

My plans will go ahead this time regardless of what she thinks.

I kissed her as we danced because I wanted to satisfy the craving she gave me nearly three years ago when our paths collided again.

As I held her in my arms, I couldn’t help myself. That curiosity to taste her got the better of me.

Maybe I just wanted to taste her before the tides changed, and I assumed my role in this game as the devil.

And her, what will she be?

My captive?

Captive doesn’t feel like a strong enough word to describe what I have planned for her.

In simple terms, she was always going to be collateral damage, but last night she became more than that and upgraded to pawn in the carefully concocted plan of revenge I put together for her father.

What she will be is mine, and that’s when things will get interesting.

I’m sure when she wakes up, she’ll fight me.

But she won’t win.

My gaze drifts through the window, and I look at the sea of red roses before me. They’re beautiful. It was always beautiful and will always be. Today though, the air overflows with that morbid unbalanced feeling I hate. I first felt it when I moved back here and wondered if it was a mistake going back to my childhood home—the place where my family was massacred.

I came back to be close to them. Today I feel as if the ghosts are chastising me by amplifying my conscience.

They don’t need to do that, however. I already know what I’m doing is wrong.

I kidnapped an innocent girl. No, a woman now. She’s not that little girl anymore. She’ll be twenty-five in two months.

I might be merciless, but even I know it’s wrong to make her suffer more than she already has.

I return my focus to her and think about how this is all going to play out.

It has taken me all that time to find something to get the wheels turning, and I’ve been a walking timebomb, ready to explode and kill every time I had to push aside all that I knew and felt for Raphael De Marchi.

Virtues like patience are lost on a man like me, a harbinger of death.

However, the saying good things come to those who wait has never been sweeter than it has in this instance.

Today is the day of reckoning, and I have a feeling that the dirt I found on Raphael opened the door to so much more.

I finally have Raphael De Marchi exactly where I want his ass, and by the time Damien and I finish with him, he won’t know what the fuck hit him.

My phone buzzes in my back pocket, and I reach for it. It’s Damien. He’s downstairs waiting for ‘daddy dearest’ to arrive from his trip to Chicago he had to cut short. We left the other guard alive so he could give Raphael the message of what happened.

I click on the button to answer the call and press the phone to my ear.

“He’s here,” Damien says.

“I’m on my way down.”

I hang up and slide the phone back in my pocket.

It’s time.

Taking Raphael’s daughter is just the first item on my list to destroy that bastard.

I turn away from the beauty and walk through the door, leaving her. She’ll most likely wake up soon and want to talk.

I make my way down the winding staircase and glance at the men at the door when I get down to the bottom. The majority are my guards. The others outside the door are Raphael’s. I gave specific instructions that his men stay outside.

I nod at Jon and Alexei, who are standing ahead of me, waiting by the door. Both are on my security team. Jon is my right-hand man. It was he who killed Bruno last night. His death was a long time coming and a sort of compensation to whet our appetite. A bullet from Bruno’s gun was found in Timothy’s body. The fucker was involved with the plot to kill Timothy. He was as guilty as his boss.

“Should we go in with you?” Jon asks when I approach.

“No. I’ll update you later.”

He and Alexei nod in unison, but there’s a look of determination in Jon’s expression I don’t miss. He’s the tech in our trio and knows the significance of this meeting. While the three of us have been a unit for as long as I’ve served the Bratva, Jon is as close to me as Timothy was.

I continue inside the living room, where I meet a panic-stricken Raphael standing by the window.

Damien is sitting comfortably on the sofa across from the display unit.

Raphael’s face contorts with fury when his gaze lands on me like he’s ready to rip me to shreds.

“Where is my daughter?” he demands like he still has power over me. He stalks closer and stops only inches from where Damien sits.

“We’ll talk about her in a minute,” I reply.

“What the fuck is the meaning of this?”

He doesn’t know we found his ring at Timothy’s house with his fucking blood on it. Damien and I have played this game so well. Raphael has never even suspected that we know his guilt and dirty secrets.

I look down at his hand, at his new ring, and wonder for the millionth time what he must have told Grigori as to how he lost the original.

Tearing my gaze away from the ring, I look at Damien, who smiles. The only people who know about Raphael’s involvement in Timothy and his family’s death are me, him, Jon, and Alexei. Nobody else and my men only know because I needed them to work for me to make this plan a success.

The plan isn’t to unleash what we know today, although we could. But the art of destroying someone is to work in small steps and pick away everything they are one bit at a time.

Raphael’s dark glare intensifies, and his expression hardens, but I don’t answer. Instead, I walk around to my cabinet and casually pull out the envelope containing the evidence that’s about to flip his shit.

Opening the envelope casually, I pull out the first picture taken from the CCTV recording that Raphael went through a lot of trouble to wipe.

He just missed one camera he wouldn’t have factored in because it was attached to a nearby yacht. It was moored mere feet away from where he committed his unhallowed crimes.

We were lucky to get the footage and only got it because Jon has a system setup that rivals many intelligence agencies. It’s set to monitor Raphael at all times.

His facial recognition bots are programmed to hack and record anything that captures Raphael’s face. Of course, it has limitations, or I’m sure we would have had more shit on him, but this will suffice for now.