The King: Bratva Blood: (A dark mafia romance)

by SR Jones

  “How do you know all this?” I ask, suspicious suddenly. “This isn’t the sort of shit you can find online.”

  “No.” He takes another puff of his cigarette. “It’s the sort of shit you can find by fucking her best friend, an old school friend she doesn’t see very often, but still keeps in touch with. That’s where I was a couple of nights ago when I came in late.”

  I stare at him, and I don’t know whether I’m pissed or full of admiration. “You fucked her friend, to get information?”

  “Yeah.” He smirks. “Not a hardship. She’s not my type, but not a hardship.”

  “Really? I’d have thought her friends were just your type.”

  Suzy is, and everyone says this Vanessa girl is a bombshell. “Was it Vanessa?”

  “Nah, they are newer friends, this girl is an old friend. A girl called Penny. They’ve been best friends through school. I looked on Cassie’s Facebook page and saw she and this girl having a lot of conversations, so I figured they were friends. I did some digging, asked Suzy, and she said they were best friends for a lot of years, then Penny moved away and only came back into the area six months ago. They just haven’t been in touch as much since. No issues or anything, simply grown apart a bit. But I figured, who knows us better than the friends we grew up with, right?”

  His words painfully bring a picture of Yulia to mind, and for some reason it makes me think of Maxim, my other childhood friend. A quiet, sensitive kid who loved to draw.

  I remember his art. Fuck me, he’d work so well with Zoey. So damn well. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing, though. We’ve not spoken in years. I could find him. Damn, I wonder if he’d be interested in taking a job? He’s probably married by now, and living still in the God-awful place we grew up. I can try to find him.

  “You’re pissed.” Vasily’s words drag me back into the room and the current conversation.

  “No, I’m not. I’m impressed by your ingenuity and dedication.”

  He smirks.

  “Yeah, well, I fucked her brains out, ate her pussy until she was practically crying, plied her with wine, and she talked and talked. I got lucky because she had a picture of her and Cassie on the sideboard in her bedroom, and it was easy enough to mention it, and then I didn’t have to do anything else. The girl was bone deep relaxed, and drunk, and she talked to me for fucking ages all about what a laugh they used to have, how much she loved Cassie, how she misses her. Then she told me all the shit Cassie went through. These were her words, K. She said; my girl has a hole the size of a crater in her, and she needs it filled with love.”

  Those words sink into me, and they terrify me. Not much does, but someone needing that, and thinking they can get it from me?

  Fuck. I can barely tell my son I love him; never mind filling some needy black hole in a woman I barely know. I like her, I fucking crave her, but love?

  “She doesn’t love me,” I say.

  “Maybe not, but she’s halfway there at the very least.” He stubs the cigarette out and walks by me. “Shall I get this new housekeeper to make us both an egg white omelet?”

  “Yeah, please.”

  As he pushes by, I stop him.

  “So if you made this girl come like crazy, and you listened to her half the night, how come she’s not blowing up your phone?”

  “Gave her a fake number. Told you, she’s not my type.”

  “What’s she look like?”

  “Pretty enough, but bland. No edge. Too nice. Nice doesn’t fit men like us, K. We fuck nice up. Remember that.”

  Then he’s gone, but his words linger like the smoke of the cigarette he’s just put out. They wrap themselves around me, toxic but true.

  I do fuck nice up. I fuck everything up.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Cassie

  I want to sleep with Konstantin. In the league table of bad life decisions, it’s probably the worst I could make, what with how out of depth I am around him, but I’m beyond caring. I want him so bad it’s like torture. It’s as if every single moment I’m super aware of my body. My skin is sensitized, and I’m constantly wet. I have erotic dreams the moment I fall asleep.

  A nurse came yesterday to look at my breast, and she told me to hold an ice pack against my sore flesh, wrapped in a tea towel, and to take anti-inflammatory medication. She said it will hurt, but should get better on its own. She did tell me certain things to watch out for. Today I’ve been holed up in my room, reading, resting, and healing.

  Konstantin has mostly avoided me. Despite my fevered hopes, last night he didn’t come to me, and I didn’t search him out again. He’s busy. Him and Vasily, they are super busy. Plotting, planning, getting everything ready for their next move. It scares me, the idea of them getting embroiled in some gangster war.

  I think they’re looking for Denis, but can’t find him. The man is dense, and I don’t think for one moment he’s the brains behind them disappearing. No, that’s all down to Liza.

  My stomach rumbles. Wow, I’m hungry, and I have to say the housekeeper Konstantin hired is a dab hand at cooking. I’ve not wanted to eat much in recent days, but I listen to my body now, and she seems to want sustenance. I head down to the kitchen to find the housekeeper, and see if she can rustle me something up. I’d make it myself, but that seems to offend her.

  I miss home, and simple things like cheese and onion sandwiches with pickles. I’ve spoken to my grandparents both, and it was so good to hear Grandpa’s voice. He says the doctors are hopeful that with the treatment he can have a few good years before things get worse. That’s amazing. More than I could have hoped for, and Konstantin did that for me. He did it despite me lying to him, causing him trouble, and putting him in danger.

  The man has a heart, I know he does, but it’s buried under layers of hardness and a cold protective shell he’s spent years building up.

  When I hit the kitchen, I stop, and an unfamiliar voice reaches me from the open study. I’ve pretty much come to recognize all the voices in this house. Konstantin’s rough, raw tones. Vasily, with his harder accent and sparse conversation. Denis had a deep, deep voice, but now he’s gone. Derek is cultured, English, and sounds upper class. Michael still has that tint of youth to his voice. This one? It’s new.

  The voice has an accent. Russian, I think, but slightly different to Konstantin and Vasily. Maybe not Russian, the more I listen, the more I recognize variations in the vowel sounds.

  His voice is harsh, more guttural. I wonder who this new voice belongs to.

  I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough.

  I head into the kitchen and don’t see Mrs. Dannivon around, so I decide to make myself something to eat for once. I like being able to do the odd, normal thing like this. It makes me feel human again … sane. Simply sitting around doing nothing is hell for my mental health. Opening the fridge, I peer in and see all the things I need to make a tasty sandwich. I get them out and set to making a ham sandwich. I take beetroot out of the fridge, already cooked, and slice it, ready to go with the ham. Then I grab the mayo, some pickles, and a tomato.

  Once I’ve got everything sliced, I grab two big chunks of bread, and start to slather them in butter.

  “Who puts beetroot in a sandwich with ham?”

  I jump and turn to see the owner of the new voice. Oh, wow, he’s … his eyes!

  It’s like being looked at by a wolf.

  Konstantin comes into the room and reaches by me to grab three beers.

  “Andrius, meet Cassie. Cassie, Andrius.”

  “Cassie,” Andrius says. Then he turns to Konstantin. “I like her, K. She puts beetroot in her sandwiches. I think she must have Ukrainian in her soul.”

  They both start laughing.

  It feels as if they’re laughing at me, not with me.

  “She’s caused me a lot of trouble,” Konstantin says. “I’m not sure what we’ll do with her, but she’s set in motion a lot of the events you’re here about.”

  “She’s the one wh
o hacked Popov? Badly?”

  “Yep,” Konstantin says.

  “Fuck, I’d have been tempted to break my rule if she’d done that to me.” Andrius shakes his head.

  “What rule?” I ask.

  “No women or children,” he says.

  “What?”

  Andrius puts his face close to mine and slowly says. “I don’t hurt women or children, but in your case, if you’d done to me what you did to Konstantin, I might have made an exception.”

  “Back off, Andrius,” Konstantin snaps.

  “That motherfucker put a bullet in me. Me.” He hits his chest. “No one does shit like that to me. I put the fear of God into the devil himself, and yet Popov, he saw fit to kneecap me. He’s fucking unhinged, he’s not scared of anyone, and sooner or later, he’s going to find out she’s been digging into his business, and he’s going to trace that right back to you.”

  “Popov shot you?” I ask Andrius. He’s about the scariest man, other than Konstantin, I’ve ever seen. If Popov shot him, that makes Popov terrifying.

  “In the leg. Tried to kneecap me to be precise,” Andrius says. “Or, his men did. Fucker is so useless, though, he can’t even do that right, or his men can’t. Took the wrong woman to hold hostage too.”

  Then he cracks up laughing as if kidnapped women and bad kneecappings are funny. I look at my sandwich and feel sick. I can’t eat it now.

  “It doesn’t fucking matter, Andrius. A war was coming anyway. We know this. All Cassie did was fire the starting pistol. So, she gets to live, and more than that, she gets my protection. Understood?”

  Andrius frowns. “She’s at no risk from me. I don’t hurt women. Plus, I like her. She puts beetroot in her sandwiches.”

  With those crazy words, he takes one of the beers and walks out of the room.

  “He scares me,” I whisper to Konstantin.

  “He can hear you, and he’s only staying a couple of days,” Andrius shouts from somewhere down the hall. “Got a new baby and a gorgeous wife to get back to.”

  Oh my God.

  “Great hearing,” Konstantin says. “Like a wolf to go with his eyes, no?”

  I nod, unable to think of anything to say.

  “He won’t hurt you, and he’s soft as shit these days.”

  He is?

  “Since he fell in love with Violet, and she changed him, he has mellowed. He’d do anything for her now, and that includes getting out of this game. He’s only here as a favor to me, and to you actually, so you don’t have to worry, okay?”

  “He’s almost as scary as you,” I say quietly.

  Konstantin laughs, then he sobers as he looks at me. “Cassie, what am I going to do with you?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “What are you going to do with me?”

  “I really don’t know.” Then he’s gone, taking the other two beers with him.

  If me and Konstantin were together, acting on our attraction, would it last? Would I want it to last? Maybe if I weren’t a prisoner and could go visit my grandparents, staying here wouldn’t be so bad. I don’t think I’d feel safe out there. Once he’s dealt with Popov, will Konstantin send me home? But what then? Liza and Denis are still out there. Vasily, who hates me, might decide to simply get rid of me if I’m no longer under his boss’ protection.

  I’ve learned how scary the world is. It’s full of predators. Wolves like Andrius, and big, stupid bears like Denis. Ruthless sharks like Konstantin. But if I’m with the biggest predator of all, that makes me safe.

  I want to be safe. Never have felt it, not really. I’ve always been waiting for the ground to be pulled from under me. Maybe because my mum did just that to me so many times as I was growing up? My formative years were decidedly unsafe.

  Would Konstantin let me stay? Would he be my protector? If I slept with him, would I be someone he kept around for longer than his previous conquests? Would that be enough for my heart?

  I sigh and look at the sandwich, and then I grab some cling film from a dispenser against the back wall, wrap it up, and put it back in the fridge. My appetite is gone.

  **

  Another night of sleepless, lust-wracked turmoil stretches out before me. It’s already two in the morning, and I’ve not had a wink of sleep.

  I’ve masturbated, but it’s barely taken the edge off. That’s the thing with me; I might not have had many lovers, but I’ve got a high sex drive. I love sex—watching it, reading about it, masturbating. It’s just … the real thing has always been something of a let-down. I’m not a goody-two-shoes. The reason I’ve not fucked around is because I’ve always thought it would be kind of disappointing. If sex with Tim, a man I thought I loved, wasn’t all that great, then I had little hope it would be much better with anyone else. Michael’s friend, whose name I forget, was proof of that.

  The best sex I had was, in fact, an encounter with a man who I met one night at university. He was in his late twenties, and an artist. An actual artist, who made a living from painting the most incredible portraits. He had a sensitivity to him, and his body was beautiful, in an entirely different way to Konstantin’s. He was tall and slim, with lean, long muscles, and pale skin, with deep brown eyes and jet-black hair. Or, at least, it looked that way in the dark light of the bar where we met.

  I don’t count him amongst the men I slept with because we didn’t have intercourse, but we did everything else. He treated my body like it was one of his works of art. I came four times, and he came three. I wanted to see him again, but he never called. It made me worry that one of the reasons I find sex with someone else so underwhelming is me. Not them, but me.

  Maybe I can’t connect? Open myself up to it fully. Or, maybe, I’m just technically crap at it. Is there such a thing as being technically bad at sex? I like it, I always start off enthusiastically, and I try to take control of my own pleasure, but somehow, along the way, it always ends up being a disappointment.

  If the same thing happens with Konstantin, I’ll probably give up on sex altogether and join a nunnery. We have such a spark, a strange, elemental connection that it makes me believe, hope, that we can work together that way.

  Some attractions are a slow burn. You notice the person has a nice smile, and then you add that to the cute way they ruffle their hair, or how hot they look when they roll up their sleeves. They grow on you. Other people hit you with the force of a truck. They stop you in your tracks and change everything with one glance of inky lashed, dark blue eyes.

  Sometimes, that attraction, that stop-the-clocks moment, is a one-way street. You notice them, you fall in insta-lust and they go on their merry way, blind to your existence. Occasionally, though, every now and again, something magical happens, and the person who stops you in your tracks feels the same blinding moment of attraction.

  At its deepest level, I do believe, with Konstantin and myself, it went beyond our outer appearance and was based in a moment of soul-deep recognition. I recognized something in him, and he saw that same thing in me.

  We’ve been dancing around it ever since.

  I’m sick of dancing; I want to play. Properly.

  Not sure if I’m about to do something horrifyingly stupid, I slip out of bed and open the bedroom door. I’m halfway down the hall, when one of the doors to a guest bedroom opens, spilling light into the darkness.

  Andrius is standing there, a shadowy figure with ghostly eyes.

  “If you’re going where I think you’re going, a word of advice.”

  I swallow, but say nothing.

  “Men like him, and me, we like the chase.”

  I frown. “Are you saying, don’t make the first move?” I whisper.

  He grins. “No. You can make the first move and still have him chasing after you. I’m married with a kid, and my wife still has me chasing her.”

  “How?”

  He pauses for a moment, considering. “Because I know for a fucking fact that, unlike so many who came before her, she won’t take my shit. Any shit. She
loves me, fiercely. She’s a warrior underneath it all, which is only right because I am, and a warrior can’t have a mouse for a wife. She would die for me, the way I would for her, but if I fucked her over?” He grins wide, his smile so gorgeous for a moment I forget my infatuation with Konstantin. “She would cut off my balls, and then she’d leave me, and nothing would bring her back. That’s how she makes me still chase her. She’s … she’s the only person in this world who has ever had any control over me, any say in what I do. She makes me better.”

  With those words, he pushes past me and heads to the bathroom.

  Well, that was a useful talk. How am I supposed to control someone as wild and powerful as Konstantin? You might as well try to control the wind. I bet Andrius’ wife is some Amazonian glamazon, who can lift her own body weight, and outruns him on the regular or something. I expect she looks like a Victoria’s Secret angel and carries a gun, while being skilled in arm-to-arm combat like some female James Bond. Me, I’m just … me. Failed hacker, ex-IT consultant, and half decent barista. How can someone so ordinary bring a man like Konstantin to his knees?

  I can’t.

  Seducing him, though, is a different matter. Maybe, I can seduce him. While I’m stuck in this house, maybe we can both get a bit of comfort.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Konstantin

  I’m still awake when Cassie slowly pushes my bedroom door open, closing it softly and padding across the floor, to slide under the covers next to me. I’m surprised she didn’t come last night.

  I heard the low murmur of her talking to Andrius in the corridor, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  At thoughts of Andrius, my mind worries over what he told me today. It’s unlikely Allyov will work with the Armenians, because years ago he had a beef with them, and Andrius put a bullet in two of their highest-ranking generals. Of course, as Andrius says, it depends which Armenians these are, and if they’re related to that group or even part of it. If they are, there’s little hope of them and Allyov working together.