The Pretty Psycho (St. Vasili’s Academy #2)

31. Vega

31

VEGA

Three Months Later

"Five minutes, Alpha Team," Ethan's voice came over the comms, alerting our team to get ready.

Gabriela, Arseniy, Dimitri, and I stood hidden behind an abandoned house, just a couple of meters away from the gates of the factory. Each of us sat on a motorcycle, our hands hovering over the key ignition, preparing to move.

I wish I could say the last three months were beautiful and blissful, and we were able to take down Gerard and Heinrich in one move, but I'd be lying.

The Schatten went into hiding, killing almost every single operative that was out in the field, only keeping those that were not on active service and pulling them deeper into the shadows. I had no idea if it was Yolanda who briefed them that we knew everything or if someone else had managed to tell them about our movements up until the battle at the Academy, but whoever it was had spooked them so well that we weren't able to track them anywhere.

We all tried not to think about Yolanda and her betrayal, but every time I would look at Jax, I would remember what she did. I wasn't even angry over what she did to me. I was angry because she destroyed that man.

Whatever it was that they shared had turned into a bright hatred burning through Jax, and somehow it was the same thing pushing him to get through his physical therapy. I thought I knew what anger looked like, but seeing him and the acidic hatred burning in his eyes every time someone would mention her name had shown me that I actually had no idea what true anger looked like. What true hatred felt like, and I wouldn't want to be Yolanda once he gets his hands on her.

And while she must have alerted The Schatten pretty well, helping them to go into hiding, Gerard Zylla was an entirely different story. We knew we couldn't take out both of them at the same time, but we could focus on one of them at a time, and the first one on the list was Adrian's father.

I had no idea if it was his ego that had made him such an easy target, or if he was so sure no one would ever be able to destroy him and his empire, but I thanked the universe every single day for his recklessness, because without it, we wouldn't have been able to figure out his movements.

"We're ready," Gabriela announced into her mic, confirming our position.

My eyes ran over the three of them and the focus they kept on the road, waiting for the convoy to drive toward the factory. Some would say our plan was a suicide mission, while others might applaud us for doing it this way. Whatever their opinions were didn't really matter at this point.

The teams scouting for information came back with the knowledge that Gerard Zylla and the rest of his minions were hiding in this factory, working behind the scenes of a supposed paper factory, buying themselves time to recuperate from the losses. I almost expected them to hit us when we were at our lowest, but for whatever reason, the Zylla Empire started to crumble down, and rumor had it that Gerard wasn't as stable as he once used to be.

He was a paranoid old man, too full of ego, and needed to be the best, so he didn’t know when to surrender. I had no doubt that he almost expected Adrian to surrender to him and go back home to work for good old Daddy, but Adrian was no one's pawn, least of all his.

"Twenty seconds," Ethan alerted, and right on cue, the sound of the convoy driving down the road filled the air, allowing us to turn the ignition on, on our motorcycles. "And…" he trailed off. "Go!"

The trucks flew past us on the road, and the moment Ethan gave the sign, we pulled right behind them, with Gabriela leading and me at the back. I liked to call this plan "Fuck around and find out" because in all honesty, we had no idea how this would go.

Our man inside gave us the plans of the factory and the schedule of the guards, but we would've been fools to fully trust him. The only people we truly trusted were in our inner circle—Jax, Ethan, Dante, Gabriela, Vin, Dimitri, Arseniy, Adrian, and me—and nobody else. But if we wanted to win this, if we wanted to take down Gerard Zylla so that Adrian could extinguish his evil once and for all, we needed more people.

The Brotherhood was ours. It might not have been my plan to stay a few months ago, but the more I got to know them and their plan, the more I wanted to be with them. I wanted to stop running and for the first time in my life, I actually wanted to belong.

I once thought I belonged with The Schatten, but that part of my life was just an illusion created to stop me from stepping out of line. It didn't take us long to find out Heinrich always knew who my father was, and he planned on using me as leverage against Oleksandr, not because the latter loved me or wanted me for some sentimental reason, no. It was because Oleksandr's obsession with legacy and having several heirs to his empire ran deeper than his need to expand the said empire.

Unfortunately for Heinrich and fortunately for me in a way, Oleksandr died before Master could cash in on me.

But with The Brotherhood, I knew. I knew deep inside my heart that these were my people. I knew these were the men and women I would die for and they would do the same for me. I knew the man I loved would be there for me to pick me up when I was down and to pull me back when I felt like running away, because I still couldn't believe that someone like me could have this much happiness in their life.

It felt wrong, feeling this happy when people I loved, people like Jax, still suffered, but I knew I couldn't fight his battles. He had to conquer those demons on his own, and I was needed here, on the field, with the ones I owed my life to.

"Keep yourselves behind the truck, right in the middle," Ethan's voice came through again, guiding us. No one liked staying back, but Ethan was the best man to coordinate this mission, and as much as he hated sitting back and monitoring everything from the house we were actually hiding behind, he was the only one who had enough strategic training for this kind of thing. His life and his own training prepared him for this.

I wasn't a leader. I was a soldier and I could never lead an entire group of people, instructing them what and when to do things. I admired Adrian and his strength to coordinate all of the generals and all of the fractions of The Brotherhood we had across the globe. He was a natural, but he was someone that was better in the field rather than behind a computer somewhere.

"Gabriela, no funny business." She started laughing over the comms the moment Ethan said it.

"I can't promise anything," her melodic voice came through, reminding me why she got saddled with us instead of working alone.

Let's just say Gabriela didn't take things too well, and while none of us know if something else had happened between the moment Jax woke up and the-event-we-won't-talk-about, we did know that she started spiraling once Dante left for Italy. So here she was, with us, like a baby in need of babysitting, because even after the whole shit show she created, she was still unstable.

And Dante was still in Italy and Gabriela refused to speak of him.

The trucks started slowing down and from our intel, we knew the gates were getting opened, thanks to the sensors on the trucks, but the problem were the guards at the front. That's why Dimitri was in formation with us.

Someone needed to take them out, and with him sitting behind Arseniy, he would be able to take out the two guards at the main gate.

Dima pulled the automatic rifle he had strapped to his back, and as he and Arseniy came closer to the gate, he aimed it at the guards who were still looking at the trucks passing through.

"Dima, on my count," Ethan said, ignoring Gabriela's remark. "One, two…" he trailed off. "Now!"

The sound of the shots got muffled by the sound of the trucks rolling inside the courtyard of the factory, and by the time the second guard realized what was happening as his colleague fell down, Dima was already aiming at him and pressing on the trigger just as we passed.

I kept my eyes to the front, at Gabriela's back, as she passed through, still keeping herself close to the truck in front of her.

"So far so good," I mumbled to myself, feeling the wind on my arms as we slowed down just as the trucks started pulling to a stop at the main courtyard.

"Any issues?" Ethan asked, his voice holding a note of trepidation all of us felt as we went into this mission. We knew this might as well become a suicide mission, but we were done chasing ghosts and wanted to finish this once and for all.

We didn't want to keep on looking over our shoulders and waiting for Gerard Zylla to strike.

We needed to strike first.

"All good," I confirmed, but I guess I spoke too fucking soon.

Just as we slowed to a stop, still keeping ourselves plastered to the back of the last truck, the previously empty courtyard suddenly started filling up with guards, all of them in tactical gear, and I fucking knew these weren't regular guards, which also confirmed our theory of Gerard hiding here.

We chose to go after midnight because we assumed the place would have a lower number of guards on duty then, but we were wrong. We were so fucking wrong.

Gabriela practically jumped from her bike, pulling out the two guns from their holders, and aimed them at the incoming crowd of more than ten guards. Dima followed after her with Arseniy behind him, while I slowly got off of mine, ready for action.

We might not have expected this many guards, but it wasn't as if we didn't anticipate the possibility of being betrayed by our inside man.

"Showtime." Ethan chuckled, just as the doors on the back of three of the trucks started opening, revealing our plan at last.

We weren't following these trucks because they were transporting paper for shredding and further recycling in the factory. We followed them because both of the trucks were filled with Brotherhood soldiers, and as the doors opened wide at the last one, my lips pulled into a wicked smile, seeing him standing there in his tactical gear, strapped with more guns and knives than was maybe even necessary, and that little pitter-patter in my heart only increased as his dark eyes connected with mine.

Hi , he mouthed, smiling at me, and even though he couldn't see my face behind my helmet, I knew he could feel what I felt.

He stood there with The Brotherhood at his back and my heart in his hands.

My once target.

The man I loved more than anything in this world.

My Adrian.

His eyes suddenly widened at something behind me, but before I could turn around, I was tackled to the ground, hitting it with a huff.

"What the?—"

"Stay down," said a familiar voice, and as I turned around my own eyes widened at the sight of Dante holding me to the ground.

"Dante?" Just as the question popped out of me, someone fell just behind the man in question and I realized what Adrian was looking at. Someone tried to come at me from behind, most probably one of the guards. "Holy shit!" I exclaimed, pushing him off of me. "You're here!" I all but shrieked, equally shocked and concerned by his presence.

I pulled off my helmet just as Adrian rushed to me, pulling me off of the ground.

"Are you okay?" he asked frantically, completely ignoring the elephant in the room. Well, elephant in the courtyard.

Dante was back.

"I'm peachy," I mumbled, dropping a chaste kiss to his cheek. "Dante is here."

"I know," he said, so matter-of-factly, as if this wouldn't fuck everything up.

"And." I looked over my shoulder at Gabriela, who still hadn’t noticed the man standing in front of me. "You know who else is here," I said, not really asking.

"I know." The fucker grinned. "But I think it's time for them to get their heads out of their asses." Yeah, as if that was so easy.

"Drop your weapons!" someone shouted, and it took me a second to realize that we were now standing inside the circle, surrounded by The Brotherhood soldiers, facing off with the remaining guards. In the midst of seeing Dante, I completely missed them coming out and protecting us from the crowd that gathered.

The guards surrounding us were faltering, that much was obvious, but they didn't want to go against their orders, and if Gerard was here, they knew it was better dying than being seen as someone who had betrayed their great leader.

Adrian hugged me to him, pressing his lips to the crown of my head, before stepping away, slowly heading toward the line of our soldiers. He pushed through them, stepping outside of the circle, while my heart thundered inside my chest. He was unprotected like that and if one of those guards decided to kill him on the spot, there would be nothing we could do.

But I couldn't stop him because this was the plan all along.

Adrian didn't want these people to die. He didn't want them to suffer unnecessarily, and he knew his father's power was weakening. Gerard Zylla was losing a grasp on reality and with that, he was losing his grip on his soldiers. The Zylla Empire was crumbling, and Gerard was the one that doomed them.

Their corporations still stood, still worked, but it was only a matter of time before they crumbled as well, and that was one thing Adrian wanted to avoid.

The Brotherhood was created as a means to an end. As an option to take down the monster who'd been torturing him his entire life. A monster who managed to push his mother to an early grave, who made him believe he was only as good as a soldier and nothing more.

But Adrian still wanted to save the companies his mother had started. After Jax came out of the hospital, Adrian finally shared why he did all of this.

It wasn't about power, although he didn't mind having it. It was about legacy—his mother's legacy—and the fact that his father was destroying everything she left for him and his brother. Everyone, including me, thought that Gerard Zylla created this massive empire all on his own, but the reality was completely different from the concocted story he had made.

The reality was that the family of Adrian's mother had these companies for decades, and once Gerard decided to pursue her, he took her last name as well, completely separating himself from The Schatten.

"I know why you might want to kill me," Adrian's voice boomed around us as he addressed the guards. "I also know there are those of you who would want to kill me even without an actual order. But I'm not here to fight you. I'm not here to take more lives over something that does not concern you. Not really."

"Then why are you here?" one of the guards asked, holding his rifle and aiming it at Adrian. I was trying to calm my racing heart, but I couldn't. I could only stand here, feeling the bite of my nails against my palms as I waited for either one of the outcomes—they would either listen to him and lead us straight to Gerard, or we would have another bloodbath.

"I'm here because I want to get to my father. I'm here because," he took a step forward, "this fight was always supposed to be held just between the two of us, without getting the rest of you involved. I'm here to tell you that I'm not my father, but I do intend to take everything he has from him. The Zylla Empire will be mine, whether you like it or not, and you can either stand with me or die." He smiled, as if he was talking about weekly grocery shopping and not life-or-death matters. "So, what's it going to be?" he asked as his eyes flickered over the guards surrounding us. "Will you stand with me, or will you keep protecting the man who would do nothing to protect your lives, even if he had an opportunity to do so?"

The silence that greeted us was not what we expected, but as the guards looked at each other and started slowly lowering their weapons, I realized that the situation here was graver than what we initially thought it was. I started walking toward Adrian who was still standing in front of our circle, when one of the guards came closer to him, talking in hushed tones.

I had no idea what was being said, but a minute later, all of them dropped their rifles to the ground, and one by one, they moved toward the wall of the building, holding their arms in the air in the universal surrender sign.

My body flooded with relief so profound that I didn't even realize I was running until I was halfway through our protective circle, pushing to get to Adrian. They let me through and as he turned around, catching me halfway and hugging me to him, I almost missed the "What the fuck are you doing here?" said in an extremely angry tone, coming directly from Gabriela.

The Brotherhood soldiers slowly dispersed, picking up the rifles from the ground, while Alana, one of our commanders, started ushering the guards that had surrendered toward the trucks. Gabriela stood next to her bike, clutching her helmet to her stomach with both hands, and unless you looked too closely, she didn't seem all too pissed off, but her emotions this time were as clear as day if you knew what to look for.

If you knew that her hands never trembled, or if you knew that her eyes never watered like that, because Gabriela had no known allergies or reasons why she would start sniffing all of a sudden.

"I'm here because?—"

"Actually." She chuckled darkly, cutting off whatever Dante was about to say and started shaking her head. "I actually don't want to know why you're here. As long as you stay far away from me, we're gonna be perfect."

"Gaby," he stepped forward, "please. I know I?—"

"Na-uh," Gabriela stopped him. "It's too late for your words, Dante. Just too fucking late."

I hated the tremble in her voice, or the fact that she simply put on her helmet and jumped on her bike without looking at any of us. I hated that she didn't stay back and ran away, but I knew she needed it.

Dante stood in the same spot he was in just seconds before she had left, looking down at the ground as if that could give him the answers he needed. I wanted to help them, but I understood that they needed to work on their issues at their own pace and I shouldn't interfere.

"Leave it be, Bambi," Adrian murmured. "We talked about this."

"I know," I said. "I just hate seeing them like this. I hate seeing our friends in pain, you know that."

"I know, but there's nothing we can do except offer ourselves once they're ready to talk about it. Besides…" He looked at the guard standing in front of us. "We have other things to worry about right now."

I wanted things to go easily, but I didn't expect them to go this easy. I didn't expect the guards to surrender like this, but I was glad they did. The last thing any of us wanted was one more bloodshed.

"What's your name, soldier?" Adrian asked as the man in front of us removed his balaclava, letting us see his face.

"Aydin," he replied. "I've been the commanding officer for the guards stationed in this area, and I have to tell you." He took a deep breath before stepping closer to us. "I don't trust you. But I trust you more than I trust your father, especially after these last couple of months."

"I appreciate your honesty," Adrian said. "But I can assure you that I'm nothing like my father, and I've been a soldier in his army," he grumbled. "I've been on the receiving end of his tantrums and mood swings, and I know what kind of a monster he is." Aydin's eyes widened, showing that he didn't know some facts about Adrian. "I may not be perfect," Adrian continued, "and this idiotic war might have been started for all the wrong reasons—because one man could not accept that his son didn't want to work for him anymore—but I want to change things." He stepped closer to Aydin, clasping his hand on his shoulder. "This is not just some silly urge of mine to have power. I don't crave power—I crave peace. I crave knowing that me and my own could live their lives without constantly having this fear coursing through our veins. I want us all to live in a world that no longer has monsters like my father. I may not be a perfect man, but I'm not the type of monster that harms children and takes away the mother as the punishment for his sons."

"I believe you," Aydin said. "I believe you're not him, and I can see you're trying to do better. You could've killed us all because we were definitely outnumbered. But you need to understand one thing." Aydin looked up at Adrian, letting us see the terror he went through right there in his eyes. "We are all born innocent, but none of us die innocent, and every single person carries a monstrosity within themselves, letting it out once it fully grows. So you understand why I need to know."

"Why you need to know what?" I asked this time, but Aydin kept his eyes on Adrian.

"What kind of monster are you then?" Aydin asked.

Adrian chuckled, squeezing his shoulder. "I'm the kind that has other monsters running for their lives. I'm the kind of monster they whisper about because they know I'll come." Adrian lowered his head, and if I wasn't standing this close to them, I wouldn't have heard it. "I'm the type of monster that kills other monsters for fun, Aydin, and my father is just the type of the monster that deserves to be killed. So are you going to show me where the old man is hiding or would I need to find him all on my own?"