Twisted Throne (Bratva Born #2)

2. Dimitri

Dimitri

The ringing in my ears is deafening. She quietened it, and now she’s gone.

Taken from me.

Someone came onto my territory and fucking dared to steal from me, and they took the most precious thing. My littleblue.

The rage in my veins is corrosive acid, and I need to find a way to burn off that energy.

I’m pacing Jacob’s study, phone in one hand and a whiskey in the other. I sip at the drink desperately hoping the burn will soothe the herd of elephants stampeding in my gut. It does not.

I don’t have butterflies, I have the whole damn savannah running around in my insides, churning me up.

I’m on a call with Damen and trying not to bite his head off.

“I’ve done as much research as I can, but whoever took her isn’t who I thought it was. There is no chatter from those guys. This isn’t the threat I initially investigated.” Damen sighs, and I can picture him scrubbing his face. “I feel like I was looking in the wrong direction this whole time.”

“ What? ” I stare at the fifty-thousand-dollar vase on the fireplace and wonder if smashing it will help the buzzing in my head. “Who the fuck took her if not the auctioneers?”

“I’m trying to find that out and being on the phone with you isn’t helping.”

“We’re already twelve hours out from her being taken,” I growl. He’s supposed to be the best there is, and yet even he can’t figure this out.

I spent fucking four of those precious hours in the slammer before Jacob twisted every single arm he knew and got me and my men out. The goddamn cops were all over the yacht too, so I didn’t get to interrogate the staff who weren’t harmed.

They’ve all gone back home now, likely traumatized, and my men will be paying them all a visit one by one. Firstly, to get information, but also to give them money for their trouble. I don’t want this shit being talked about. They will be paid well for their silence going forward.

Jacob enters the room and signals for me to wind the call up. Does he have news?

“Call me as soon as you get anything.” Then I add, “Please.” Damen doesn’t work for me, and if I piss him off enough, he might decide to stop helping.

Part of me wishes I’d let my men keep firing on that boat; they would have been outnumbered by us and our firepower. The men I had on the yacht with me could have taken those fuckers out, never mind the men on the boat alongside us, but there was too high a risk of hitting Adriana.

“The cops took all the phones that were lying around when they talked to the staff.” Jacob rubs his eyes as he speaks, looking as weary as I feel.

I nod. I expected as much. The staff phones won’t tell them much, I’m sure.

Me and my men dumped all our burners overboard as soon as shit went down. There were boats nearby, close enough to hear the shots and screams, and we knew the cops would be called.

“The staff phones were passed up to vice.”

Where is he going with this? Have some of the staff maybe been messaging to family or friends about the stuff happening on the yacht?

I sigh and pinch the bridge of my nose. “If I’ve brought a ton of crap down on your head, I apologize.”

Jacob surprises me when he chuckles. “Son, it’s a blip. Anyway, I have half of vice in my pocket.”

“You do?” I ask, surprised. We don’t mess with drugs, and we don’t run strip clubs or hookers, so why would he have vice in his pocket?

“They’re the most corruptible of the lot,” he says with an easy shrug. “I need the feds, and I also need ATF, and I have enough people there to help me. I don’t need vice, but it never hurts to have as many local cops as one can on the payroll. Vice are easily recruited.”

“How come?” I ask, intrigued and briefly distracted from the dreadful churning.

“Because they often end up almost as grubby as the guys they’re chasing. Makes for easy targets to flip if they have a ton of stuff they want to hide.”

I nod, filing that information away. One day, I’ll take over from this man, and I need to think more like him. Strategies rather than tactics. Jacob plays the long game, and it serves him well.

“Vice went over the phones. I think they were trying to see if there were drugs being brought on board and that kind of thing. One of the cops who grabbed some of the work is friendly with us. He found a call. One which was made from one of the staff member’s phones, to England.”

I shrug one shoulder, not sure what relevance it has.

“He ran the number through the system, and it’s a cell linked to a young woman. A young woman who studied with Adriana at university.”

Holy hell. No way is that a coincidence.

I grit my teeth. Relief that this may be a lead quickly gives way to the anger simmering away in me. Rage building, I pace. She went against my orders. Orders I made to keep her safe.

If this call is what precipitated this cluster fuck, she’s brought a ton of trouble down on her head and my family’s too.

When I get her back, she’s going to see what it means to live under strict rules. No fucking phones. I’ll make sure of it because there will be none in this house she can have access to, and the only time she will leave it is with me.

“I doubt her college friend has kidnapped her,” I say. Maybe, though, someone was monitoring all the phones? I pause and stare out the window, letting the green lawn and it’s nothingness soothe me for a moment.

“No, I agree,” Jacob says. “The girl’s father, however, is a very rich and powerful man, and he has certain tastes.”

“What tastes?” I feel like I’m the last to know anything right now, and it’s fucking with my head. “How do you know this? Did you talk to Damen? I need to call him back and give him this information.” I pull my phone out of my pocket, but Jacob gently taps the back of my hand.

“You know of Nikolai Volkov.”

I let my phone drop into my pocket. “Of course. Runs weapons and other shit. Huge player in the UK now. Has that club in London, the fancy one where he records his guests.”

Jacob smirks.

Light dawns. Oh, this is getting interesting. “They say he has files on lots of the British establishment. That Nikolai Volkov?”

Jacob chuckles. “Yes, that one. A certain Barnaby Kane is a member of his club. He’s the father of Sian, the girl who Adriana called, and he’s a slippery and dark fucker.”

Now I’m as alert as an eagle who has spotted its prey.

He carries on. “When the police told me about Adriana ringing Sian so soon before she was taken, it made me suspicious. When I found out who her father was, I wondered if Nikolai Volkov had heard of him, and that’s why I called him. He’s more than heard of him; the man is a regular at Club V.”

I want to kiss Jacob right about now. This all has to be linked.

“It turns out that this Barnaby fellow likes to hire hookers.” Jacob takes hold of the back of a chair and drums his fingers against it. “Now, Nikolai doesn’t run girls, but he will facilitate people who ask about such things with numbers or contact details for those who do. Anything to bribe them with later if he needs to. It turns out that Barnaby asked for connections with men who could supply women. He likes expensive hookers.”

This is all good background intel, but regarding Adriana, so far this isn’t helping me. Lots of powerful men like high-class hookers.

“Volkov put him in touch with a man who runs London’s most expensive stable of girls. This guy let Volkov know in return what Barnaby liked, and who he used, quid pro quo. It gave Volkov intel for his files, and that’s information that Volkov wouldn’t ever share unless he needed something, which he never has from Barnaby. Except, he does remember what the guy told him because it turns out this Barnaby fucker has very specific tastes. This pimp says he’s the most particular and picky customer he’s ever had.”

My spine tingles in that way you sometimes get before a storm. “Specific tastes?”

“Oh, yeah. Dark haired. Pale skin. Blue eyes. Slender but curvy. Apparently, this pimp was fucked off with the demands, and this guy isn’t some street level scum who loses his cool easily. According to Volkov, he treats the girls well, and they all work for him willingly because they earn a fortune, and he provides extra protection for a twenty percent cut. He got so sick of the way Barnaby kept messing him around that he cut Barnaby off in the end.”

“Why exactly?”

“He made too many of the girls cry. If they didn’t look right, weren’t enough like her —and this was Volkov’s exact words, son—he said the pimp told him that if the girls weren’t enough like her, then he’d not be able to get it up and he’d turn angry. If they looked enough like the woman in his head, he’d fuck them; if not, they were whipped, and many were not down for that. This pimp cut him off, and that’s that. Except … the pimp told Volkov his nickname.”

I know the name before he says it.

“ The Prince .”

Her friend’s father is the guy who wanted to buy her? Then he came to my territory and stole her from me. Holy shit, I’m going to kill him, bury him, then dig him back up and do it all over again.

She’s in England.

“Let me get this right,” I say slowly. “The man who took her, who came onto my fucking territory isn’t some high-level drug runner or people smuggler but an English aristocrat?” I’m incredulous. “He must have a fucking death wish.”

“He’s too arrogant for that. He’s very rich and powerful, and he clearly has deep connections with lots of unpleasant people.” Jacob is still softly drumming his fingers against the back of the chair. “We need to be careful, but I’m convinced he has her. We must make plans and approach this very clinically.”

“Clinically?” My blood is boiling. “He has what is mine .” I thump my chest.

Jacob’s eyes widen. “Jesus Christ, you’ve got it bad.”

“ What ?”

“The girl. You’ve got it bad.”

“No, it’s not that.” I shake my head. “She’s fucking, mine and he took what is mine, and no one does that and lives. So, I’m going to get her back.”

He nods, thoughtful. “Okay, so this is just about getting a possession back and teaching the world a lesson? Not to take from you?”

“Exactly.”

“Okay then, in that case don’t be careful. I just thought it mattered to you whether you got the possession back alive and not dead. You know, not shot. Maybe in the head. Those big blues of hers all wide and staring and vacant.”

I’ve never had to bite back the urge to hit Jacob, but now, as if I have no control of myself, I find my hands tangled in his shirt, twisting the material.

I do it before I parse just how insane the action is. I’m panting as I haul Jacob against the wall. I let go almost as fast as I grabbed him. Shit. This man has been nothing but a hero to me. What the fuck am I doing?

Moving away from him, putting as much distance between him and me as I can, I stare at him, chest heaving, waiting for him to call his men into the room. I deserve the beating I’m sure he’ll hand down to me. He never has before, but I never put hands on him that way. I’ll take it, and I won’t fight back because I’ve just deeply disrespected him.

Instead of shouting for his men, he smiles as he smooths his shirt down.

“Son. That’s not the reaction of a man who only wants a thing back. That’s not the reaction of a man who is in control or thinking clearly.”

“I’m sorry, Jacob. You’ve only ever been good to me. Whatever punishment you see fit, I won’t fight it.”

He strides to me and places his palms on my cheeks making me look at him. “Dimitri, you are a son to me. I don’t call you that name lightly. There will be no punishment, but you need to do this right, or you risk him harming that girl, and I don’t think you’d come back from that. Not if she dies because of you. That’s not something you’ll get over.”

He taps my cheek twice, not hard. “Get your fucking head in order. Then let’s make a proper plan. Call Damen back, and give him what information we know. With this intel, he should be able to confirm it’s really him who has her, and he might get more information on Barnaby. Then, go for a run, take a cold shower, drink a carafe of coffee—strike that last one; you’re jittery enough as it is. But get the booze out of your system, and then we can talk and plan, okay? If she is there, and it looks that way, Volkov will help us. He is talking to his brother as we speak. We just need a plan that doesn’t mean going in there guns blazing, because that’s not going to get your precious possession back in one piece. You won’t forgive yourself if hasty actions kill the woman you love.”

He leaves the room and closes the door on my words.

“I don’t love her.” The words echo in the empty room, dropping to the floor like the dead leaves from fall trees.