Twisted Throne (Bratva Born #2)

4. Dimitri

Dimitri

I call Damen and give him all the information Jacob has. I contemplate calling Nikolai Volkov but leave it for now. I’ve heard he can be mercurial, and he’s certainly as hard as nails and cold as ice. If I screw things up with him, I risk his help. Jacob has him in the bag for now, so I leave things as they are.

Then I do as my stepfather suggested. I take a cold shower. The water glances off me as chilly and sharp as icicles falling on my skin. It wakes me up, though, and invigorates me. Then I have a strong coffee and a pint of water before taking myself out for a run. Damen will take a bit of time to parse all the information, and I’ll drive myself crazy if I sit around waiting.

Instead, I run fast through the estate, sticking to the land we own and doing loops. There are no security following me, but there are men positioned all around the compound, armed and ready.

My thoughts drift to Adriana and the short time we had together. One thing I haven’t told anyone is that I need her back. For my sanity. She made the ringing in my ears stop being an issue. It’s not so much that she stopped the noise, but when she was in bed beside me, the noise didn’t matter.

One of the tools the audiologist gave me was a white noise machine. The theory being that the white noise helps the brain ignore the tinnitus and helps one sleep. It helped me but not enough to deal with the worst nights.

Some nights when a raging storm was whooshing through my ears, the white noise machine would just add to it. Those dark times, I’d end up wanting to put my head through the wall behind me. Never mind that the incessant noise and lack of sleep would then have me thinking back to the explosion that blew my world apart. When I did finally manage to sleep, the nightmares would come. Always the same. My brothers in arms being blown wide open as the boy with the explosives laughs, and my mouth opens, but the only sound that comes out is the whining ring of the tinnitus. I’d awake sweating, panting, and with my heart pounding.

She stopped it.

Somehow, with my littleblue curled up beside me, the ringing wouldn’t matter as much. If the sea raged and the winds howled inside my mind, the auditory ghosts of my injured ears, I’d curl myself around her and breathe her in, and it would settle me.

I had her for such a short time, but in that period, she became my white noise machine, and I need her back.

I pick up speed, enjoying the burn in my lungs and thighs. What is that fucker doing to Adriana? Is he tarnishing her and hurting her? Is she scared? I want to rip his limbs from his body. I want to fucking disembowel him for what he’s dared to do.

Instead, I think I’ll bring him back here with me for a little spell of rest and relaxation. He can enjoy some time in my oubliette. Let him think about things while he’s down there.

By the time I’ve run five circuits of the perimeter, I’m sweaty enough that I need another shower. This time, I make it quick, military style. I dry my hair and apply a splash of scent and head downstairs.

Each time I check my phone to see no communication from Damen yet, my stomach sinks more. My mother is in the kitchen, and she turns to me, smiling from where she’s arranging flowers in a vase. “Don’t they look pretty?” she asks.

I smile, despite knowing it probably doesn’t reach my eyes. “Yes,” I say indifferently.

“Son, you look exhausted.” She walks over to me and, mirroring Jacob earlier, she takes my face in her hands. “When you get her back, because I know you will, why don’t you make your mamma happy and settle down?”

I sigh and shake my head, forcing her to drop her hands. “It’s not for me, Mamma. You know that.”

“Why not?” She frowns. “I don’t understand. When you were younger, perhaps I did. All young men want to sow their wild oats.”

I smile despite myself at her use of the old-fashioned saying.

“Now, though, you’re a man. Soon, son, you’ll be middle aged. It will happen before you know where the time has gone. What then? You’ll be one of those lonely older men, bitter and unhappy.”

Jesus Christ, is she for real? “Mamma, I’m hardly middle aged.”

She purses her lips. “No, but before you know it, you will be. Trust me; time goes so quickly. Maybe I want grandchildren.”

“You’ll get them. Nataliya will change her mind one day and give them to you.”

To my shock, tears fill her eyes. “I love that girl like my own daughter, but did it ever occur to you that I might want someone to carry on your father’s genes? The man I loved before anyone else?”

Her words hit me with the force of a sledgehammer. The ringing in my ears starts up until it resembles a crescendo. For the second time in one day, I feel blinding hot anger at one of the people I love most in the world.

“Is that a fucking sick joke?” I demand.

“Dimitri. Do not swear at me that way.” She places her hands on her hips and stares up at me.

“Mamma, that’s a really messed up thing for you to say to me.”

Her brow knits together. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t talk about him for years, and with good reason, I know, but then you throw this at me?”

Her nose wrinkles at the top now, something she does when she’s trying to figure out one of her crossword clues. “Dimitri, I don’t mention him because you don’t. Not anymore. I figured you are a loyal man, and you gave your loyalty to Jacob. That’s why I thought you stopped talking about your father. I simply followed your lead as when it comes to that subject, I’ve always taken my cues from you. In some ways, I was relieved. When you were young, you idolized him because of your Russian Nonna and her tales. That’s not healthy, but then you went the other way. I’ve never known how to handle it for the best, but I’m tired of never being able to mention him.”

I stare at her, at a loss for words. Finally, I manage. “I bet Jacob would be over the moon to learn you’re still pining for your dead husband, a man not fit to lick his shoes.”

Crack.

The fiery pain across my cheek takes my breath away. What the hell? I rub my jaw as I watch my mamma pace. She’s like a caged animal, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her this furious.

What gives?

Then it hits me. She thinks I don’t know, and she’s keeping up the pretense. “I read the letter,” I say with a sigh. “The one you kept. God knows why you kept it. I know he was a weak man. Sick. A maniac, some might say. He wanted to murder us and then kill himself.”

She gasps and bends over as if I’ve punched her. At that moment, Jacob walks into the room and rushes to his wife. “ Moya lubyov ,” he murmurs. “What is it?” He helps her stand upright and guides her to a chair.

When she’s seated, he shoots bullets at me from his eyes. “What is going on here?”

“It’s my fault. I’m sorry, Mamma. I never should have said that. Let’s not speak of this again. Please understand, I am not being cruel; I just don’t want to risk passing that sickness on.”

I turn and head out of the kitchen, but her garbled sob, my name in there somewhere, stops me.

“ D-d-d-im-m-itri.”

I pause and look over my shoulder.

“You’re wrong. So wrong. That’s not … that’s not what happened.”

Tears stream down her cheeks, and Jacob grabs some paper towels and passes them to her, which she uses to dab at her eyes.

Then he pours her a glass of wine.

She turns to him. “He read the letter,” she says.

Jacob looks at me and says only one word. “ Oh .”

“Would someone like to explain to me what is going on?” I snarl.

“Dimitri, patience. This is hard for your mother.”

She sips at the wine, her hands shaking so much the wine sloshes about in the glass.

Finally, she sets the glass down and, one hand on the stem, the other scrunching the paper tightly in her fist, she begins to speak. “I didn’t talk to you about your father, and I see that was a huge mistake now. I didn’t talk to you for two reasons. One, I believed you’d kind of found a healthy balance between the hero worship you had of him as a child, and a way of placing him in history and accepting Jacob as your father now. I was happy you did, and that you and Jacob were close.”

She sniffs. “I suppose in a way I always worried that your hero worship of your father might cause issues with Jacob, even though I know now Jacob is a much better man than that. But after what we went through in Italy with that bastardo , I was worried. You seemed to have grown up and moved on, and our life was here now. I suppose that was a mistake on my part. I should have been more concerned about the way you went from talking about him much of the time to never mentioning your father.”

Jacob places a hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently.

“The other reason I didn’t talk to you is because the truth of your father is awful. It’s dreadful.” She looks at me. “Son, sit.”

My feet drag a little as I walk to the chair as if it’s the executioner’s chair in a prison. I sit heavily.

“That letter is real and yes, your father wrote it, but that’s the only truth there. The contents, what it says, is all a lie.”

I stare at her, barely able to comprehend. My feelings for my father have overshadowed my entire life. Firstly, I worshipped him, and then I despised him. I based decisions around him. I tried to be more like him, and then I determined to never be remotely like him.

I would do whatever it took not to do what he did, even if that included closing my heart off forever.

Now, she’s telling me the note was a lie? That my entire existence has been built on a lie?

“What is the truth?” I manage to grind out.

“Your father was targeted by the Russian security services. They couldn’t simply murder him as he was high up, and they needed their hands to look clean. They made him a deal: write that letter, and they would then kill him and make it look like a suicide, and we, you and I, would be allowed to leave. He had a cast iron guarantee of that from one of the senior decision makers in the security services at the time.”

Her voice is shaky, traumatized.

“He couldn’t trust them, but he had no other choice. His other option was to watch us be butchered. In front of his eyes. You were a babe in arms. So he laid down his life, wrote that note that they used to smear him with, and let them kill him and make it look like a suicide. He never would have hurt us, and he wasn’t insane or cruel. He did, however, release some very important information about the safety of the nuclear program, and that’s why they had to smear his name so badly that no one would believe what he said.”

She sniffs again then dabs at her red eyes.

My heart is pounding too fast. I can’t speak because I can’t trust my voice. There’s a thick lump in my throat, and my eyes are burning.

“I had no idea you’d found the note. And if I did, I’d have told you the truth sooner. Dimitri, there is no cursed blood in you. Nothing for you to fear. You have no evil genes, if such things even exist, because your father didn’t. He made the ultimate sacrifice to keep us safe. He was a brave man.”

“He gave his life,” I whisper.

“More, son. He gave his reputation and his legacy too.”

I glance down at my arm, looking at the veins in my wrist as if I can see the blood flowing there, as if I can envision it turning from sludge to something clearer. “He didn’t go crazy?” I ask, still unable to believe this.

“No, my darling boy, he didn’t go crazy. He laid down his life for us.”

Shit. This is so big I can’t begin to take it in. “But you never corrected Anton when he said bad things about Russian Papa,” I say. “I remember he’d say he was weak, and you never corrected him.”

She shakes her head. “He didn’t know the truth. Anton thought that your father did try to harm us and then killed himself. It wasn’t safe for me to tell him the truth. As for Russian Nonna, she told you the truth of his character if not of the events.”

I frown, thinking. “Why did she choose to stay in Russia when she knew what they did to her son?” I ask, incredulous. “She could have come here for a better life.”

Mamma smiles through her tears. “She grew up in a different age, Dimitri. She might have known the Soviet empire was evil, but she didn’t think America was any better. She was taught from being a tiny girl that capitalism was wrong. She viewed America the same way a deeply religious person might view a night club. Corrupt. Debauched. Immoral. Plus, she was old and set in her ways. Change can be scary.”

She sips a little more wine and dabs at her cheeks with the tissue.

“Have you really spent your life avoiding love because you thought you’d be a danger to any woman you let in?” My mother shakes her head, her gaze full of sorrow.

“I haven’t avoided love, as such; I just never felt it.” I shrug.

“Because you never let yourself,” Jacob says. “If a door is closed, we cannot walk through it.”

He’s right; I know as much.

“There’s a girl right now who is being held by a madman, a real one,” my stepfather pushes. “A girl who looks at you as if you hung the stars for her. A girl you look at as if she’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. Maybe you don’t love her. Maybe you and she aren’t meant to be, but maybe, just possibly, you are. You won’t know unless you open yourself up to the chance.”

I blow out a long breath. “I guess you’re right. I can’t do that, though, if she isn’t here, can I? In order to have a chance of finding out, I need to bring her back. Unharmed.” I can’t go rushing in there and risk her life; Jacob is correct. Her safety matters more than my ego-driven need for revenge.

As if timed by God himself, my phone buzzes. I take it out of my pocket and read the message. “Damen,” I say to Jacob. “He’s sent us an email. Because of the information we gave him, he’s been able to dig deep. He’s sending us a ton of information on Barnaby, including his real estate holdings and security detail. We’ll need to download all the files and print them.”

Another message pings. “He says she’s there. At his main home in the south of England.”

I look at Jacob. “Thank God, we have a location.”

I read more, and my euphoria dissipates. “Fuck.”

“What?” my mother demands.

“The house is a veritable fortress. It even has a moat of sorts. We can’t simply go rushing in there.”

I look at Jacob, my head pounding with everything I’ve learned the past hour.

“Let me message Volkov once we have this information printed.”

Jacob does as he says and messages him, sending the info we have to Nikolai Volkov. Nikolai calls Jacob twenty minutes later, and I listen on speaker as they exchange pleasantries. Then Nikolai blindsides me.

“We have a plan, and we think we can get you in a room with her sooner than later.”

The thought of being in the same space as her, breathing the same air, has something inside me, something that has been clenched tight, unfurling like a bud in spring. My littleblue will be back in my orbit once more. She’s become like air to me, and in such a short time. I don’t know if it is love, as everyone else seems to believe, but she’s an obsession, and one I won’t be letting go ever again.

I hold my breath as Volkov continues to speak.

“There’s an event, at the club, three nights from now. My club is men only, but we have certain evenings where partners and wives can come, thanks to my wife. She hates the idea of a men only club. Thinks it’s sexist.” He chuckles. “Barnaby is coming that evening, and he’s bringing a date. Normally, he brings a working girl, but I checked, and he hasn’t hired one. If he has your girl with him, there’s a chance he’s bringing her. You are welcome to come and be there too.”

“To extract her?” I say.

He clears his throat on a cough. “Fuck no. Not in my club. You can see her, though, and speak with her. Reassure her that you’re there to rescue her. We have a plan for the extraction.”

“He’ll take one look at me and bolt,” I say. “Then I’ll never get near her again.”

“It’s a masked ball,” Nikolai supplies. “You wear a good enough mask, and he won’t know it’s you. We’ll distract him to give you long enough to talk to her and explain what will go down.”

“What good does it do me if you won’t let me take her?” This is making my jaw ache from the tension I’m holding in it.

He sighs. My hands are clenched into fists, and my shoulders ache too.

“I can’t ruin my club by letting you take her there.” His voice is calm, but I can sense his patience has limits, and I’m getting close. “My club gives me priceless information, and members have to trust it as a safe place in order to speak freely the way they do. However, my brother has an idea, a plan we believe will work. He’s here with me.”

“Sasha Volkov,” a second voice says. Sasha’s voice is smoother and less gruff than Nikolai’s.

“This man, who has your woman.” He pauses, and I hear him take a drink. “He has very specific tastes. He also has a high- class escort working for him. She’s his trainer … of all the other girls he hires.”

The thought of her training Adriana makes me want to break things.

“This escort knows a good friend of mine, a dominatrix, Miss May. I am going to get a message to Adriana through May and via the escort. We will tell Adriana to hold on and help is coming. May will be hosting a special, private, invite-only soiree in her club after Nikolai’s party. Her establishment is a sex club and one I think Barnaby would be interested in visiting, if invited. This party is the perfect place for you to put your plans into action.”

The idea that this Barnaby fucker is planning to take my littleblue to a sex party is making me want to break him .

“May planned the party a few weeks ago and already has around fifteen people attending. She wanted to use Nik’s masked party as a way to get a few more people interested, so she asked if she could hand around invites and get a few more people to turn up after Nik’s event. A kinky after-party, if you will. We spoke with May, and she has given an invite to Barnaby’s escort, who will present it to him as a great idea. If he doesn’t take the bait then, he’ll be offered a second chance by me at Nikolai’s party. I’ll be going to May’s gathering, and I think I can persuade Barnaby to as well. He’s into that shit, and he’ll find it hard to say no.”

“Are you going, Nikolai?” I ask.

“Christ, no,” he grumbles. “My idea of hell, and Sienna would have my balls for breakfast. But Sasha used to play that way and his woman, Leah, is more amenable to going if it helps you, which we think it will.” There’s a rustling of paper, and then he speaks again. “You can come to the masked ball, but no violence or fuckery. Hopefully your woman is there with Barnaby, as we believe. You get some time to talk to her and explain she’s going to be safe, and inform her there will be a second party later that night. Tell her that once she is at the second party there will be a signal to watch for. When you give that signal, that’s her cue to get the fuck out of the way while shit goes down. You deal with Barnaby and his men, take your girl, and get the hell out of London. You will need to leave immediately. Do you have a private jet?”

“Yes, we do.”

“Have it fueled and ready, and make sure you have take-off slots booked. He’s a powerful figure here, and I can’t protect you from the kind of law enforcement you’ll come up against if anything goes wrong. You need to get your woman out of the country immediately.”

“Thank you. I can’t say that enough.”

Holy hell. This almost seems too easy. I thought I’d be attacking his home. Having to get past his make-shift moat and storm the castle like a knight of old.

I let out a long breath. “This is… It means a lot.”

“Well, you owe us now,” Sasha Volkov says, “and we do like to collect favors.”

Of course they do. It’s how their world works. I’ll give them anything they ask for if it gets Adriana back safely.

“Anyway, back to business. At the sex club, May will provide a demonstration of some mild BDSM play. Once that demonstration is over, May will lure Barnaby to a larger back room for a special display of intense pain play. He’s into it by all accounts, and we think his kink will override his common sense. You and your men can be in that room. Once there, give Adriana the signal, take Barnaby and his men, then get the hell out of Dodge.

“No guns or shooting,” he adds. “There won’t be any weapons inside anyway, as we will ensure everyone is searched, and they must leave their weapons at the door. His team won’t be armed either.”

“Can’t you let me sneak mine in?” I ask, hopeful. I really want to shoot this motherfucker in the face.

“No. You’ll ruin May’s business. You’ll have to do this the old school way.”

I let out a dark laugh. “Trust me; I have the capability to kill that bastard with my bare hands. Just make sure he’s not armed and none of his security are; don’t screw me on that. Damen’s information is that they do carry, despite it being illegal there.”

“We won’t let them in armed, that I guarantee. I think you need to select your best men, pack, and get to London,” Nikolai says.

“You can stay at the club,” a female voice joins the conversation.

“Dimitri, meet the wife. Sienna.” Nikolai’s voice holds a note of amusement.

“Don’t call me the wife; you know I hate that.”

He laughs and then says, “Message me and let me know how many men are coming. See you when you land. We’ll organize cars for you when I know how many you’ll need. Later.”

Then the line goes dead.

I feel as if I’ve been bludgeoned over the head as so much information has been thrown at me this past few hours, but at least I have hope that in a few days I will see Adriana again. If it doesn’t pan out the way the Volkovs think it will, then I’ll pivot and put another plan in place. I know where she is now.

I turn to Jacob. “Let’s go over Damen’s information and make plans; we need backups in place too.”

“Yes.” He slaps me on the back. “Let’s go get your girl back.”

The man who took my littleblue from me is about to find out that I’d raze his castle, destroy his entire nation, and set the damn world alight if I must, in order to get her back.