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“I was a little disappointed, though,” he continues. “She’s pretty. But… rather common.”
My jaw jumps without my permission. Unfortunately, Ravil catches the slip-up.
“Oh dear,” he tsks. “Don Uvarov doesn’t like that, does he? You must really like this girl. I suppose you would have to, to knock her up in the first place.”
And there it is. The hole in his taunting. Which just goes to show: if you stay silent long enough, information comes to you of its own accord. Something Ravil never learned because he was always too busy flapping his gums.
He thinks June’s baby is mine.
I refrain from celebrating his idiocy out loud. Better just to let him keep talking.
“You want the Bratva to pass to your son, I assume.”
“Which you have a problem with,” I guess in a bored voice.
“As a matter of fact, I do. It’smyBratva.” He leans forward, clenching the arms of the chair, and bares his teeth again. If he thinks he’s intimidating me, he’s mistaken. “You relinquished your claim to the Uvarov Bratva when you killed my uncle. We do not spill family blood, Kolya. You know this. It’s the code we live by. It’s the code we’ve always lived by. Family.‘Krov.The only thing that matters.”
I don’t need the history lesson. My father’s blood wasn’t even cold before the Bratva started splitting down the middle, fracturing off into the men who supported me without question and the men who could not reconcile with the crime I’d committed against their don.
It didn’t matter that he was also my father. It didn’t matter that he deserved a far worse death than the one I gave him.
All that mattered was‘krov.And I had spilled blood that I wasn’t meant to spill.
“You want what’s mine, cousin?” I lean forward, never blinking away from Ravil’s bitter, yellow stare. “Come and fucking take it.”
Ravil’s sneer turns venomous. Those bug-like eyes, protruding from either side of his face, unsettle me as much as they ever have. “I don’t want to enter into open warfare with you, cousin,” he warns. “But I will if you push me. If you allow the little bastard in that whore’s belly to see the light of day, you might as well set your empire on fire.”
I tighten my fists out of sight. Blood thrums at my temples, hot and furious.‘Krovor no, Ravil is dangerously close to getting his throat slit here and now.
“A smart man wouldn’t have walked onto my property just to threaten me. I ought to take your head off just for the impudence.”
Ravil cackles and leans forward, dragging a taunting finger over his exposed neck. “What was your phrase?‘Come and fucking take it’?You wouldn’t dare, though, would you, Kolya? It’s a bit ironic, this whole thing. Spilling Uvarov‘krovonce nearly cost you everything. Doing it a second time would cost you the rest of it.”
I clench my teeth hard enough to shatter them like glass. He isn’t wrong. What I did was damn near unforgivable in the eyes of many. I’ve spent years rebuilding the trust that undergirds the Bratva. A single drop of the wrong blood could undo all that work.
But Ravil is a fucking fool if I think I’ll let him saunter into my house and dictate a single goddamn thing.
“You come into my home, under the goodwill of my protection, my honor, and threaten me? That is reckless, cousin. All it would take is one little slip of a knife, and your line would end forever.”
Ravil goes deathly still, his skin turning a sallow yellow that makes him look embalmed.
I give him a careless smile. “You’re not the only one with spies, cousin,” I tell him, throwing my punches with all the finesse that my father trained into me. “You may think you know my secret. But I know yours, too.”
“How did you find out?” he croaks, doing away with the pretense.
“That you’re impotent? Not every man who defected to you is actually loyal to you, Ravil. I may have broken a cardinal rule when I killed the old man. But there are still many who see me as the rightful don.”
“You were always a cocky little shit,” he snarls at me.
I smirk. “And you were always a prickly little bastard with too much pride. Your men are going to find out about your infertility soon enough. That will make things… dicey.”
He glares at me with ten years of hatred pent-up behind those yellow eyes. “You don’t deserve the throne you stole. Adrian would have made a better leader than you.”
“Adrian was a drunkard who kept secrets from the very people he should have been honest with,” I snarl. “He was never meant to give orders; he was only ever meant to follow. And even that he couldn’t seem to manage very well.”
I stand and fix the cuffs of my shirt. I’m done trading words with this fucking worm. I want him out of my sight.
Ravil gets to his feet, though he gives up a good three or four inches to me. “I’ll offer my deal one more time: get rid of the baby or I’ll do it myself.”
