He wasn’t begging; he wasn’t really even shaking. From the middle of the room, Mario stared at his sons, at me, at his bloodline and the world he’d built, like a god looking down on his creation.
“I won’t apologize,” he said.
“It wouldn’t help now, anyway,” Bastian said from one of the chairs encircling him.
Dante cracked his knuckles, next to him. “You should have been stopped long ago.”
“The only people willing to stop me were the people I made strong enough to do so.” Mario stared at the arm that always had my chain coiled under the sleeve. “Are you going to do it, Rome?”
I shook my head. He’d been more of a father figure to me than my own, and he was the father figure of the mob, of the family. “I don’t understand how you could do all this.”
“You do what you have to for the family. Katie was a piece we needed.”
“Tell me that placing her at Marvin’s was coincidence.” I shook with a wrath I couldn’t contain and circled him like a shark ready to rip apart a wounded animal.
“Do you want me to lie?” Mario asked and then picked at his teeth. “Deals were made. That wasn’t the only one. We got a lot of protection out of me agreeing to a lot of things over the years.”
I raised my head to make eye contact with Bastian, and he nodded along with Cade, who sat by his side. I swung my fist fast hard into Mario’s jaw. The old man crumbled in the chair. He breathed in and out quickly, sucking on air as if he were trying to get his bearings.
Then the man laughed, hard and loud. “Wow. That’s real. That’s some real shit I’ve given my enemies over the years. The monster in you doesn’t come to play.”
“I never did play when it came to the family, when it came to her.”
“She always was able to hook every man she came in contact with, huh?” Mario rubbed his jaw in thought. “I’ve always been proud of that girl. Tell her I was proud, will you?”
“Marvin raped her. He tortured her. Katie was just a girl. You want me to tell her you placed her there knowing that he would?” As I said the words, acid rose so high in my throat, I contemplated spitting on him.
“I’d do it again, Rome. Let me be clear to you all here and now. I don’t have a single regret, not one. Katie is ours. I did what I had to do to get her. Being the boss”—he looked at his son—“means making the hard choices. I made them over and over again. You all know by now we have money from drugs and trafficking. I halted other families from doing it.”
When I turned to stare at Mario’s boys, Cade’s face was ashen. Bastian was vibrating with another emotion. We’d all been duped into thinking we’d been cleaning up when really Mario had fooled us all.
“You made our family a lie,” Bastian responded quietly, but his words held malice.
“I made us untouchable,” said Mario. “Look what we have now. I got Katalina here with us. So she had to sleep with Marvin and Jimmy. She’s fine now. She’s the heir to billions in the bratva. Just marry her, son.”
Bastian’s eyes flared at his father’s admission, but I’d already known. Mario had moved Katalina like a chess piece, willing to have her fall victim time and time again. He’d used her like she felt she’d been used, and he’d made her feelings about the mob true.
Bastian walked up to his dad, bent down to look him in the eye, and said without an ounce of emotion, “Blow this man’s goddamn head off.”
“No!” Katalina stood in the doorway, hair tied up on her head, exposing the sharp features of her face. She was free of makeup, in combat boots and a plain tank top hanging over her jeans. In her simplest attire, she exuded with the most power I’d ever seen from her. “Don’t any of you listen? I said let me go and stop what you’re doing for once.”
“Oh, Katalina,” Mario groaned. “Now’s not the time. We’ve already decided what becomes of me.”
“Without me? Because my choice doesn’t matter even when the choice is about me?” She stalked forward. “I don’t want death, Mario. I want life. I want all of you to see this can be different.”
“Different how?” Bastian whispered like he wanted an out, like he wanted to rally behind her, but the choice had already been made. Mario had wronged us, and Katalina most of all.
“I can forgive him if all of you can.”
“I can’t.” The words flew out of me and held the gun to Mario’s head. “I’ll never forgive him. It was the one secret he should have told me and the one he kept from me instead.”
Mario nodded, no remorse playing over his features. “He’s right. I chose this path for the family. I’d choose it again.”
Bastian cringed, and Cade stumbled back as if hoping their father would redeem himself.
“I don’t care.” Katalina shrugged. That shrug, that deceptive hitch in her voice like it was no big deal . . . The beast in me roared.
“I do.” My finger pulled the trigger.
The shot rang out loud and clear, explosive within the expansive space.
She jumped forward into his blood while Cade and Bastian took a step back. Dante sighed and hung his head before he dialed a number on his phone.
Mario’s death was instant. He slumped in the chair, and the temple where the bullet entered poured blood.
Katalina lunged toward the wound immediately, the savior in her bigger than all of us. Her hands tried to hold in the blood and her gaze cut to mine. “How could you?” she whispered, and her gray eyes held not an ounce of love for me. Gone was the longing, gone was the lust, and gone was the connection.
I threw the gun to the cement. “I choose the family every time, Katalina. You’re a part of it, and I’ll protect you whether you like it or not. That man was never going to protect you.”
“You killed our father,” she screamed in agony and held her hands up with the blood of the mob king on them.
“We didn’t need him anymore.” I crossed my arms because if I didn’t, I’d go to her. I’d try to calm her, soothe her, wrap her up while she fought me enough to remember that she loved me.
Yet the fury in me was still tearing around my body and the monster wasn’t silenced. I wanted more blood. I wanted more revenge. I heard her screams and saw her pain and knew that all of this life had caused it, including me.
I couldn’t subject her to more of that.
I couldn’t go to her.
I had to let her go.
“You need to walk away from this life,” I said.
Her cries wracked her body as she held up Mario’s face and then pulled it to her bosom to hug him one last time. No one approached them. We let her feel the pain for us all. Mario had been one of us and she mourned him like that.
When enough time had passed, when her cries turned to silence, she leaned him back on the chair and turned to Dante. “Get the best to clean him up and give him the funeral he deserved.” Then she spun to look at the facility, wiping the blood onto her clean white shirt, staining it with dirty, lost life. “I always think I’ll learn to love this place. And yet I step foot in it and want to burn it to the ground every single time.”
“It’s not a place of happiness.” I tried to ease her.
“It’s a place of death and it reeks of it. It’s a place of misplaced anger and judgement.” She shook her head and laughed. “I wanted for so long to sit beside you all and make these calls. For what? For blood on my hands and no reward? No true ownership or power?”
“Katie, we need to—”
“We don’t need to do anything!” She cut her hand through the air when she whirled to look at me with hate in her eyes. “I took the bratva. Dimitri’s gone. It’s mine now.”
Something hard, solid, and cold dropped into the pit of my stomach. “No,” I said so low, maybe she didn’t hear. “Where are they then, huh?”
“Your guards won’t let them pass. I’m allowing it for now.”
“Katalina,” I whispered. “You shouldn’t be allowing for anything here. You can’t do this. The bratva, they aren’t like us.”
“I can and I will.” Her voice boomed around larger than life, echoing back at us. “I intend to rule, not walk away,” she continued.
“What the fuck are you thinking?” I bellowed, and my voice matched hers now. By then, men had started to filter in.
Bastian grabbed her arm. “We need to talk, Katalina.”
She shook her head and held her bloodstained hands out in front of her. She glared at me and nodded, looking straight in my eyes. “Yes, we do. I need to make alliances with you for my bratva. I hope to protect them from monsters like him.”
I lunged for her faster than Bastian could pull her away and threw her over my shoulder. Dante stepped forward as she wailed into my back, but the sound that erupted from deep in my chest stopped him. I turned to face them with Katalina struggling as I pulled a gun from behind and swung it toward all of them. Every man’s hands went up. Whenever I fired, I didn’t miss. Everyone knew that. “Do not come for her. This is our fight with each other. I bleed, she bleeds. Back the fuck off.”
She threw out obscenities at every single one of us as I carried her across the room to the back doors we’d entered so long ago together. The same trash can was to the right of them as I swung open the door.
This time, I wanted to be the one puking in it.
When I got to the bathroom, I set her down, and she tried to stomp my foot. “I don’t want to be back here with you! I don’t want anything to do with you at all.” She screamed at me so loud, she must have wanted everyone to hear.
“Same. You think I’ve wanted anything to do with you since the first time I met you?”
“You left your damn PO Box, not me.”
“You needed someone,” I explained.
“Not you. You can’t love. You killed your father and Mario. If you can’t love them, then who the fuck can you love?” She was throwing blows lower than ever before, but the pain in her eyes was there, was almost palpable. I saw our connection renewed, burning brighter in her anger than ever before.
“You!” I screamed. Or the monster screamed. Or my soul screamed. I wasn’t sure who anymore. She’d ripped me all apart. “You left and I crumbled. Don’t you get that?”
I wanted to crumble at his words. My heart did, I felt the pain of it. Knowing the one you loved loved you back should have been a happy moment. Instead, we knew we couldn’t be together. There was too much behind us and too much in front of us. Sometimes the complications around that burning flame of love snuff it out. “You deserved for me to leave. Look at our past, Rome. We can’t come back from that. You all deserved my desertion.”
“This family needs you. We need you to stand with us and be a part of what—”
“Stand with you?” Her face turned ashen. Her little nose wrinkled up as if she was disgusted that I’d even suggested it, even though she’d done it all these years until now.
Before we could continue, she whirled and vomited in the waste basket near the bathroom door.
The motion was violent, wrenching from her soul like she wanted to exorcise everything from it.
She gripped the edge of the waste basket, knuckles turning white. “I should be used to this by now.”
“Used to what?” I walked over to rub her back and she tensed but let my hand glide up and down her spine.
“Used to those around me dying. Losing every single person I care about.”
“You haven’t lost anyone tonight.”
“I lost Mario.” She glared up at me. “Because of you.”
“He didn’t care about anyone but himself.” I tried to leash my anger by balling my fist and pressing it into the palm of my other hand.
“And yet I still cared for him. I still wanted him alive. You take a life and they’re gone forever, Rome. Wiped clean from the earth.” She shook her head at me like I should be ashamed.
“So they can’t do any more damage.”
“Was he all that bad? He loved me in the only way he knew how.”
“Harden your heart, Katalina. If you think ruling that bratva out there is going to be easier than this, it won’t be. You’re going to need a stronger stomach.”
She stepped back from the garbage and took a moment to wash her mouth in the sink. “Like déjà vu being back in this bathroom.”
“It’s more like a nightmare,” I grumbled.
Her silver eyes watched me over her shoulder in the mirror. “I think I’m in love with you. And that’s not possible. Especially not now.” The words fell as whispers from her lips, floating like light feathers over to me. And still they shattered and destroyed every part of me. I wanted her love but not like this. “It shouldn’t be possible after what you’ve done.”
In the movies, the novels, the fairytales, we could work it out. We’d find a way and kiss and make up here. Suddenly, I wanted that with her.
“You don’t have to walk into the bratva’s open arms,” I said. “We’re possible if you want us to be.”
“Do we ever really get what we want, Rome?”
I wish I could have told her that the mafia gave us exactly what we wanted. We got the money, the cars, the luxurious lives. Yet we were too far in, too deeply rooted in the family to think the money and infamy on the surface was all it was. Down in the dirt, the grit and power and responsibility of a city weighed on your shoulders.
“This doesn’t have to be our fight,” I said.
“It’s the only one worth fighting now. My family and my blood will be for something.”
“For what?” I whispered. “You can’t change a whole city by yourself.”
“I won’t be by myself. Bastian and the family are going to align with us. We’re going to clean up, Rome.”
“He won’t agree.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not safe for you! Or anyone. The bratva can’t be trusted.” I snarled and slammed my fist into the wall. She didn’t listen, she didn’t even attempt to. “Look at this logically.”
“Logic keeps you stagnant and I’m not aiming for that.” She turned on a heel and made her way to the door.
As she was about to swing it open, I slammed my hand on it and shoved it closed. “Did you ever consider I might not let you walk away so easily? You’re the damn enemy now, Katalina.”
“Or an ally. Bastian makes that call.”
“We all do. Bastian’s never ruled as a dictator.”
She leaned her back on the door and crossed her arms to look up at me. “And what? You’re going to sway him to kill me? To lock me up and treat me as the enemy? You don’t want the bratva as an ally to the family, and yet, you know as well as I do it’s the best thing for the family. We could crush all the gangs and other families in the city. The power would be ours.”
“And the responsibility.”
She bit her lip as if thinking for a second. “Who better to have that responsibility, Rome? You grew up on these streets. We all know them. I know how the men operate, you know how the gangs slither through the shadows of the city alleys. I want to grab them by their heads and hold them out in the light, make them stare at the damn sun and confess their sins.”
“We aren’t gods, woman. We don’t make the rules.”
“I do now,” she shot back. “I have to now, Rome. Or else, everything I’ve ever done is all for nothing.”
“For nothing? It was to help the family and to survive.” I fisted a hand and tried my best not to let her words grate on every nerve I had. I wanted to find every man who’d made her feel this way and rip them apart so they felt her pain and then felt nothing at all. I emphasized it again, “You did what you had to in order to survive. You can be proud of that, you can be—”
“I can be more than just a survivor. I can be a savior. I can be a damn enforcer. And I’m going to be one. You either get on board or stay the fuck out of my way.”
“I’m in your way, woman, because you set me there. You fucked me and I fucked you so far into our own oblivion, I’m stuck in love with you.”
“Stuck?” Her eyes narrowed. “I’m not asking you to be stuck.”
“And yet here I am in this bathroom with you again after all these years. Let’s stop this.”
“Are you going to stop being Bastian’s right-hand man?”
“What?” I stepped back at her question.
“You want me to give up my place for what? To stand next to you? After all this? Right now, all I’ve gotten from you is a fucked-up version of ‘I love you’ in a little bathroom I just puked in. Is that what I’m supposed to want? You’ve shown me that you will swoop in to save the day and ignore me the next. You let your damn monster out to play to save my ass but then tell me it’s the reason we can’t be together.”
“Katalina, I have to keep things in line for the family.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck!” She stomped her foot and the words thundered out with fury. “I’m not here to be by your side, to be a pawn on the chess board; I’m here to rise above it. I should have done it long ago. I never should have given my heart to you when you couldn’t quiet this viciousness. You were never ready. None of you are.”
She’d already taken my heart, and now she squeezed the life from it with those words.
“You’re making a mistake,” I whispered.
“No, the only mistake I made was trusting anyone to do for me what I could have done myself. Had I been sitting in the room making decisions with all of you, I like to think we wouldn’t be where we are. If Cleopatra ruled an empire, so can I.”
“That bratva isn’t the empire you want.”
“It’s the only one I have. I was only this family’s tool. Did you love me for that or in spite of it?” I took a step toward her, but she held up her hand. “No! You don’t get to come to me now. Not after this.” She waved toward the hall. “You couldn’t hold back killing Mario. You couldn’t let me make that decision. And you want me to keep standing by your side as if it’s okay, Rome. It’s not.”
“I won’t apologize.”
“You can’t even see why he would have been an asset alive. That in and of itself is a problem.”
“I don’t need to think rationally about him, Katalina.” I walked into the hand she had between us, I held it to my chest. We both stared at it as I said, “He hurt you. He should have been six feet under the first day he even thought to.”
“You can’t unleash your monster any time you like based on how you feel about some girl, Rome.” She wanted to hurt me, but her hand had curled around my shirt, like she was holding on, like I was a lifeline.
“You’re not some girl, Katalina,” I whispered. “You’re my fucking world. You’re the queen of this family and now the bratva too. You’re the one thing I hate to care for but still do. I can’t cage the animal in me that’s willing to fight for you, wouldn’t be able to even if I tried.”
“Then we can’t work.”
Rage at her words flowed through me. I wanted to strangle some sense into her, but our emotions were vibrating off the walls and I was sure the tiles would shake and fall off soon. “We can if you stop this. Don’t put yourself in a position where I’ll have to fight to keep you alive day in and day out. A bratva queen is always in danger.”
“Good thing I’m not an Armanelli queen then, right? You’re only their monster, not mine.” She dropped her hand, turned and swung open the bathroom door. This time I let her.
“You stay with the bratva, you leave this family behind, Cleo.” I let the words fall from my lips as a warning, but they were filled with anguish too.
She froze mid stride before she turned and looked at me. Her eyes glistened like stars shining on metal in the night. “I leave you behind too, Rome. You aren’t just the family. One day you’ll see that. One day, you’ll get why I’m doing all this. We’re more than what everyone has made us out to be, huh?”
I could chase her, but I knew if I did it would only be to rip her apart for what she was putting me through.
We were destroying each other, and one of us had to stop. We couldn’t keep fighting, especially when neither of us was willing to give an inch. If we continued this, we’d both end up dead. She was too important to more than just me now. She was an heiress. A Russian Princess.
The monster in me lay down and surrendered to its queen.
