Page 4 of Bratva Menace

I shouldn’t have been as excited as I was at that prospect…but fuck, I was. I was yet to meet anyone who matched my crazy, but that woman…My stalker…

Oh, she matched it to a tee, and it was fucking exhilarating.

I couldn’t help but be curious about what she would do once she found out I was going to be married in only a few short days. She’d shown a certain level of possessiveness toward me already. That was evident based on the fingers she’d sent me of a woman she thought I’d had sex with.

You’d think something like that would have freaked me out.

Surprise, surprise. It didn’t. It turned me on. And I found myself deliberately trying to antagonize her. To get her to reveal herself instead of hiding in the damn shadows all the time.

I wanted to see her.

My grandfather, Sergei Volkov, had called a few weeks before to tell me the date had officially been set. That I had three weeks to get my affairs in order before my ass was to be on a plane to Russia.

He’d been pushing the wedding back for months, giving excuse after excuse as to why it was being postponed. My father suspected Sergei was having trouble maintaining the deal. That my bride-to-be’s family was trying to renegotiate the terms, forcing my grandfather to push the wedding back until they could come to some sort of agreement that suited them both.

I think it was partly that, and my father, that were responsible for the delay. Sergei had placed an open contract on my father. Ten millions dollars to whoever could end his life.

For the past six months, assassins from all over the world had tried to claim that bounty. Tried breaking into our home. Murdering him in his bed. Shooting him in drive-bys. The whole nine yards.

None of those attempts had been successful, thanks to Autumn, the Crimson Death. World-renowned assassin. His girlfriend. A word I never thought I would say in conjunction with my father, but there we were.

They’d met when they were both kidnapped by the same man. Talon Scardo. A fucktard of man with a huge daddy complex and a need to have the world view him as a smart and important man.

Bore.

He’d made the mistake of making them partners in a gladiator-style fight-to-the-death tournament where four people entered the arena, and only two walked out alive.

My father and Autumn hated each other at the start. Had actually tried to kill each other several times before they reluctantly entered into an alliance with the sole objective of working together to try to escape Talon.

And thanks to a joint effort from the Bratva, La Cosa Nostra, and Los Zetas, that escape came to fruition.

After a lot, and I mean a lot of fuckery—mainly from my father’s side—they had worked on their feelings for one another and were all in.

There was no denying the fact that it was a little weird for me. I’d only ever seen him with one woman before. My mother had been murdered over ten years earlier by a rival family, the Voznesenskys. But seeing how happy he was made all that weirdness more than worth it.

I never noticed before how much he was just coasting through life. How unhappy he truly was. Merely existing and not living.

Autumn had brought him back from the darkness.

She, along with a four-man security team, had managed to thwart every attempt on my father’s life. I suspected Sergei was desperately trying to have my father killed before the wedding because he didn’t want to risk something happening during the event itself and possibly ruining the deal he so urgently needed with the Tarasovs.

He must have given up, though, because it had been a month since the last attempt. And in two days’ time, I would be walking down the aisle.

That dark chill vanished.

I exhaled heavily. She wasn’t watching me anymore.

I ignored the tug of disappointment in my gut because it was completely and totally irrational, and went inside.

CHAPTER THREE

LUKYAN VOLKOV

“Surprise!”

I clutched my chest, gasping in pretend shock at the cluster of people standing in my backyard; my siblings, my father, Autumn, Tatiana, Drea, Arturo, his brother, Vincenzo, their two younger siblings, Lucian and Theodora, Christian, Luca, and about a dozen other people whose names I couldn’t remember.

“Oh my God! What is this?” I asked with a laugh. But, I knew exactly what it was.