Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 120165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
“Wait,” croaked Bronwyn. “Spartak.”
Everyone looked at her in confusion. “He’s back there, out cold,” I told her, pointing.
“Let him burn,” said Gennadiy viciously.
Bronwyn shook her head. “He’s the one who faked the phone call! If we get him out, he can tell The Eight what he did!”
I stared at her. She’s right. I would have left him there and lost our only chance at clearing our name. Whatever did I do without her?
I showed Valentin and Gennadiy where I’d left Spartak’s unconscious body—none of his men had tried to save him, they must have all fled when the club caught fire. My brothers picked up Spartak and a few moments later we emerged into blissfully cold, clean night air. We were coughing, our lungs raw from the smoke, our skin was singed, and I was bleeding everywhere and couldn’t really see straight. But we were alive.
The street was filling up with fire trucks and paramedics and I could hear police sirens approaching, too. We took Liliya straight to one of the ambulances. Gennadiy, Valentin and Mikhail quickly put Spartak in their car so that they could spirit him away before the cops got him. A rental car came screeching around the corner and Gabriella stuck her head out of the window. “Get in!”
Alexei, Bronwyn and I climbed into the back. As the first police cars turned into the street, Gabriella roared away. She twisted around to look at us. “Hospital?”
I looked around. Spartak was gone. Everyone was okay. And I had my wife back.
“Hospital,” I agreed. And passed out.
EPILOGUE
Two Weeks Later
Radimir
“Hard hats for everyone,” the foreman told us, handing them out. “Please be careful, we’ve made sure the structure’s safe, but I don’t want anyone getting hurt.”
I put a hard hat on Bronwyn’s head, which made her look so adorable my chest went tight. I laced my fingers together with hers and squeezed her hand, then put a hard hat on myself. My head had taken enough knocks for a while.
I’d come out of the fire at Spartak’s nightclub with smoke inhalation, a concussion, serious blood loss and enough shards of glass in my hands that it had taken a doctor a full hour to remove it all. Bronwyn had slightly worse smoke inhalation and some cuts and bruises, and was under orders to use her crutches until her arthritis had calmed down. But the worst casualty had been the club itself. Thanks to Spartak’s lax safety measures and the chemicals stored in the basement, the fire had raged for hours and by the time the fire department got it under control, the club had been gutted. The damage did provide an opportunity for a fresh start, though, and that was important...because the club was now ours.
“This wall will be coming down,” the foreman was telling Gennadiy. “All of this has to go...”
When the police had rolled up to the club, the first thing they’d found were about thirty trafficked women, some of whom had been in the basement for years. The second thing they found was the drug factory. They rounded up Spartak’s surviving men—Bronwyn was relieved to learn that the one she’d stabbed had lived—and it was clear Spartak was going to jail for a long, long time.
Except...no one could find Spartak. The police thought he’d fled the country but actually he spent the day following the fire in a lock-up garage just a few miles from the club. Also in the garage was one of The Eight. He was very interested in how Spartak had used them to nearly eliminate the Aristovs. By the end of the day, he had a full confession, and Spartak was dead. The Eight restored our family’s standing: we were no longer cut off. And in restitution, they gave us all of Spartak’s assets and territory, including his nightclub. The war was over...and we were more powerful than ever.
The plan was to completely remodel the nightclub and turn it from a seedy drug-front into a legitimate business that Gennadiy would run.
“Wider balconies,” Gennadiy was telling an architect. “We need to get rid of the bottlenecks.”
“And more fire exits,” said Valentin. “What are we going to do with the basement?”
Mikhail smiled and put a friendly arm around the architect’s shoulders. “I have some ideas…”
I watched my family as they talked and planned, thoughtful and a little sad. I could see so much of myself in them: Vladivostok had left its marks on Gennadiy and Valentin, too, just in different ways. And Mikhail, always so warm and lighthearted...but he never talked about why he was still single, too.
I’d never known what I was missing until I met Bronwyn. Now I wanted them to find someone, too.
I looked across at Bronwyn, who was telling the architect how there should be more bathrooms, because there were never enough in nightclubs. My wife. She’d sensibly foregone the designer clothes and heels for this site visit and was in jeans and an old pair of hiking boots...and she’d never looked more beautiful. I drank her in: the soft waves of copper hair that brushed her neck, the gorgeous curves of her hips and ass, the tight denim… I listened as she talked through some ideas with the architect about how to lay out the club, so it felt safer for women, and a glow of pride filled my chest. I’d found the woman I needed by my side. Smart, beautiful, a demon between the sheets and not afraid to stand up to me when she needed to. My little librarian had become the perfect Bratva Queen.