Lies He Told Me - A Mafia Romance

Joy

This is not a Cinderella story.

There’s too much blood for that. Too much darkness, too much pain.

And way too many lies.

That’s how it started—with a lie. Gavril told me he’d protect me. Swore he’d keep me safe from everyone who wanted to hurt me.

He was so, so wrong.

I shouldn’t have listened. The people out in the city, the monsters crawling in the night… those weren’t the ones I had to worry about.

Because in the end, the biggest threat of all…

Came from my fake husband himself.

He comes in my room without a knock. Closes the door behind him.

The chains around my bare arms are cold and tight. I can’t seem to peel my gaze off him, off his bloodstained sleeves, his hungry eyes.

He steps forward, grabs my chain and tugs it so that I’m thrown against him. “Don’t pretend you don’t want this,” he growls.

His overpowering musk fills my nostrils. All I can hear and feel is the twist of our bodies slamming together, his hands ripping all over me, pulling down my pants and panties.

Then he stops short. I look up at him with desperate eyes. “I thought you were here to free me.”

He laughs cruelly. “Who said that?” He steps close again and strokes my cheek with the back of his hand. “I’m only here to reclaim what’s mine.”

He undoes his pants, then yanks me by the chain back to him. Just like that, he’s inside me, owning me.

His one hand is around my neck, the other on my chain, pulling me to him, shoving himself inside me, harder and deeper and faster, until I’m just about screaming with it, shaking with it, and just as I’m about to lose it—

But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s where the story ends. To see how we got there, we have to start much, much earlier.

Gavril

Months Earlier

How did it come to this?

My eyes skip across the crowd of familiar faces. My men. My Bratva. All of us gathered here for what must come next.

The air is stale with foreboding. We sit on the stone seats; the accused man sits on the ornate red chair. A red chair for a red council. Red for blood that will soon be spilled.

The man sprawled in the chair at the center of the circle is smirking like this is all amusing to him. He is a killer of civilians, a breaker of the rules that protect us from the city and the city from us.

He’s also my brother.

Looking at Osip, I can almost forget that fact of our relationship. If I catch him in just the right light, I can see the traces of the innocent boy I once knew. The one who, back in the day, got us into movie theaters without paying—I swear, miss, I had our tickets just a minute ago.

Years later, when the stakes were much higher than a free matinee, that innocence got us deals we shouldn’t have been able to make. “You have my word,” he would say, and he meant it back then. I knew it; he knew it; the men we were dealing with knew it.

They did not know back then what we would become—powerful. Unstoppable. Ruthless.

But then again, who could have looked at Osip in those years and known that? Those wide brown eyes, that oval face with glossy brown hair falling carelessly to his shoulders.

He was innocent then.

Now, he is the farthest thing from it.

In the harsh light glaring from overhead, I see the corners of his full lips quirk with a wry smile. Like this is all some sick joke. Like he might crack up any minute now.

No one else is laughing.

My brother Osip has broken the only law we have: Don’t hurt those not in the game.

A man is dead. His wife defiled. All of the Bratva men gathered around me know what the punishment for those crimes is.

Death.

No exceptions.

I rise from my seat at the head of the table and force my face to remain blank. Walking over to him, I say, “Osip Vaknin, you sit here accused of the murder of an innocent. What do you plead?”

Osip’s laugh booms. “You’re kidding.”

Behind me, Ludmil rises. “You’re going to wish we were, you sick f*ck.”

The grumbling all around echoes the same sentiment.

Before, when my brother was popular within the Bratva, his screwy temper was tolerated. Not now. Osip’s legs are swinging as he cranes his head around. Looking for an ally he won’t find. “Come on. All of this—over some nobody? Some f*ck*n’ chump?”

His gaze has stopped on me, bores into me. I stare back. “You know what the rules are,” I tell him. “You helped make them.”

He’s already shaking his head, looking away, muttering, “You were always the *n*l one, big brother.”

Big brother. The words grind on my soul. My mother’s voice—barely remembered, like something out of a nightmare—echoes in my mind. My oldest memory. “Please, Gavril, you have to look after him. I won’t always be … I’m not going to … Please, Gavril. Promise me.”

I keep my voice steady. “So, you plead guilty?”

Osip lifts his chin. “Yeah, I do. I plead guilty to teaching some piece of sh*t a much-needed lesson in manners.”

Ludmil growls again, “You call beating a man to death in front of his wife—then forcing yourself on her—a lesson in manners?”

Osip rolls his eyes again. “Maybe I went a little overboard. But the guy deserved it. I was just walking along, minding my own business. This guy—this mudak m*th*rf*ck*r—he bumped right into me. Any apology? No. And then when I asked him, real nice, ‘Do I get an apology?’ No, I did not.”

His head dips, his eyes flashing as he recounts it. “When I punched him a few times in the alley, then asked him real nice again? He spat in my face. I kept asking him, I kept …” He shakes his head, like he still can’t quite believe it before looking up, his glare drilling into me. “He never apologized. So you’re saying I should have just taken that disrespect?”

I exhale.

I’ve heard the story already, of course. Days ago, before I assembled the last-minute cleanup. It has not aged well.

All it has done is show the Bratva what I have always known to be Osip’s Achilles heel. The one I knew would screw us over, sooner or later. My brother has always obsessed over respect. Giving it, getting it. If someone crosses the line, then Osip uses that line to strangle them.

“No,” I tell him. “You’re supposed to beat him—maybe even beat him within an inch of his life—but leave him living.”

“And the wife?” Ludmil butts in. He has four older sisters he adores, so is always tetchy with how we treat women. “What did she do? Refuse to s*ck your c*ck after you had beaten her husband?”

Osip’s head is still dipped. From this angle, if you didn’t look close, you could swear he was just some smart-*ss teen who’d just been caught graffitiing something. “She was screaming at me, like I was some monster, some street rat.” A muscle in his jaw tightens. “That she was going to tell the cops, tell anyone who’d listen about what I did. That I’d have to kill her too.” His hands fist, then relax. “I could’ve killed her—but I didn’t.”

“Want a medal?” Ludmil quips.

“Enough,” my lieutenant Radovan grumbles. “We’ve heard his side. Let’s get this over with.”

I twist my head his way. “That’s for me to decide.”

He scowls, but stays shut the f*ck up.

I pace. Down here, the air is musty with stone. A single skylight opens to the air above—right over the red chair. Wind whistles through. It should rain, but it hasn’t yet.

What I should do—must do—is obvious.

He broke the rule. The price for breaking it is his life. There has never been any debate over this.

And yet … he’s my brother. The last I have left of my blood. My only family. My Osip.

We came up together, we built this together, we swore we would rule it together. How can I abandon him to suffer alone? How can I wield the executioner’s ax myself?

That red chair… it always does something to the body of whoever’s sitting on it. Osip, always the strutter, the lax leaner—he has his legs splayed and tapping, but he’s hunched over into himself, like someone’s struck him in the gut.

The chair is curved red wood, inscribed with creatures, tortured humans crawling and screaming all over each other. It is not a pretty sight.

“Does anyone else have anything to say?” I ask the room.

“I was the one who had to help clean up the mess.” Maksim makes a face. On his young features, the scowl is ugly. Out of place. “That wife’s in the psych ward, and we just wasted a good ten grand paying off a variety of professionals to stay quiet. That should speak for itself.”

Over the answering murmurs, Osip says, “What did I tell you idiots already? She wouldn’t say anything. And I’ll pay back the money myself. I wipe my *ss with ten thousand. What is money to me?”

Silence.

“It’s not just about the money,” someone else blurts out.

Osip twists around, scanning the unsympathetic faces for the one who spoke. Not finding him, he rises, then sits back down again. “Forget it. None of you are gonna listen to me. You’re all hopped up with your stupid, righteous rules. Hate to break it to you, but what I did is what we do every other day. You wouldn’t lose sleep over a dead Skull King pledge, would you? And Skull Kings are lower than dirt! So why lose sleep over t