Page 66 of Trapped By the Bratva
I glanced at her. “You’re a nurse?”
She shook her head and looked at Alek. “I just had the, um, unfortunate experience of pretending to be one. A long time ago. I did the best I could.”
My God. The life she must have lived.Forced to learn how to stitch people up, then stolen at the altar in an arranged marriage, only to be married elsewhere to a man not of her choosing. She had a tale to tell, and it sounded like the other women did too.
Is that what I want? To join the ranks of danger like that?
I got up and washed my hands while she compressed the wound. Once I was clean, I sat back down and took over. The gash on his arm was long, but not terribly deep, and I gestured for Margie to bring a tray over so I could irrigate the opening.
“Some of those fucking Cartel assholes,” Nik explained to his older brother. “They were tracking me, following me near their territory, and then once they spotted me, they tried to get to me.”
“Why?” Mila asked.
“To get Amy back,” Nik replied, clenching his teeth as I readied to sew him up.
“Get Amyback?” I asked.
“They’re still bitter that we took her out of their warehouse when we busted up a fraction of their trafficking ring.”
“Trafficking?” I gaped at him, then resumed with the stitches.This stuff just keeps getting worse and worse.
“Yes,” Alek answered. “The Ortez Cartel took Amy off the streets, along with other women. They were going to sell them all.”
“Diego already bought Amy,” Nik reminded him as he sat still so I could stitch him up.
“Diego already paid for Amy, but Nik got her out of that situation,” Mila explained.
It sounded like another hero story. Knowing this, it became easier to view the Bratva in a new light. They weren’t just thugs and criminals causing mayhem for the hell of it. They had their own code of conduct, it seemed. They were self-proclaimed lords and governors of their territories and turf, but they weren’t all bad guys. How could they be if they saved women from being trafficked and such?
I didn’t want to know about the illegal activities. I didn’t condone any of that. But… not every person was all good or bad, and I opened my mind to consider that Dmitri and his family weren’t terrible people to stay with.
Once I cleaned up Nik’s wound the best I could, I returned to Dmitri’s room. I knew he was busy with a meeting earlier, but I’d truly lost track of time helping the women with the babies. Poor Amy sure was struggling, but I knew she’d get the hang of it with all the help available here.
As soon as I walked in, I stuck close to the door of his private wing. He was shouting, but not at me.
“It’s bullshit. Letting the fucking Feds have Avilov?”
The tap of his cane on the floor suggested he was pacing, and I prayed he wouldn’t hurt himself, agitated like this.
“I agree,” Ivan replied. “But it’s early yet. We’ll see how this shakes out.”
“No. I don’t care what Alek wants. I need to kill Erik. I need to get the ultimate revenge for what that motherfucker did to me. He cut off two of my fingers, so I’ll remove all of his. He cut me up, beat me with a bat, and tore my arm out of my socket. He took a motherfucking hammer to my hand until it was goddamn pulp. That motherfucker deserves the same in kind. And more.”
I shrank back, ready to turn and exit. The utter anger and fierce malice in his tone scared me. He sounded obsessed, like a maniac, to kill the man who’d tortured him. Hearing him like this made me debate whether I should be wanting someone like this.
Dmitri looked weak and vulnerable, wounded at the moment. But overhearing him like this, he sounded like a ruthless and hard killer.
I’m a fool to want him.
To want to commit to this.
I slunk back out the doors and closed them, wondering how I could be so blind, so driven by lust, to covet a man who could be so wicked and nefarious.
I was falling for him. I knew I was. But this served as a stark wake-up call, a reminder that he wasn’t just any other man who could be my lover. He was a killer, a criminal, so hell-bent on murdering another man that I wasn’t sure if I could relate to him again.
We were different. We were opposites on the best of days. While that antagonism pulled us together, I felt like there might be a chance that we were too fundamentally different to truly belong as a couple.
As a pair of souls matched in life and lust.
