The Final Hour (Volkov Bratva #3)(60)

“Jetmir mistook you for Mishca,” Lauren said, remembering what Mishca had told her.

“I didn’t even know what a Bratva was, but they didn’t believe me. So every day, for five days, they tortured me, and when that didn’t work, they hit Sarah. I would have told them anything they wanted to know, but I had no clue. Then, on the last day, they were tired of my games. They wanted to teach me the errors of my ways by lying to them…so they killed Sarah, right in front of me.”

Klaus was repeatedly flexing his hand, the tendons across the back of it standing out. “But they didn’t have to do that. They didn’t have to kill her if they would have just taken my shirt off. They waited until after Sarah was murdered to look for the most obvious answer.”

He fisted the bottom of his shirt, dragging it up. Up close, the scars looked far worse. Some looked like bite marks, others were long slashes like old knife wounds.

More importantly, he was showing her his stars. Looking at them, Lauren could feel the phantom pain of the needle digging into her skin when she got her own.

“I didn’t have the f*cking stars. Oh, I have them now,” he said when he noticed Lauren looking at them. “I got them as a reminder to who I was. I wanted to look at them for the rest of my life”

Swallowing, Lauren looked away. “What did they do once they figured it out?”

“It was too late by then, they were going to kill me anyway, but before we even got to that point, I begged them to kill me, to end my suffering because in my mind, I was weak. The love of my life was dead across from me and I did nothing to save her.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Klaus,” Lauren said quietly. “You were a victim too.”

“A victim, right. Well after that night, I promised myself I would never be a victim again. Your precious Russian showed up after they had left for a few hours, cut me free. Imagine my f*cking shock when I saw his pale ass staring back at me.”

“They’re why you became a mercenary?”

He opened his mouth, ready to answer, but his phone chimed, cutting him off. Looking at the screen, he climbed to his feet. “Story time will have to wait.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

He wrenched the door open. “Some of us actually work for a living.”

“You know,” Lauren called after him. “If you gave half as much effort in being nice as you put into being an ass, I think you would be a pretty cool guy.”

“And where’s the fun in that?”





Klaus, Mishca, and Lauren were all sitting in a room together, discussing the night with the mercenary when Klaus’ phone chimed. Silence fell over them as they all just looked at the phone, though Lauren’s gaze often flickered to Mishca.

It was the phone call they had been waiting for from Klaus contact, Celt. Mishca had automatically assumed it was Jetmir wanting revenge or Brahim, and that theory was plausible, but Lauren doubted it. She felt as though Jetmir would have wanted to do it up close and personal as opposed to contracting it out. But for this reason, she was also afraid to know who had actually paid for the job. Either way, it was someone close to Mishca, and that was only going to piss him off more.

With a shrug, Klaus finally answered, and during his rather brief conversation, his face never gave anything away, Lauren worried what he was being told. When he hung up, he stared at the phone for a while, tapping his finger against it.

At first, Lauren didn’t understand why he was hesitating, he had always been so blunt in the past, no matter what it was about.

“Celt was able to track the account where the payment came from…” He trailed off, scratching at his facial hair.

“Did you get a name?” Mishca asked.

“Your sister.”

There was that split moment of utter disbelief hanging between them, but Lauren couldn’t—or wouldn’t—believe for a second that Alex would do something like that.

Even Klaus was a bit reluctant to jump to conclusions. “Information could’ve been fixed.”

“And your contact wouldn’t have found that?” Mishca went on, his tone dangerously calm.

It didn’t help that at that moment, they heard Alex’s voice in the living room, raised as she was yelling something at Luka.

“I think you should calm down,” Lauren said as she reached for Mishca’s hand.

But Mishca was already out of his seat, pulling the door open so hard it cracked against the wall, effectively claiming the attention of everyone in their living room. Lauren hurried out after him—Klaus staying exactly where he was—she hoped to calm him before he did something he would later regret.

Alex had a smile on her face at first, one that seemed permanently placed there since she and Lauren had come to terms with what happened before. Slowly, as Mishca stormed towards her, that smile fell.

“What happened when I took you to see Anya?” Mishca asked and Lauren could see the fear in his eyes that no one else could.

She didn’t know much about the politics of the Bratva, but she could take a stab in the dark as to what it would mean if Alex was behind the mercenary that was hired.

Viktor was a testament to that fact.

Mishca wasn’t like Mikhail, he wasn’t as cold-hearted as he pretended to be, but when it came to Lauren, sometimes he failed to see reason. Sometimes, Lauren loved that about him—like when he was going up against the Albanians—but not when it meant he would have to hurt his sister.