Thief (Boston Underworld #5)(61)

But upon opening it, I find that I am wrong. It isn’t just paper. There are photographs too. Photographs I thought I would want to see, but I was mistaken. The grainy stills are from a surveillance video. And before I allow my eyes to settle on the main subject, I examine every detail of the room. A basement. A dirty sofa. A bucket. These living conditions aren’t fit for an animal, let alone a woman.

Yet there she is. My mother. Strung out and naked.

I know I shouldn’t, but I look at her face. Vacant eyes and hollow features are all that remain. An empty, sagging sack of skin and bones that a soul has long since abandoned. When I reach out to touch her, I feel her anguish in every cavernous inch of my body. This was the same woman who tucked me in at night and kissed me on the forehead. The mother who sang sweet lullabies and read lively bedtime stories.

These memories are all I have of her, and I loathe myself for being too young to stop this. I want to go back and fix it. I want to go back and murder every man who ever touched her. It’s too late to save her. The only thing I can do for her now is rain down blood and fire on the animals who did this to her.

The report Alexei compiled is more detailed than I could have imagined. Everything is categorized, and the work has already been done for me. Dates, times, and the names of everyone who participated.

But it is the first on the list that leaves a permanent scar on my soul. A confirmation of what I’ve always suspected to be true.

Sergei.

My own father is responsible for this.

His ego has always been the most cowardly thing about him. And as the story goes, when he suspected my mother had betrayed him with one of his own men, he offered her as a gift to Manuel Valentini. But she was not a gift. She was a human sacrifice. A bonus to sweeten a gun deal between Manuel and my father.

He gave her away like she was a piece of garbage. Knowing the fate he delivered her to, he allowed her to be beaten and used by Manuel and his men for years. Yet every night, he would come to my room to watch me cry over her loss, insisting she had abandoned me.

I pour another drink and close my eyes. The images haunt me, and I know they’ll never go away. I have been a fool. Allowing my dick to lead me, ignoring the cause I believed in the most. For months, their hearts have continued to beat. They have continued to breathe the air of this earth, when they should have been rotting in the ground already.

It isn’t even the worst of it. That part is still yet to be read. And Alexei has not spared a single gruesome detail.

My mother left this world fighting. Fighting to escape. She slashed Manuel Valentini’s dick with a shard of broken mirror.

And then he dissolved her in an acid bath.





Crash.

My body jerks upright. Sleep blurs my vision, and I blink rapidly as I look around the room. My skin is clammy, and my heart is racing. Something isn’t right, and my first instinct is to hide.

I scramble from the bed, but crippling pain shoots through my calf and paralyzes my leg. Hostage to the cramp, I have little choice but to wait it out.

Explosive noises reverberate down the hall. Glass shattering. Wood splintering. More animal than man, the grunting could only be coming from Nikolai.

A new fear blossoms inside me. Someone is here. Someone is attacking him.

He needs me.

I stumble down the hall, my leg dragging half useless behind me. I’m in nothing more than a nightdress, and I don’t know how to save him, but I know I have to try.

Howls of agony erupt from the open doorway. In the short distance, my mind conjures up so many different scenarios. But when I reach the threshold, nothing could prepare me for the reality.

He is shirtless. Bloody. Chest heaving as he sifts through an open storage container. A cigarette still hangs from his mouth, and there’s an empty bottle of whiskey beside him. One by one, he removes glass framed photos, only to smash them to bits a moment later.

Murmured words rumble from his chest as he identifies the faces in the frames. Affection one minute, and hatred the next. And I think that an intruder would have been easier to handle.

There is no manual for a situation like this. He’s hurting, and I want to help him, but I just don’t know how. Knowing better than to approach a wounded animal, I call out to him from the door.

“Nika.”

He freezes, and a chill moves over me. His head turns so slowly in my direction that it’s like watching a horror movie.

“You,” he sneers.

Frigid blue eyes carve into my face, anesthetizing my heart.

So much hate. I have never witnessed so much hate. And every fragment is directed at me. I have known Nikolai to be many things, but never this. Never this monster who looks so much like my own father right now.

I already know it’s too late, but I run anyway.

The footfalls behind me are steady and thunderous, and before I can put any real distance between us, he has me by the hair. He yanks me back and pins me to the wall, and I cower before him, crumpling into myself. If any love for me ever existed in him, it’s gone now.

“Please, Nika—”

Like a snake, his hand lashes out to wrap around my throat. “You don’t deserve to live.”

He’s drunk. I can smell the whiskey on his breath, and I can see it in his bloodshot eyes. But it doesn’t lessen the blow of his words. It doesn’t make me feel any less dead inside. He made me fall in love with him, only to destroy me.