Stolen by the Mob Boss : A Russian Mafia Romance (Bratva Hitman) Nicole Fox (unputdownable books TXT) 📖

without even so much as a warning. He’ll be fine. He’ll continue to live while my parents are burned beyond recognition.

It’s not fair. Even that young, I know it’s not fair. But more than that, I know that I have to stop him. I stop crying, and I look at him like I could kill him. Like I want to hold his neck between my hands until he stops twitching and finally dies.

He sees it too. His mocking expression slowly turns vicious. Like a mind reader, he knows what I’m fantasizing about. He says nothing else. Instead, he whips his hand forward and lunges toward me.

***

I wake with a start, a hand on my neck. I halfway expect to feel bruises like I’ve been grabbed, but I know that it was just a dream. Konstantin isn’t here. He can’t hurt me anymore. Still, it takes a few minutes for my heartrate to catch up with my brain. I lie in bed, trying to regain my composure, my chest heaving as my breathing slows down.

A voice in the dark asks, “Are you okay?”

I turn to see Roman looking at me carefully. For some reason, I’m surprised that he’s still in bed with me. I’ve worked up this silly idea in my head that whenever I go to bed, Roman slips out from under the covers and spends all night planning and plotting and working out. And then, right before I wake up, he climbs back into bed and pretends to be sleeping.

Anything other than that feels foreign. Someone like Roman spending the night with me, sound asleep? It seems too nice to be real.

“Just a bad dream,” I reply.

He reaches forward and brushes a hand over my cheek, his fingers stroking my chin. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I struggle with whether or not I do. On one hand, it feels personal. This isn’t the first time I’ve had a dream like this. It doesn’t happen often, but when it first started, I remember being inconsolable. I remember waking up in sweats, tears streaming down my face. It took an hour to calm down the first time it happened. Since then, I’ve gotten used to it. I left that day without any visible scars, but I’m sure my brain is screwed up. I’ll probably always have these dreams.

My only hope is that they start to lessen once Konstantin is dead. I’d like to think that the only reason they still pop up is because I’m worried he’s out there causing more people this kind of trauma. If I knew he was dead and couldn’t hurt anyone else, I think I might be able to rest a bit easier.

“It was a bad dream. About him.”

“About who?” Then it hits Roman. “Shit. I’m sorry. I’m here if you want to talk more about it.”

This is a side of him I never get to see. When we first met, he didn’t want to hear my side of things. He had no clue about Konstantin’s actions or what he’d done to my family. And to be frank, I’m sure he didn’t care that much either. But spending time with him in this safe house, I’m starting to see him less as the killer devoid of any emotion and more as a victim himself.

Had he never experienced what happened to his parents, he might be different. He might be the security guy that he told me he’d want to be if he weren’t in this business. He might actually have a family. He might have the life so many men dream of.

But that was all taken away from him because of what his uncles did. Because of what his uncles almost got away with.

The idea that I might turn out like Roman scares me, not because I’m afraid of him, but because I can’t imagine myself being able to pull back as well as he does. He’s reserved and alone most of the time. I can’t do that. I still have Nana and Madeline and all my friends at Rudy’s. I can’t just disappear without a trace. I could never do that to any of them.

“We don’t have to,” Roman says quietly.

“It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just ...”

“It’s what?”

“I’m scared, Roman.” I struggle to find the words that I want to use. “I’m scared about tomorrow. What if I like watching him die? What if I like seeing him suffer too much? What if I’ve lost my humanity, like those guys at the diner?”

He stares at me for a long time, just combing his hand through my hair. The action is soothing, but the silence makes me feel anxious. Finally, he says, “You will never be like those men.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I won’t let you.”

I laugh quietly. “You already taught me all the moves I’d need to get away from you. There’s no stopping me now.”

Roman cracks a smile. “You know what I mean.”

I think I do. After our conversation last night, I’m starting to see him as someone that would rather protect people than hurt them. He doesn’t want anyone to end up like him. Or I should say, the person he’s been for so long, because I don’t think he’s unable to be saved. I know there’s a person in there that just wants to know peace. In a perfect world, I might be able to help him rediscover that man and bring him to the surface once again.

But our future isn’t written in stone. I don’t even know what’s going to happen after tomorrow. Will he keep in contact with me, or is this the last night I’ll ever share with him? That thought hurts me more than I ever thought it would. I curl against his larger frame and press my forehead to his chest, breathing in the masculine smell of his body.

He wraps an arm around my lower back and holds me close.

There are times when I wish our circumstances were different. We wouldn’t be meeting