British Bratva: A Russian Mafia Romance (Russian Underworld Book 2) Read online

  CONTENTS

  British Bratva

  NEWSLETTER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Extended Epilogue

  NEWSLETTER

  About the Author

  A MAN WHO KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS

  BRATVA BEAR SHIFTERS

  LAIRDS & LADIES

  RUSSIAN UNDERWORLD

  IRISH WOLF SHIFTERS

  BRITISH BRATVA

  AN OLDER MAN YOUNGER WOMAN ROMANCE

  _______________________

  RUSSIAN UNDERWORLD, 2

  FLORA FERRARI

  Copyright © 2019 by Flora Ferrari.

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The following story contains mature themes, strong language and sexual situations. It is intended for mature readers.

  BRITISH BRATVA

  Maxim

  Staking out the London journalist who's set on exposing the Bratva's money launderer, my mission is to stop him in his tracks. But it's the man's stepdaughter who stops me in mine. The younger woman I fall in love with from a distance is everything I ever wanted and when I find out he's been hurting her, there's nothing I won't do to make her mine.

  Elizabeth

  All I wanted was to find a way to tear down my stepfather's reputation and make a life of my own on the other side, but when a mysterious Russian keeps turning up to save the day, I have to make a choice between the plans I made and the future I never thought I'd have.

  Will I risk everything I thought I ever wanted to give myself body, soul and all of my heart to an older man? Would I join the Russian Mafia to be with him forever?

  *British Bratva is an insta-everything standalone instalove romance with an HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Maxim

  From the moment I opened the encrypted email from the account I used to communicate with my Russian brethren back in Moscow, the reason I wanted Pierce Sutherland dead changed.

  In the dark of the supposedly empty apartment I was camped out in, the screen glowed, backlighting the Cyrillic title of the file I decompressed.

  Over fifty JPEGs spooled out, and I clicked through them. The majority showed me dark, determined eyes and perfectly fine features, looking out with a grim stoicism that a young woman her age should never have known.

  Her name was Elizabeth Harrington and I'd been obsessed with her from the moment I laid eyes on her through the scope of my rifle from the apartment opposite the Chelsea home she shared with her stepfather. My intended target.

  It wasn't her face I was focused on. Each image showed her baring skin I dreamed of seeing someday for myself up close, without the barrier of a lens, but I never wanted to see it like this. In some images the bruises made pebbled patterns along her ribs. Other pictures, I could make out the imprint of an open hand, or the fingers of his fist.

  I heard a growl, before I realized the sound had come from my throat.

  I already knew the arsehole treated his stepdaughter worse than I'd treat a dog, but the photographs Valentin Rozhkov, my handler and second in command to the current Bratva Autoritat, Yakov Timoshenko, had just sent through were worse than I'd expected.

  In that moment, I couldn't have given fewer fucks about why the Russian President wanted him neutralized, or about the future funds of our organization that his investigation had hanging in the balance. Pierce Sutherland was going to look me in the eyes and regret every fly he'd ever swatted, every spider he'd ever crushed. And then I was going to carve him up for touching her and relish every scream.

  "Our hacker pulled them from her computer, Maxim. I think you have what you need to approach her now."

  The clipped Russian accent came clearly through the speaker without a grain of interference, despite the distance between Moscow and London. Unlike Timoshenko, Valentin understood the importance of investing in good kit. He also knew me well enough to know I wasn't going to let what this man had been doing pass.

  "I'm going to kill him with my bare hands. I'm going to rip his head off, and feed his bloody body to the pigs."

  "I thought you might react that way. Focus. Please. I won't ask again. We need his investigation taken apart. Nothing to be published. After that, do as you please. We will need him neutralized I don't care how that happens."

  "When I'm done with him, neutralized won't be the word."

  "Don't get sloppy, Maxim. No mistakes."

  "Maxim Toropov doesn't make mistakes. Goodnight Valentin. I have a dinner to go to."

  I didn't shock easily. I'd been doing wet work for years, straight out of the army after school. I'd honed my killing skills on the battlefield, and when I came back from the army, it was an easy step to tumble into business with some very serious men. I'd seen and done things that would stain my soul black for the rest of eternity. But Sutherland shocked me.

  It took a special kind of bastard to lay a hand on a woman the way he did, for no other reason than his own diminished ego trying for an easy boost. All my kills were necessary, one way or the other, for the good of the Bratva. The world we lived in came with those kind of mortal checks and balances, and I was playing the reaper. It was just a job, but I had no doubt I felt the impact of what I did a thousand times more than Pierce Sutherland.

  The contract on Sutherland should have been just another job. It was. Until it wasn't.

  With the line to Valentin dead, I went over the files again.

  These pictures changed it all. Stretching back years, they showed Elizabeth's progression from girl to woman, along with every bruise she had suffered along the way and in each image her face reflected in the long bedroom mirror I'd watch her stand in front of day after day, was a mask of stony defiance. I wanted to crush the bastard. Rip him limb from limb.

  Over the past three weeks, I'd seen her take these pictures after he cornered her. Up in her room at the top of the house, she'd take out the camera and the laptop she ke
pt hidden, stashed under the floorboards. Now I knew she documented everything he did, each photograph was date stamped and she made short, factual notes that I didn't want to read.

  Tuesday, 9:30pm. Drunk. Backhand.

  It had looked like her escape plan. Something recent. I never dreamt she'd been doing it for years.

  In the three weeks I'd been watching the house, I never saw her cry. I'd see her go up to her bedroom after he'd spewed fury into her face, and stand in front of the mirror and just breathe until her shoulders dropped back down. None of it touched her. The woman had so much self control she awed me. I'd never seen her raise her voice at him once, but when she got up to her room she'd hang a punching bag in the corner and go at it until her knuckles were raw, her t-shirt stuck to her back and her legs too shaky to keep her on her feet.

  I knew that way of keeping demons at bay all too personally. She was strong and capable, why hadn't she left? Why endure all this? I couldn't figure it out.

  Watching her, even from the distance I had to maintain, I saw a woman who might have a chance of understanding who I was in a way nobody else ever had. I'd given up on thinking there would be a woman who'd align herself with the instability and violence that was my day to day. I told myself a woman was a weakness waiting to be exploited, but I wanted Elizabeth Harrington in ways I hadn't wanted anyone for years.

  She was eighteen and vital, against all odds, and I was going to show her what it was like to be protected by a real man. With me in her corner, she'd find out what it was like to know no one was ever going to touch her again, unless she wanted them to. Everything that had led me to this point had been to get me here, to her. And I wasn't going to let her down.

  Pierce Sutherland had to die for all he'd done, and I was going to be the one to end his life and set her free

  Elizabeth

  Cassie folded her arms across her chest as she leaned against the wall around the side of the hotel bar we both worked in, slumping against it with a heavy sigh. She looked old in the dim streetlight. Tired and worn out. I could see the spider web of lines branching out from the corners of her eyes. But she still had a smile for me.

  "Thought that last guy was going to flood the bar with all the drooling he was doing over you. This is why I button my shirt all the way up, kid."

  I rolled my eyes, watching her light up a cigarette. She was old school. One of the last remaining refusers to vape. "Yeah, yeah."

  It didn't bother me who looked. Maybe it should have. Maybe I'd have cared more if I didn't have other things to worry about. But it was just my body. That was a mantra I'd learned pretty well.

  "You're attractive, Elizabeth. They're going to look if you give them something to look at."

  "Maybe I don't care."

  Sometimes, I thought it would be amazing to have some gorgeous guy with a perfect smile touch me and kiss me, and treat me like I was just another pretty girl. That was the part of me that slipped my top button and made sure my shirt fit right, the part of me that thought it would be nice to have a little fun, like all the rest of my classmates.

  But most of the time I didn't think that at all. I thought about my stepdad, because the men here were closer to him in their fancy suits with their Pinot Noir and their Cabernet Sauvignon than any idea of someone who was going to come and whisk me away. At the gym I went to, they were all tough guys who didn't know what to make of me in my baggy clothes and standoffish attitude. There weren't any boys at school. And I’d nearly broken the hand of the last customer who decided it was okay to grab me.

  Cassie was the only reason I didn't get fired on the spot.

  She'd been good to me since I tried to con her into believing I was old enough to serve alcohol when I walked in trying to get a job with a cringe-worthy fake ID and the idiocy of fifteen year olds all over the world.

  I think she saw the desperation in my eyes when no one else did, because I can’t think of another reason why she would have humored me and my cut-glass accent and juvenile snark enough to give me a job in the back washing glasses.

  A year on, she never replaced me with anyone else to stack the dishwasher when I graduated to bar work for real, and two years after that, I was still here. I owed her so much more than she could ever have known.

  "You okay today? You came in pretty rushed."

  There was a sandwich packet in the bag dangling from her fingers. My eyes locked onto it through the thin plastic and I could feel myself start to salivate. My stomach was already trying to digest itself.

  "School stuff. It's nothing."

  I got kept late because I still hadn't put in my UCAS application and the career guidance counselor wouldn't take the bloody hint. At St Paul's Girls everybody went on to university. She said that if I wanted to go on a Gap Year, I should apply anyway and get my place deferred. She said that if trekking around South East Asia was something I was seriously considering then I should share my plan with her so she could help get it up to scratch.

  She made me sit down and write a personal statement, which meant I had no time to eat before the start of my shift.

  It was a miracle I managed not to laugh in her earnest little face.

  But I couldn't tell her I wasn't doing either of those things. It would break all of Pierce's rules. His reputation was the only reason I still had my place at one of the top private schools in the country. He couldn't be seen treating his stepdaughter badly, no matter what went on behind closed doors. Couldn't kick me out of my dead mother's house either. Even though, as he loved to remind me, I had no legal right to it at all. Mum had died without a will. And deep down I knew he had something to do with it.

  "Nothing, huh?"

  "Yeah, Cassie, nothing. Sooner I'm done with it the better."

  "Don't wish your life away, kid."

  Lately, that was all I did.

  She must have noticed how hard I was staring at the sandwich, because she held out half when she opened it up, and I bit into it with precisely zero decorum.

  "Christ Elizabeth. You're supposed to be a lady.

  I grinned at her around a mouthful of BLT. "Which idiot told you that?"

  A lady wouldn't do what I was planning. A lady wouldn't sit in wait and bide her time like some kind of sociopath, playing an act.

  The past three years I'd been as obedient at home as I could stomach to get ahold of whatever I could to take Pierce down. I grit my teeth through his flares of temper, knowing it had to have been one of those to cause Mum's fall. I had a plan to stack up everything I could against him, and I was taking what I could get from him while I got it all together.

  I was nearly there. The only thing holding me back was needing to take my final exams. I wanted to get out with good enough grades to give me a start somewhere on my own. Once they were over, all bets were off.

  Three years, nine months and two days ago, my stepfather got into an argument with my Mum, and that was the last time she ever said anything at all. If it took losing everything I had left, I wasn't going to let him get away with that. Revenge was a long time coming and I was more than ready to take it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Elizabeth

  It was late when I clocked off and the half sandwich I had shoved down my throat on break hadn't done much to make a dent in my appetite. But I had other things on my mind other than the hollowness of my stomach.

  Making sure Cassie didn't see me, I went around to the back of the kitchens after I had said goodbye. When I poked my head around the door of the office she was busy cashing up for the evening, a distinct frown on her face as she jabbed figures into the boxy computer on the paper-strewn desk.

  The door to the alley was open, same as usual, spewing steam and cooking smells out into the air. It was always like a furnace in there. I didn't know how the kitchen staff handled it.

  Right on time, Ben stepped out into the street, wiping the sweat off his forehead and taking out a packet of cigarettes. Refusal to vape ran in the family. He was Cassie's nephew. Her
brother Mitch's son.

  He was an older guy, his body wasn't bad, because he was down at the gym helping his dad out on most of his days off. But there wasn't a thing about Ben that interested me. If he had more backbone, maybe I would have found him remotely attractive, but I just couldn't be interested in a guy who thought it was fine to stay exactly where he was, in the hole he found himself in.

  "Alright Ben."

  He looked up, cigarette between his lips, and he wiped his hand on his slightly grubby whites before he renewed the grip on his lighter and sparked a flame to light it.

  "Alright Lizzie." He squinted at me uneasily through a cloud of exhaled smoke from that first puff and I tried not to wrinkle my nose.

  Ben was somewhere close to thirty, or so I thought. He was a big, beefy guy who'd looked out for me since my first shift here. And just like Cassie and Mitch had, he'd taken me under his wing in a kind of big brother role.

  He fended off the cat calls and whoops the other chefs sometimes started up with in my direction. Not that I needed the help. Out in the bar I didn't cross paths with them so often, but when we did it was pretty clear that I could hold my own. I wasn't like the other waitresses, ready with a laugh and a blush when they tried something.

  And he liked me enough to do what I asked, even when it wasn't remotely sensible. Sometimes I worried he thought I owed him more than friendship.

  "Did you get it?" I asked.

  He gave me a long, hard look and I knew he was thinking of ways to tell me that what I was after wasn't the right course. "Lizzie…"

  "I told you not to call me that." I didn't like the idea of him thinking we were all that close, because I didn't want to lead him on. "It's Elizabeth or Liz if you really must. Did you get it for me?"

  "Begging your pardon for being friendly." He shook his head, and for a minute I regretted being so sharp. The big dumb idiot looked nearly wounded.

  "Ben, please. I'm sorry. Did you get it for me or not?"

  "Course I did. Do anything for you, I would."

  With a heavy sigh, he walked past me, over to the large rectangular wheelie bins and pushed the blue one away from the wall a little. I watched him crouch down and pick up one of those thin sports bags slung on strings. The way it hung taut told me whatever was inside was heavy.