Caring for the Bratva: A Steamy Standalone Instalove Romance Read online

  Contents

  Caring for the 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

  Epilogue

  Extended Epilogue

  Extended Epilogue

  NEWSLETTER

  A MAN WHO KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS

  BRATVA BEAR SHIFTERS

  LAIRDS & LADIES

  RUSSIAN UNDERWORLD

  IRISH WOLF SHIFTERS

  Collaborations

  About the Author

  Caring for the Bratva

  AN OLDER MAN YOUNGER WOMAN ROMANCE

  _______________________

  A MAN WHO KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS, 246

  FLORA FERRARI

  Copyright © 2021 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 and 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.

  Caring for the Bratva

  This is the job opportunity of a lifetime. I’ve been working as a veterinarian’s assistant, but when I get the offer to care one-on-one for a diabetic Dalmatian called Lucky, I leap at the chance, especially when I see how much it pays.

  I’ve got dreams of opening a dog sanctuary of my own one day. I can’t afford to turn down a chance like this.

  But what they don’t tell me is my boss is Dominik Dudnikov, leader of the Bratva.

  Apparently, I’ll rarely see him. He’s a busy man.

  But when I start working, the six and a half foot silver-haired crime boss makes a point of spending time with me. With his dark compelling eyes and his hulking muscular body, he’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of in a man.

  But I know he’d never want me. I’m a curvy twenty year old virgin with no experience at all. He’s a forty-two year old predator with a confident glint in his eyes and women throwing themselves at him every day.

  That’s why I’m so surprised when he claims me in the most savage way imaginable.

  But no sooner has our romance started than it comes under threat.

  A war with the Italians could take everything we are building away. It could end in our deaths. Or worse.

  I try to focus on Lucky, the cute dog who started this all, but it’s impossible not to fall under the spell of the possessive Bratva alpha.

  *Caring for the Bratva is an insta-everything standalone instalove romance with a HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.

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  Chapter One

  Dominik

  “You can’t be serious,” Kesha snarls from beside me.

  My little brother’s lisp might make people think he’s weak or in some way deficient, but that would be a dangerous assumption on their part.

  Kesha is wiry and wears big chunky horn-rimmed glasses, but he’s as tough as they come and everybody knows it. Even with his lisp, Flavio Greco leans back slightly when my little brother turns his rage on him.

  We’re sitting on the balcony section of the club, music pumping from the floor below us, meaning we have to raise our voices to be heard. All around us, Bratva and Italian Mafia sit, bristling and waiting for violence to erupt at any moment.

  I sit back and move my forefinger around the edge of my whiskey glass, observing and waiting.

  “Let’s be reasonable,” Flavio says after a pause.

  He’s probably around my age – forty-two – but he looks older with how he’s abused his body over the years. Too much drinking has made his cheeks sunken and hollow looking. His eyes are glassy. His body is soft, not the hard worked body of a man ready to go to war. But he’s the leader of the Italian mob and, if we want to continue to function in this city, we have to play nice with him.

  “How is it reasonable to arrange a meeting just to tell us you’re going to fuck us raw?” Kesha snarls.

  I hide a smirk with a small sip of whiskey. I rarely drink more than a few sips, unlike Flavio and his men who neck glass after glass as if that’ll give them the courage they so sorely lack. I prefer to keep my wits as sharp as my blade, ready to do damage should the need arise.

  “That’s not what we’re saying,” Flavio whines. “We’re just taking what’s rightfully ours.”

  Kesha grunts out a laugh, echoed by our men surrounding us.

  “You’re strong-arming the union without our permission. You’ve been threatening their families… without our permission. How the fuck did you think you were going to get away with that?”

  Flavio flounders, snapping his gaze to me as though I’m going to offer him assistance. He doesn’t understand that a good leader knows when to remain silent, to let the cards be dealt until it’s time to make a move.

  When he sees I’m not going to rush to his rescue, he turns back to Kesha with a tight grimace. “I didn’t realize we needed your permission to make some money.”

  Kesha laughs again, gruff and menacing. I know the mobsters would love to make fun of his lisp, but they know what would happen if they dared to cross him.

  I’ve taken care of Kesha all my damn life, and that hasn’t changed just because we’re both men.

  He’ll be thirty this year, but I still see him as a kid sometimes, looking to me for guidance and leadership. My protectiveness flares as I scan the faces of the mobsters, searching for any sign of disrespect.

  None of them will hold my gaze for long, preferring to turn their eyes down to the floor like the cowards they are.

  “We’ve split the docks for years,” Kesha says. “How the fuck did you think you could make a play like this without asking us first? And threatening families… what sort of amateur shit is that? You’ll have the Feds breathing down our necks if you keep this shit up. It has to stop.”

  “Is that what you think?” Flavio snaps, turning to me again, his lips watery and trembling from all the liquor he’s sunk during this short meeting.

  I stare at him for a few moments, my eyes hard, my lips flat as a note of rage thrums through me. He doesn’t understand that Kesha is giving him an easy way out, a way to talk himself out of this rather than feeling the full force of the Bratva.

  He thinks I’m going to save him, but he’s dead wrong.

  If it wasn’t for my brother, I’d have beaten this man bloody already.

  “I heard a couple of your boys broke into the union leader’s house and threatened his wife,” I say.

  Flavio’s cheeks sink even more. He opens and closes his mouth like a fish.

  “I… well, yeah, yeah, we did that. But I hardly see how the fuck that’s a problem. We didn’t do
anything. We just sent a message.”

  “A message you didn’t warn us about,” Kesha snaps.

  He fish-mouths some more, and then his features grow hard. Or what passes as hard with a man like this.

  “Listen, there’s a chance to make a boatload of money here. All this traffic coming into the dock, all this activity… if the union calls for a strike, do you know how many people are going to be looking to us to bail them out? Do you know how many businessmen are just itching to give us bribes?”

  I sigh and lean forward, laying my forearms against the table. The table shifts under my weight and Flavio’s resolve shifts under my gaze, as he squirms in his chair and picks at the table with his thumbnail.

  “You’ll make some quick cash in the short term,” I tell him as if I’m speaking to a child. How the fuck hasn’t he thought this through? “But in the long term what do you think will happen? We’re not the only port on the East Coast, Flavio. If word gets out that the mob is bullying people for a few petty bribes, they’ll go somewhere else. That means we lose our cut—our steady income.”

  An eerie calm settles over the men.

  No, not calm…

  It’s more like the silence that falls over a group of antelope when they’re waiting to see if the big cat is going to leap from the brush and charge at them.

  They know better than to fidget and give each other snide looks when I’m the one talking.

  Flavio lets out a shaky sigh.

  “If they try to leave, we’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” I snarl. “You’ll hunt down every multinational corporation that abandons the docks? Do you have any idea how fucking impossible that would be?”

  “Well…”

  He trails off, doing that annoying thing again where he keeps looking around like somebody’s going to save him. I can’t respect a man whose first instinct is to look for someone to swoop in and solve his problems for him.

  I turn my gaze to Luca, his consigliere.

  Luca is younger and quieter than his boss, his pale blue eyes narrowed as he takes in the scene. I can’t tell how he feels about this arrangement. I respect how he keeps himself guarded, and I find myself thinking – not for the first time – that dealing with Luca would be much easier than dealing with Flavio.

  But Flavio has led the mob for two decades and he’s been mostly steady, the sort of person we can rely on even if we don’t like him much.

  “Why do you need this sudden injection of cash?” Kesha asks from beside me. “Do you owe money to someone? What the fuck is going on?”

  I smirk when I see Flavio’s eyes widen a fraction. It looks like my little brother has hit the nail on the head as he so often does.

  “Who do you owe money to, Flavio?” I say, leaning forward, even more, causing him to shrink back in his chair as I loom over him.

  He shakes his head slowly, opening his mouth as though he’s going to speak, but no words come out.

  “Well?” I snarl.

  “That’s my business,” he says.

  “So you do owe money,” Kesha says, seizing on his uncertainty.

  “That’s my business,” he whines.

  “We could’ve helped you,” Kesha goes on, unperturbed. “If you’d come to us and asked, we could’ve loaned you—”

  “You think I’ll take a loan from the Bratva?”

  “Would you rather start a war?” I snarl, fighting down the rage moving through my body.

  He broke into a woman’s house and threatened her with her daughter sleeping in the next room… and all for his pride.

  It’s deranged and sick and twisted and wrong, the sort of lowlife move I’ve been trying to eradicate from this city ever since I took control of the Bratva.

  Flavio blinks rapidly like a cowed animal. “A w-war?”

  “It doesn’t have to come to that,” Kesha says, giving me a look, his eyes seeming even more wide and boyish behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “But you need to stop pressuring the union. You need to leave them the hell alone so business can go on as usual. If you need help with cash, we can—”

  “No,” Flavio snaps. “No, no, no.”

  “To which part?” Kesha says, using his reasonable voice.

  It’s a subtle hint to me to calm down, I know. He can sense the need to hurt this man coursing through me, to punish him for threatening a woman, and then acting like a little bitch when he’s confronted with his crimes.

  He’s just lucky he didn’t hurt anyone. He knows I wouldn’t be able to stop myself then.

  “The loan,” Flavio murmurs.

  “You’ll back off from the union?” Kesha says.

  Flavio grunts, nodding. “Do I have a choice?”

  “Every man has a choice,” I tell him. “You can choose to do as we ask… or you can choose war. I’ll grant it’s not much of a choice, but it’s your decision to make all the same.”

  “I’ll leave the damned union alone,” he grumbles.

  I note Luca’s face pinch tightly for a moment, as though in discomfort, and curiosity moves through me.

  I’m not sure if it’s from Flavio’s whiney tone – making them look weak – or from the fact, he backed off so easily.

  “Good,” I say, nodding, trying my best to summon a smile as I pick up my whiskey glass.

  But smiles have never come easily for me.

  I raise the glass up.

  “To good business,” I say.

  Flavio does the same. All the men follow suit, picking up their glasses and raising them to the strobe-lit air, the pumping lights bouncing off the glasses and moving all around us.

  “To good business,” they echo.

  I sit in the passenger side seat as Kesha guides us away from the city, through the countryside, toward my estate.

  We’ve been working all night, trying to sort out the mess Flavio made, and now my body is clothed in a layer of exhaustion.

  The sun rises over the hills to our left, bruising the sky blood-red.

  “Do you think he’ll stick to his word?” Kesha murmurs.

  “He better.” I sigh. “For his own sake.”

  “Don’t forget you’re interviewing the dog handler when you get back.”

  I groan. “Fuck, that slipped my mind.”

  I was planning on sitting in the sauna for an hour, sweating out the stress of not being able to wring Flavio’s neck like I’d prefer, but Lucky needs a special handler. The poor dog has diabetes and he’s skittish around most people.

  I need somebody with a delicate touch.

  “Did you find somebody who fits the criteria?” I ask.

  Kesha nods. “No family, no friends, no connections. She’s agreed to stay at the estate if you find her suitable for the position. She was working in a veterinary clinic in town, doing a great job by all accounts. If you like her – if Lucky likes her – I think she’ll work fine. You never know…”

  He smirks across at me, and I flip him the bird.

  He doesn’t have to finish the sentence. It’s an old joke of ours, Kesha bantering that one day I’m going to find a woman to puncture my gruff exterior and make me realize what it feels like to care about a woman, to become obsessed with a woman, to need her every waking second of my life.

  But he’s wrong.

  I’ve never felt anything close to what I’d need to fully commit.

  I’ve never even felt an ember.

  I stopped expecting that burning closeness a long, long time ago.

  Somehow I doubt this veterinarian’s assistant is going to be any different.

  Chapter Two

  Daniella

  I sit in the office with my hands in my lap, wringing them together as nerves work their way through my body, making my heart thud in my chest and sweat pour from my body. I try to fight away the waves of sweat – I don’t want my potential new boss to think I can’t handle stress – but the room is warm and my nerves are flaring.

  I look around the cavernous office, at the conference table
and the large oak desk.

  My mind is still reeling from the drive up to the estate, through the tall metal gates and down the long gravel path, past the huge glistening fountain, and up to the tall front door.

  I’ve never been in such an opulent property before, and it’s making me feel poor and inadequate like any second somebody is going to kick the door down and roar at me to get the hell out of here.

  I imagine a security guard aiming his fist at me, his body trembling with rage.

  “You poor pathetic orphan,” I imagine him roaring. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing in here? What is wrong with you? Get back to the slums where you belong.”

  I push that thought down, trying to tell myself I’m so much more than my orphanage origins, that I worked my butt off to get the job at the veterinary clinic, and this… an opportunity to bond one-on-one with an animal, for amazing pay, with room and board included, it’s too good to pass up.

  I’m not naïve.

  I know my possible new employer is either paranoid or involved in some kind of criminal activity. The walls around the estate are tall and imposing, with armed guards manning lookout towers at the corners, watching for any assailants.

  “Dominik Dudnikov,” my boss said to me when she brought me the job opportunity. “He’s not a man you turn down. I think you should go to the interview at the very least.”