Bratva Babysitter: A Russian Mafia Romance (Russian Underworld Book 4) Read online

  CONTENTS

  Bratva Babysitter

  Bratva Babysitter

  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

  Epilogue

  NEWSLETTER

  Extended Epilogue

  A MAN WHO KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS

  BRATVA BEAR SHIFTERS

  LAIRDS & LADIES

  RUSSIAN UNDERWORLD

  About the Author

  BRATVA BABYSITTER

  AN OLDER MAN YOUNGER WOMAN ROMANCE

  _______________________

  RUSSIAN UNDERWORLD, 4

  FLORA FERRARI

  Copyright © 2020 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.

  BRATVA BABYSITTER

  Destiny

  I've always been the girl with a plan, but when my disorganized best friend gets married after a whirlwind romance, I realize my plan hasn't gotten me where I really want to be. My babysitting business is never going to give me a family of my own. On the spur of the moment I take a job in St. Petersburg, Russia, to stir things up. I'm hoping to meet a Russian heartthrob of my own, but Viktor the Vor isn't the kind of older man this virgin had in mind.

  Lifetime criminal, hired by my employer to act as bodyguard, he's the opposite of everything I thought I wanted, but I'm falling for him despite all my plans. Can a man like him ever change his ways to give me the family and become the husband I crave, or am I on track to be a prisoner's wife and mistress to his life of crime? Is there love waiting for me in the snow, or will my heart get frostbitten on the way?

  Viktor

  All I ever wanted was to join the Bratva, and when they make a move to take over St. Petersburg, I take my chance.

  I'm not expecting to have to babysit the babysitter, but when things get out of hand, I'm right there willing to put my life on the line for the younger American woman who stole my heart the moment I set eyes on her. I never thought I'd be a family man, but when it comes to Destiny, it's clear that it's in my fate. When my past choices catch up with me and I have to pick a side, will I able to give her the happily ever after she craves, or will the ice palace of our love tumble down in the face of who we really are?

  *Bratva Babysitter is part of the Russian Underworld series, but can be enjoyed as a standalone. It ends with an HEA and contains no cheating and no cliffhanger.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Viktor

  Once upon a time St. Petersburg had been a different city. Quite literally, although I barely remembered it as Leningrad. My father died in prison the winter before the decision to change its name back to the one it was founded with. There was some vain hope of regaining former glory and washing away the memory of Soviet rule by going back to before it had happened, but the effects and the memories were too long lasting. It was snowing when it became St. Petersburg again, just as it was snowing now. That, at least was always consistent at the same time every year.

  The prison transport dropped me at the railway station - the closest they came to ferrying us back the twenty miles into the center of the city when there was no one to come to meet you at the gates. Just as I had done many times before, I hunched down into my fur-lined coat and shifted my bag higher onto my shoulder. I carried everything I owned with me, and that wasn't much. The tools of my trade were my fists and whatever weapons I could get my hands on. My credentials were written out in ink across my skin in coded references to my crimes, my prison stretches and my kills. These days most men’s tattoos didn't mean what they used to, and I was a rarity, a man who still chose to live by the traditions of the Vor. At least, in St. Petersburg I was.

  The younger guys coming on stream didn't know the meaning of a tough time. I saw the way they frowned at my tattoos as though they thought they were better than me somehow. Maybe they were wrong, maybe they were right. I didn't care, so long as I still got work and I still had brothers to look out for me. I was a traditionalist, the life I knew was the life my father had taught me. I didn't need any more than that to guarantee a living. It was the only way I'd known since I was a boy.

  Staring off down the empty tracks, the cold was starting to seep up through the soles of my boots from the concrete of the platform, numbing my toes, but after so long without fresh air, it was far better to be outside. To be able to look up and see the night sky and feel the kiss of the frozen snowflakes on my skin felt like some kind of miracle. And at the same time, I had an unbalanced feeling, like I didn't quite know which way was up out here, that I always had after coming out of a stretch inside.

  The world was large and unpredictable, and yet again I had to figure out which parts had changed and which allegiances held true. The world never stayed still and waited, but then I'd grown used to that.

  Someone had liberated my gloves, but I couldn't complain so much, when my wallet was fatter than it had been when I'd gone in, from the favors I'd worked out with my fists while I was inside.

  I breathed in the frozen air, silently reciting the address I'd been given as I traced the outline of the folded piece of paper in my pocket. The bloodstain on it had dried by now and the paper was crusty. But even if the ink had leached, my destination was burned into my memory.

  Power had shifted when the city of Leningrad disappeared overnight. But not for the way we hoped. Perestroika left openings for all the opportunists to worm their way in. In the wake of Glasnost, St Petersburg became a gutter where all the low life collected once the oligarchs took what they wanted. If my mother had had any hopes of me following another way of life, she kept them to herself. How I ended up was inevitable and I wouldn't have had it any other way. There was honor in the choices I made and the deeds I did. I had more honor than most of the men I knew put together.

  I had to, when all I had in life was the reputation of my father, and the ancient list of contacts he'd established that were rapidly becoming outdated and their way of life extinct. I was drawn in to the life of a Vor before I fully understood what that even meant. At thirty-five, I lived and breathed it. One of the last remaining men in this city who would always do what was necessary. But we were a dying, under appreciated breed.

  I had no complaint about my chosen path, but that Russia's center of crime didn't even have a core of criminality to be proud of irked me. After all this time, I was viewed by those I worked for as nothing more than a glorified thug. Muscle for hire, an attack dog, ready to take the fall whenever it was necessary. And I was tired of doing business with men who only looked out for themselves.

  The last six months in prison were the last I wanted to do under the employ of people with no sense of what loyalty meant. Kresty-2 was full of the same corruption that the old, creaking original Kresty had been, but at least there had been some kind of honesty in the overcrowding and the lack of heating of the old cross-shaped buildings. Everyone knew what they were getting. The new super prison was a failed PR exercise that no one would admit had gone wrong. A Potemkin village, in every sense.

  The doctors who were supposed to be on hand got fat sitting on their asses doing nothing all day long. The cells were over occupancy. The basement flooded, letting the smell of raw sewage seep up through the floors.

  Promised kitchen equipment stayed with the few favored individuals, protected by people on the outside who had paid extortionate amounts of money to the guards to ensure they had a softer ride. Food, and hot water, were just as sparse in any other prison. But what did they care? They could listen in on every whispered word and watch us shiver from three different camera angles.

  None of that was unusual. Bribery was a side of Russia that I knew well. But I had been sold out one too many times by Stanislav Pavelenko's people and I was done with it. They had no respect for what I did for them, and no sense that they should pro
tect their own.

  So I didn't plan to side with them any longer. Now was the time to make my move, because there wasn't going to be another chance.

  St Petersburg, as far as I was concerned, belonged to a more worthy leader. One who understood the code that I tried to live by, and that the city itself deserved more respect. From what I'd heard on the inside, change was coming. And I wanted to be part of it.

  The train hissed into the station with a rising cloud of steam condensing in the air and I yanked a carriage door open. My breath became less visible as I stepped onto the train and I was glad of the warmth of the carriage, even if not for the stares that followed me as I made my way along the rows of seats.

  I settled into an empty pair and tossed my bag onto the luggage rack above my head. My things never went out of my sight unless I could be certain they were secure. That was a rule I made years ago and sticking to it meant I had more in my possession than I otherwise might have.

  It was late, but after being detained so long, I was eager for action and sitting still even for the short duration of the journey brought out the urge to move even more than it usually would.

  When the train pulled into the city, they would expect me back at my usual haunts. Usually I would check in with Pavelenko's men as soon as I made it back to the city, but my last interaction in the cells had made that an impossibility.

  There had been a disagreement over a place at the dining table and I was seasoned enough to know how to do damage to a man without being observed. My attacker was slower than I was. The guards saw nothing, despite the cameras they had pointed at every angle of the cells. Which was just as well, because the man was a suka whore, just like all the rest of them were turning into.

  They'd sell their best friend out to a guard for nothing more than extra potatoes on their dinner plate.

  Once upon a time, inside had been a place I felt I belonged, a place I knew how to exist as well, if not better, than I did on the outside. But it was different now, I'd had to learn to keep my head down, to play by different rules. But I was never afraid of them the way they seemed to think I should be, just because they were Pavelenko's favored. I had seen things, experienced prisons that made Kresty-2 seem like a theme park.

  The tracks sparked as we went over the points, and the arc of light momentarily illuminated the dark buildings we were rolling past, catching my attention. The major buildings were all lit up, but some of the streets were still dark. Sometimes the balanced lines of the low rise rooftops with the domes of the cathedrals rising above them and the wide path of the Neva forging its way between them brought me calm. Other times, their balance and perfect symmetry made me feel like some kind of savage imposter from the time before the city was built as a triumph over the swamp land the area once was. Maybe I was made for that rougher existence rather than the gilded elegance of all of it, but I loved it. I wouldn't have lived anywhere else in the world.

  Especially not now. Exciting times were coming. There were murmurs of Valentin Rozhkov, the second in command of the Moscow Bratva, buying property. That tied in with another rumor I had heard, a rumor that things were going to change again in St Petersburg. That he was going to make a move to push out the interlopers who had claimed the city for themselves. That it was going to happen very soon.

  I planned to be on his side when the shit hit the fan rather than Pavelenko's, and the only way to do that was to gain his trust. And to do that, I had to show him how valuable I could be.

  When the train pulled into St Petersburg-Glavny, I pulled the address of the house the Moscow Bratva had purchased out of my pocket and turned my coat collar up against the cold, shouldering my bag again.

  Turning up on their doorstep in the middle of the night with nowhere else to go was not part of my plan, but as the snow started to settle and my boots tracked footprints through them, I knew that I couldn't spend the night outside. The Metro was going to have to be my salvation, and I would sort out whatever happened next in the morning.

  Destiny

  I was the girl with a plan, never the one to take a risk. As far as I could remember it had always been that way. I had everything mapped out because I had to. Getting on a plane to St Petersburg was the first thing I'd done since adolescence that was even close to being classed as crazy.

  And as much as I hated to admit it, I'd only done it because of my best friend. And I really was crazy, thinking that taking a leaf out of Chloe's book was any kind of good idea. I loved her to bits, but she was the kind of person who was okay falling into whatever life threw at her. She got through life bouncing from one thing to the next without a real plan for any of it, and that was absolutely not me.

  But then, spontaneity and a total lack of planning had ended up leading her straight to Roman, her husband, and I could pretend to myself all I liked that the two of them getting together as quickly as they had was a bad idea, but the truth was, they were amazing together and it was the happiest I'd seen her in a long while. I hated to even think it, but I was jealous. For so many reasons.

  She'd never been more successful than me. And sure, technically she still wasn't. I had my own business that I'd grown from the ground up. But she was married, with a family of her own and I was glad for her, I really was. But what did I have, aside from my shiny business cards? A string of other people's babies I fell in love with while they needed my babysitting services in Miami and my Gran barely recognizing who I was any longer.

  I'd always wanted to be a mother and she was right, I wasn't getting to that goal any faster staying exactly where I'd grown up, seeing the same people week in week out, keeping everything stable and the same.

  Like Chloe said, the only men I ever met were married fathers to newborns. I didn't go out in the evenings because I was always working. Weekends were not my time off. And I didn't know if that was really the life I wanted any longer. Seeing Chloe get married when I'd always thought it would be me to walk down the aisle first had really shaken me. Something had to change. I had to get out of my comfort zone.

  It was just that St Petersburg, Russia, was a really long way outside it. What if accepting the offer to come and spend a year looking after Maxim and Elizabeth's baby Alexei was a gigantic mistake? How was I going to get by when I could only just about string a few sentences together in Russian?

  I had a knot of dread settling into the pit of my stomach as we started our descent and my ears began to get fuzzy and full with the change of pressure. It was way too late to change my mind now.

  Out of the window I couldn't see much apart from the pale grey sky and then gradually I got glimpses of the pale grey snow-dusted, landscape of the ground below getting bigger and bigger as we came in toward the landing strip. When we broke through the low cloud barrier, I had an unobstructed view of the snaking river that wound toward the Baltic Sea we had just flown over, across the open, snow-dusted landscape that was getting bigger and bigger as we descended and the low-rise, dollhouse city

  It took me a few minutes to realize it had to be the River Neva, because it was all painted white and frozen solid. How cold was it down there? Suddenly I was thinking that the clothes I'd packed really weren't going to do much when it came to keeping me warm. Miami never got snow. I'd barely even seen it before, except on TV. My first glimpse of the city I was going to spend the next year in - the first place I'd ever been outside of the States - was like something out of a postcard, or one of those swirling snow domes filled with glitter.

  I only hoped that the romance of the gilded domes and spires and the sprawling, historic buildings weren't just some kind of escapist fantasy. Twenty-two was a funny age to go off chasing fairytales and looking for one in the world I was about to step into when I got off the plane was beyond naive.

  That was one thing I'd never been. After my parents died when I was twelve and I went to live with my grandma, it was my way of making sure I was in control. My Gran didn't need me to be a burden, so I made sure I wasn't one. Ever. It was as simple as that.

  I'd known I had to take on more responsibility. So I did.

  I started out putting fliers around the neighborhood and babysitting in the evenings after school and on the weekends, and then I started to expand. I got my childcare qualifications, baby first aid. I got Mickey in computer class to set me up with a website. I got business cards.