Sold To The Bratva Boss - Flora Ferrari

Chapter One

Artem

I sit in the back of the limousine with my second in command, Gavrie, feeling the cool ache from my gym workout move up and down my body. My steel colored suit hugs closely to my body and I feel my biceps tightening, squeezing, with the punishment I put them through earlier today.

Working out my body keeps my mind ready and alert, allows me to relax enough to respond calmly to any situation I need to. Otherwise, there’s this fucking inferno inside of me, raging all the time, this swirling mass of fire and passion and rage that I can’t seem to quiet.

Maybe my childhood, lingering.

Those dark pits, those indignations, and all that blood …

I sigh and push those thoughts away, or try to.

Lately, I’ve been thinking more about finding a woman, finding somebody with whom I can share my vast empire. But of course the search has been in vain, as it has always been.

I’ll know – just know, deep down, without thought – when I see her.

And I’ve yet to see a woman who even comes close.

Gavrie arches an eyebrow. “All good, boss?”

I nod and glance out of the window. We’re on the outskirts of the city, approaching a club that sits at the end of a row of buildings. Spotlights cut the sky and a red carpet has been laid out in front, with suited men already walking up the carpet and into the building.

Mafiosi, Triads, Cartel and Yakuza, all of them gathering here to do business.

And of course me, the leader of the Bratva.

A slave auction is neutral ground. Emilio told me so over the phone, sounding very proud of himself.

He doesn’t know about my past, of course.

Nobody does.

I feel a twisting stab in my gut when I think about walking into that building, but Gavrie assures me that smoothing things over with Emilio is of vital importance to our business. And, as always, business comes first.

Gavrie leans forward, flashing his gold watch. He’s a few years younger than me at thirty-eight, with a shaved head dotted here and there with Russian tattoos, his body thick and stocky, if not muscular.

He wears a deep blue suit, and his eyes seem magnified in his frameless spectacles.

“These men think this makes them strong,” I murmur. “Selling slaves, buying slaves. Kidnapping women. They think it gives them power. But if you stripped them of their men and their weapons, if they ran into the wrong man in a dark alley late at night and all they had was their violence and their grit to save them, how tough do you think they’d be?”

Gavrie frowns, perhaps detecting the tremor in my voice. But then the limousine pulls up and a woman in a golden bikini opens our door, her tassels shaking as she waves a hand.

These, at least, are willing, paid staff members. I made sure of that. Every single woman working here will be paid a fair wage and be allowed to go home without threat to her life or her dignity. The women inside, though, that’s a different matter.

“Sacred ground,” Gavrie assured me, after Emilio had said his piece. “We can’t afford a war with the Italians.”

“It’s a way to assert his dominance, or his pathetic attempt, at least,” I growl. “He thinks if he can drag me here, he can get me to do anything. It’ll be a very bad day for him when he finds out just how wrong he is.”

We walk up the red carpet together.

I pull my shoulders back and hold my head high, and stride directly into the building and toward the upper balcony, where we’re going to be seated for the auction.

I don’t stop to shake the hands of the other crime syndicates, because otherwise my temper might snap, my taut, tight rage might be set free and I’ll crush a jaw, break a skull, shatter a collarbone when I think about the capricious sadism some of these bastards indulge in.

Emilio stands up from the table when I push aside the curtain separating us from the hallway. Three of his men stand against the wall, silent, watching.

Emilio himself is a skinny, beanpole-built man with a sharp nose and a black whiskery mustache. He leans on a silver pommeled cane, the head a carved fist. He must be around twenty-five, if that, the sort of man who’d kill his father to take over the organization …

But those are just rumors.

“Artem, my friend,” he beams, offering me the hand not clutched around the fist