Chapter 57: Lukiyan

L.A., California, Present Day...

In one swift move, I drive my knife into Father Pedro’s heart.

His eyes snap wide, then cling to my ruthless gaze as if he can’t believe he’s actually going to meet his maker.

His last breath comes out in a whoosh, along with the gurgling sound of blood pouring from his heart. As he crosses over to the other side, the light of the living leaves his eyes. Seconds later, his graying head flops back against the leatherback chair, and his body goes limp.

Behind him is a stained glass featuring Jesus and his twelve, but I don’t believe any of them will be welcoming Father Pedro through Heaven’s gates.

I wouldn’t.

The same way I never gave him a chance to beg for his life. I wasn’t going to give him an opportunity most don’t get.

Just like a shadow, I’d slipped in through the church’s narrow hallway leading into his office. Then, without anyone noticing, I killed the guards and came in here to finish the job my Pakhan—the Yurkov’s fearsome leader—entrusted to me.

When I twist the knife in Father Pedro’s heart, I take pleasure in killing him that much more, issuing exactly what he deserves for his evil extracurricular activities.

I’m a Vor. I was raised in the Bratva, so I know no other way than an eye for an eye and a life for a life. Especially when you’re foolish enough to play with the devil.

So, the good father here had to pay with his life for using the money we donated to the church to run his human trafficking ring. His specialty was babies and children under ten, but his personal favorite was their organs.

He won’t be doing that anymore.

I’m not a good man by any means. And I’m nobody’s savior. I was certain I heard the angels scream the moment I stepped on God’s doorstep and my unhallowed feet walked through the church.

I probably deserve a torturous death for all I’ve done, but at least I’m not Father Pedro.

He’s one less fucker for the world to worry about now.

The bonus in ending him is that my need to kill has been satisfied tonight.

Killing bastards like him is all I can do to tamp down the rage roiling within me. Until I dole out my revenge on the motherfucker who killed my sister, killing is all I can do.

As the dark red blood runs from Father Pedro’s deceiving heart, I focus on the color. On how the deep red is so rich and pure, alive but not. Not anymore.

I haven’t been able to look at blood and see it as just blood since that fateful night six months ago when I found my sister’s body on the floor of her bedroom, surrounded by red rose petals that looked like they were floating in her blood.

Now I see the blood, and while the morbid image of my sister clings to my mind, the memory of the woman I should have long forgotten comes to me too.

My nameless beauty’s lips were blood red and shaped like a beating heart.

The memory of our wild night in Brazil still haunts me.

All I have to do is think of her, and I remember warm brown hair sprawled out in long graceful waves against my sheets as I drove into her sweet cunt.

I remember her petite, willowy frame, criticized by large, fully-rounded breasts and those piercing, amber-colored eyes which spoke of mystery, secrecy, and desperation.

I only went to Brazil to forget.

I needed the break after hunting for Melissa’s killer for six months and finding nothing but shit.

My wild encounter with the dark-haired beauty wasn’t supposed to happen. Then again, I went to the club that night looking for pussy, and I always get what I want.

She was different to any other woman I’ve been with, and I haven’t been able to get her out of my head or the taste of her sweet pussy out of my mouth.

Like a masochist, I keep holding on to the memory.

It’s a rare day when a soulless creature like me finds a distraction in a woman when he’s had so many others.

Maybe it was because I wasn’t done with her yet.

Or maybe it was because she was a virgin, and I was the first man to claim every hole in her body and make her mine.

Even to a dark soul like me, there’s something meaningful about being the first to claim a woman’s virginity.

It’s been years since I’ve fucked a virgin, but never one like her. She hooked me from the moment I saw her on the dance floor and decided she was going to be mine for the night.

When I took her back to the beach house I always rent when I need one of my Brazilian getaways, I knew she must have made some impression on me.

No matter which country I’m in, I never take women home. Yet when I saw her, there was no question about what I was going to do with her.

It pisses me off that I don’t know who she is, where she came from, or where she went. I would have looked for her, but I thought I owed her the courtesy of not knowing me.

Certainly, if she could see me now, she would have listened to those instincts of hers that were telling her I’m dangerous.

I could see it in her eyes that she knew she shouldn’t be anywhere near a fiend like me, but she still offered herself to me on a decadent platter. And fuck, did she ever taste sweeter than any fruit I’ve ever had.

Now she’s just a memory, and I’m back in L.A.

Back on my mission of death.

Back to being Lukiyan Romanechka, the Obshchak of the Yurkov Bratva. I’m the guy in charge of overseeing the money that comes into the organization and our security—which is why I’m here with Father Pedro.

I inherited the role from my adopted father, Dmitri Kozlov. He and his wife died three years ago in a head-on collision.

My father took care of the enforcers—the assassins—in the Brotherhood, and now I do the same.

I kill for a living.

I pull my knife out of Father Pedro’s heart, grab a tissue from the box on the side, and wipe off the blood.

I’m about to place the knife back in its sheath when my phone starts vibrating in my back pocket.

There’s only one person who would call me while I’m on the job.

I reach for the phone and see I’m right.

“Hello, Pakhan.” I press the phone to my ear. “Mission accomplished.”

He knows I would have done my job, but I tell him anyway, to cover myself.

Lucca Dyshekov has always been a friend to me, even before he became the Pakhan a few years back. However, the last thing I want to do is look weak to those I need to show strength. Or seem uninterested in my job when I’m the newest member of the elite group in our Brotherhood.

It goes without saying that I haven’t been myself since Melissa’s death, and everyone knows it. Everyone also knows that the only thing on my mind is finding her killer.

They’ve been helping me with all the resources at our fingertips, but months ago, the trail ran cold. Knowing so crippled me, placing me in that state of wretched weakness I haven’t experienced since I was a child.

“Good job,” Lucca says. “I need you to come to the house. We found a lead on Judas Kane.”

The moment he says that name, my interest piques, rocketing through the sky.

Judas Kane—my sister’s killer.

They finally found a lead on him.

“I’m on my way.”

I arrive at Lucca’s enormous manor house in record time after riding my motorcycle as if I had the infernal flames of hell on my ass.

I take the sweeping marble stairs leading to his office and find him inside with Aleksei, his second-in-command, and Sovietnik. Both are sitting at the large mahogany desk by the window.

Behind them is an oil painting depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I’ve always found that painting fitting to who we are and what we do. I feel it now as I approach them.

This is us together—the three members that form the elite. Usually, when we meet here, we talk business. Tonight we’ll be plotting death.

“Hey,” Lucca greets me as I take my seat opposite Aleksei.

“Hi, what did you find?”

“Something solid, but it’s not going to be easy.” Lucca straightens with a tense look on his face, tucking a lock of his shoulder-length hair behind his ear.

Aleksei clenches his jaw, and I know from the strained look in his eyes that although we have a lead, whatever they have to tell me isn’t going to be something I want to hear.

It’s probably more shit about Melissa to taint her image.

“Judas is working with the Camorra Syndicate,” Lucca says.

Camorra Syndicate? No wonder we couldn’t find him. I suspected links to some big organization. I was right.

The Camorra Syndicate is run by Tobias Rivera. He has branches here in the States and Europe the same way we do but he’s based in Italy. Unlike the Bratva, they’re a smaller entity with massive power and the right connections to keep them that way.

“Where is he?” I ball my fist.

“We don’t know that part yet,” Lucca answers. “However, I’m hoping what we’ve found will help us locate him.”

“I managed to intercept a remote call while tracking a black-market dealer in Uzbekistan. I suspected the guy was linked to Judas because of the items he was selling,” Aleksei explains. Judas Kane is an assassin who’s been linked to some of the world’s deadliest criminals and organizations. He’s also a black-market dealer, so anything black-market related would be right up his alley. “It turns out this guy and Judas both work with Emilio Vittorio.”

I’ve heard of him. Emilio is Tobias Rivera’s cousin and the second seat clan member on the Camorra Syndicate’s council.

He currently lives in New York and makes his fortune from his casinos and property across the globe. There isn’t a country on this earth that doesn’t have some sort of business owned by that man.

The motherfucker also dabbles in the sex trade.

Cautiousness invades Lucca’s expression when I look back at him.

“When we looked into things further, we realized Melissa met Judas through Emilio,” Lucca explains. “She worked for him at the L.A. branch of his escort service called Escape.”

My blood heats with the rage I’m trying to control. I didn’t know Emilio owned Escape.

Things are starting to make sense now.

After Melissa died I found out she was on hardcore drugs and worked as an escort. I just didn’t know it was this bad.

The girls who work at Escape get a fuck load of money to be whatever they are paid to be because they cater for men with dark, twisted tastes.

The girls are the desperate kind who will sell their souls if they need to. It grieves me that my sister became that way and never thought she could come to me for help.

While I thought she was doing well in school and preparing for college, she was doing shit like this to deal with the grief she felt over losing our parents.

Lucca slides a sheet of paper over to me.

It’s a V.I.P client list, with a listing of the girls they were each allocated. Circled in the center is the fake name Melissa used—Jennifer Carlton. Next to her name is her client’s - Judas Kane.

As everything falls into place in my mind, I clench my jaw and narrow my eyes. My heart gallops frantically in my chest when I think of how that bastard must have degraded my sweet sister.

I know she was to blame for her actions, but when Emilio hired her, she would have been a minor in a vulnerable state who couldn’t help herself.

She was barely eighteen when she died.

That makes Emilio just as guilty as Judas for her death.

“Emilio is arranging a job with Judas,” Lucca continues. “We don’t know the details of that job or when they’ll be meeting, only that he’ll be in New York at some point in the next few weeks.”

“So I’ll go to New York and find him,” I cut in.

Lucca eyes me firmly, hardening his stare “You know as well as I do that if it were as simple as that, we’d already be there. The moment you breathe a word to anyone about him, that’s it. Your chance of finding him will disappear. He already knows you’re looking for him. He practically invited you to look.”

“I know.”

The whole thing has been a game to that motherfucker.

The roses scattered around Melissa’s body, along with the knife wounds in her head, heart, and stomach, were the only clues of what happened to her.

And also, who did it.

That’s his style, like some freaking calling card.

He wanted those she left behind to know it was he who killed her. And know that even with all the strength of the men in the Bratva and our allies combined, it would take a miracle to find him.

Judas Kane is notorious among the world’s most dangerous because he can become a ghost when he needs to be. He can choose when to exist and when to fade away.

That doesn’t matter to me because I’m going to find him no matter how long it takes, and he’ll die at my hands the same way he killed my sister.

“I have an idea,” Lucca says. “One that might be tricky but worth a shot.”

“What is it?” I’ll do anything.

“Emilio has a job opening for a new guard on his personal security team. You could do it.” He raises his brows. “Go in and get close to him.”

I keep my gaze trained on him, seeing where he’s taking this idea. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gone undercover. This is just the first time it would truly matter.

“Get close and find out when he’ll be meeting Judas,” I fill in, and he nods.

“No one can trace your links to us, or our allies. That will be your advantage.”

It will.

Although Melissa took our adopted parents family name, I kept Romanechka to remember my birth mother. Everyone respected that because at twelve-years-old, I was an older child when the Kozlovs’ adopted me. It would have been weird for me to suddenly change my name, especially when I didn’t want to. It was fine for Melissa because she was only five-years-old.

Years later, as I took on my duties in the Bratva, being Lukiyan Romanechka worked to my advantage as there has never been anything to link me to the organization.

Try to look me up, and all you’ll find are the details of a man with a troubled past and a history of violence. Nothing about the mafia, though.

People call me the Shadow because I can blend in and be whoever I want to be.

“Take your guards,” Lucca continues. “Aleksei will also go with you as backup, and we can set things up from here to move in when you need us.”

“Thank you.”

“No need to thank me. Vengeance was always going to be ours. Your father was good to me right from when I was a boy. He trained me, like many others, and was like a father to me.”

That’s my father all over—the man who adopted two orphans siblings because he wanted to keep us together.

He was as ruthless as he needed to be, but he had the right amount of heart that allowed him to stay in touch with humanity.

Aleksei moves the file in front of him over to me. “This is what I have so far on Emilio.”

I open the file and take note of the picture of Emilio on the front page.

With his tousled salt-and-pepper hair and ghostly pale skin, he looks like a cross between a pirate lord and a vampire. He’s in his mid-fifties but looks older because of the scars marring the left side of his face, and one blinding his right eye, which is just a ball of grayish white. It makes him look like the embodiment of evil itself.

I flip the page and my hand instantly stills, frozen in shock, when my gaze lands on the image of the beautiful brown-haired woman with amber eyes I spent the night with in Brazil.

For a moment, my mind slips, and I wonder if I’ve fallen into some kind of twisted dream where I’ve conjured her from my thoughts.

I’m tempted to believe I’m seeing things, but I know I’m not.

It’s her.

“Who is she to him?” I rest a thumb on the side of her face, remembering the silky feel of her smooth, creamy skin.

“His daughter, Persephone.”

Daughter?

What a coincidence of shit.

And Persephone?

That’s her actual name? Like the mythical goddess.

I guess that would make me her Hades because I’m staring down at her picture, finally knowing who she is, and I still feel like I’m not done with her yet.

“I didn’t know he had a daughter.” I tap the picture then quickly make a fist.

“Only a few people outside family and friends know,” Aleksei explains. “I gathered information of all the people you need to be aware of. Obviously, she’s the most important.”

What was she doing in Brazil?

Never mind that. The real question is, could she compromise this mission for me?

No…

I almost smile.

She didn’t want me to know who she was because she’s Emilio Vittorio’s daughter.

Emilio Vittorio’s virgin daughter shouldn’t have been all alone in a club, much less anywhere near me.

I can guarantee that I shouldn’t have been the first man to make her virgin cunt bleed.

That means she’s not going to say anything if or when she sees me again.

“She’s getting married to Antonio Marchesi in a month’s time, and then she’ll be going to Italy,” Aleksei explains further. “I think this meeting with Judas will likely take place before her wedding.”

Wedding. Wow. My breath lodges in my throat as if someone built a dam around my lungs.

Maybe that was what she was running from.

What the fuck kind of situation have I truly landed myself in?

No matter what it is, this has to work.

This is that miracle I needed to find Judas.

“When can I leave?”

“Tonight,” Lucca replies.

I dip my head reverently. “I’ll pack my things.”

One last look at the image of the girl who offered her virginity to me, and I close the file. Her face still lingers in my mind though. The same way it has for the last three months.

I’ll never forget how ruthlessly I owned her body, nor how much I craved more.

And still do.

Sweet, angelic Persephone, I still want you.

That, however, is not going to stop me from killing your father.