Misha Read online

  The men in the room glared at her as she told her story.

  Sergi looked like he wanted to punch a wall or anything b near enough.

  “The man just laughed at him.” She hung her head. When she looked up again after a moment, she had tears running down her face. “My brother hit him and the man beat him down into the ground. Then had his driver throw my brother into the trunk of his car. He tossed me to the ground as well and told my father he would be back for me after he dealt with my brother.” Sobbing, she just stared at them for the longest time. “The man returned after a week and told us my brother was in prison for assaulting a member of the Bratva. He would be there for at least four years. How well he was treated behind the cement walls depended on how well my father could provide for his care. He said he would start at five hundred rubles a month. That should cover his food and water and give him twenty minutes a day of sunshine.” Through her tears she glared hatred at Sergi. “My father had no choice but to pay the bastard. He showed my father a photograph of my brother after he’d been beaten. My brother was only seventeen at the time.” She got to her feet and began backing toward the door. “If my father didn’t pay him every month my brother would die behind the bars of his jail cell. Or I could go with him right then and my brother would still have to serve his four years but he would be released after that.” Shaking her head, “My father told him to go to hell.”

  “What did he say to that?” Sergi asked.

  “He raised the amount to a thousand rubles a month and didn’t promise that my brother would be protected in his cell!” She screamed at them. “My brother served his four years and my father paid the man every month. He worked so hard to get the money to give it over to the bastard. Then just before my brother would get out, my father died in the fields. His heart couldn’t take the overwork any more. We buried him, then two days later the bastard came for his money. My mother told him we didn’t have it because my father died. The man just shrugged and said my brother would continue to reside in the prison until we could pay him off and the longer it took would be on our hands not his.”

  The men in the room looked angry as they listened to this outrageous claim against their organization.

  She knelt down to her knees and sobbed. Holding her daughter close to her she told them, “It took us years to finally get the money he demanded. When we went to pay him, the man took the money we gave him and said now we owed him interest. I was seventeen and the man shook his head. He told me this was all my fault. All I had to do was come with him that day. Now I was too old for his likes but he knew of a man that would take me. He would show me how to please a man even at seventeen.” She dropped her head and stared at the floor. “My mother hustled me out of there and wouldn’t let me out of her sight for the next two years.”

  “What happened then child?” Sergi asked in a shaking voice.

  “She died in her sleep one night. I couldn’t even tell anyone she was gone. I knew if I did… HE would come for me. I knew he would sell me as a sex slave to one of his friends and I would be lost forever. My brother would spend the rest of his days behind bars where he never should have been in the first place. I managed to get a message to my brother in prison and I waited for an answer from him. He came one night a few weeks later. He showed up at the house with a few friends from the prison and we took the underground to the border of Kazakhstan. From there, we got passage on a ship and came here.”

  “So your brother escaped from a prison in Russia?” Barron asked with incredibility. Escape from a prison system was almost unheard of.

  “Da, he and the others did just that. I didn’t ask then but over the years we’ve been together, I’ve heard their stories. None of them should have been there in the first place. They were wrongly accused of crimes they didn’t commit. They were only there because they tried to stand up to the Bratva. All in all, my brother spent ten years in that hellhole for nothing more than defending me from that bastard.”

  “But that is not who we are,” Sergi insisted vehemently.

  “You’ll forgive me if I put my own experience ahead of your false claims.” She snarled. “That’s the Bratva I know, the only Bratva I know.”

  “What is this man’s name?” Sergi demanded to know.

  “Ivan Kolvastan,” she spit out his name, while hatred made her eyes almost glow.

  Sergi swore in his native language. He knew well the man she spoke of. And he didn’t care for him much. He could believe every word she told them. Sergi had been looking for a way to discredit Ivan in the eyes of the Bratva High Council but no one had ever come forward before with something he could use to deal with the man. “Why didn’t you ever come to us before this?” He wanted to know.

  Zeta stared at him with shock in her eyes. “Why didn’t we come to you? Are you fucking serious? For all we knew, you would be of the same mind as Ivan and we didn’t want to bring down his wrath on our people. We weren’t the only ones he was shaking down in our town. He was collecting protection money from everyone in town.”

  Sergi looked toward the others and they all saw his lips tighten, as his eyes grow cold. Everyone in that room but Zeta knew Ivan wouldn’t stand a chance against Sergi’s wrath. Sergi was the kind of man that it took a lot to piss him off but heaven help you if you ever did. Ivan had made the mistake of pissing the leader of the Bratva off now. Now it wouldn’t matter if he did run, Sergi would hunt the man down and personally take his revenge. Ivan had muddied the Bratva name in their own homeland and that was something Sergi wouldn’t stand for.

  Not after a lifetime of keeping the Bratva clean and honorable. Ivan had become a stain Sergi would wipe clean. And not one man in the room felt a bit of concern for the man. Ivan totally deserved what was coming to him.

  “What happened once you got to this country?” Misha asked her. “Did you have papers to get out of Russia?”

  Zeta shook her head. Sitting down on the floor, she wrapped her arms around her daughter and held her tight. “We had to sneak across the border, one by one. Then we had to get fake papers to board the ship. We had to keep ourselves hidden from the other passengers so as not to draw attention to ourselves. We couldn’t afford to get caught and or separated. When we got to the shores of America, we fled the authorities. My brother and his friends found jobs and we began our lives over here. Well, not here in New York City, but close by.”

  “How long have you been here?” Nikoli wanted to know.

  “We’ve been here for five years now. My brother and his friends started up an MC they call Iron Bears.”

  Misha gave a slight grin. The Iron Bears huh? Well, it fit anyway.

  “Your daughter’s father? Is he a member of the MC?” Barron wanted to know. “Will he come looking for you?”

  “No.” She looked down at the sweet baby in her arms. “He isn’t part of the MC and he won’t be coming back for me.”

  Misha got to his feet slowly and started toward her. “He’s the one that threw the two of you into that ditch isn’t he? He drugged you and threw you away like garbage?”

  Zeta looked up at him but she found she didn’t need to say anything.

  He could read the truth in her eyes.

  “He did nothing but lie to me from the beginning. Maxim made it clear from the time we got here, we couldn’t tell people where we lived. That would protect us from being found by the wrong people. I met Lonnie in Jersey City, four years ago. I never took him home with me and I never told him where we lived. He romanced me until I told him I couldn’t betray the others. When he knew I was serious and wouldn’t give in to his demands, he walked away. I haven’t seen him since before Anya was born.”

  “Did he know about the baby when he left you alone?” Misha growled. His hands were curling into fists and the rage was building inside him.

  Zeta nodded as she admitted to her own stupidity. “Yeah, he knew. I told him about the baby and he still walked away. He finally admitted what he’d done. He romanced me just to
get info on my brothers’ MC. He didn’t give a fig about me at all. He told me he didn’t care about the brat and he never cared about me. He wanted info on my brother that’s why he looked me up. He said there was a price on my brother’s head and he wanted to collect it. That was the only reason he kept coming around. I haven’t seen him since then. Out of the blue yesterday, he called me and he said he wanted to meet his kid.” She tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear. “At first, I wasn’t going to meet him. I mean he walked away from both of us four years ago and never looked back. Then he threatened me. He told me if I didn’t meet him he would turn over every rock in four states until he found my brother’s MC and then he would kill everyone in the club, including me and his daughter. I didn’t have a choice but to meet him.”

  “What happened when you met with him?” Barron wanted to know.

  She looked over at him. Lips pursed she told him, “He didn’t care a fig about his daughter. He didn’t even look at her or talk to her. He asked me about the MC. When I wouldn’t give him any information, he smacked me around a bit then when Anya began screaming, he poured some liquid on a cloth and put it over her face. I thought he was going to smother her right in front of me. I didn’t know what he was doing and I tried to stop him but he hit me. It was hard enough to knock me out for a moment or so then I woke up to him holding the cloth over my mouth and nose. I tried to fight him off but he was stronger than I was and then I was out for the count. The next thing, I know I woke up here.”

  Misha filled in the rest, “I was on my way back to the city and I could have sworn I heard a baby crying. I made Barron stopped the car and we looked around before we found you in the ditch. I couldn’t just leave you there so I brought you here.”

  “From what we found someone had stopped a car and pushed them out of it,” Barron added his observations in. “We saw the grass was crushed down as if something heavy had rolled down the ditch then we found the pair of them laying in the tall grass.” He shrugged. “The rest is what you know.”

  “So the only one coming for you might be your brother.” Sergi nodded.

  “My brother and his men,” Zeta agreed. “Lonnie thinks I’m already dead or will be before anyone finds me.” She looked up at Misha. “My brother won’t give up looking for me until he finds me.”

  “Can you contract your brother and have him meet with us?” Sergi wanted to know.

  Zeta shook her head. “That, he would never agree to do. You are Bratva and he will not come here for that reason.”

  “But we won’t hurt him or you.” Sergi growled.

  “Father, please.” Misha gritted his teeth. “From what she has told us, she and her brother and his friends have very little or no reason at all to trust what we tell them.” He knelt down in front of Zeta and took her hand. “But know this, the Bratva isn’t all like Ivan. Ivan is the worst of us and as soon as we get home, we will take care of that man. But in order to do that, we can’t let him know we are coming.”

  “Da, what happened to you and your family must never happen again,” Sergi agreed with his son as his eyes showed his determination and rage. “It never should have happened in the first place. Ivan hid his activities from us all too well.”

  Just then, Nikoli’s cell phone pinged and when he looked at it, he grimaced. He leaned over and showed the screen to Sergi.

  Sergi’s lips tightened and he looked over at Zeta. “It looks like your brother and his brothers have arrived.”

  Zeta began to tremble. “Please don’t hurt them,” she begged in a whisper.

  Sergi sighed as he rubbed his fingers over his bald head. “Blyad!

  Chapter Four

  Sergi then met her eyes. “We aren’t going to hurt anyone.” Getting to his feet, he called his security detail and gave his orders in Russian.

  She glanced over at Misha. “You guys do realize I know Russian very well don’t you? I mean I did grow up there. I told you where I came from.”

  Misha glanced over at his father who was speaking Russian to his security team. He just shook his head slightly. Looking over at her, he smiled. “We don’t usually run into someone from Russia here in the states. You speak English so well.”

  Zeta shrugged. “You do what you have to do to hide who you really are in the face of hiding in plain sight.”

  Misha searched her eyes but found very little answers in them. He got to his feet and joined his father.

  Sergi looked over at his son and stated, “Why do I get the feeling she’s got so much more to tell us?”

  “You got that feeling too?” Misha whispered. “She just reminded me that she grew up in Russia, she remembers the language.”

  Sergi shook his head. “I had forgotten that part of her story.”

  Nikoli joined them and looking from one to the other of them he said, “My men are in the parking garage. Shall I bring our guests upstairs or wait?”

  “Please don’t do that?” Zeta asked from behind them.

  They all turned to see her standing there.

  “My brother is looking for me and Anya. If he sees men approaching him, they will shoot first and disappear.” She hung her head. “I don’t want to see anyone hurt. Your men or them. I can go down and talk to them.”

  “And what will you tell them?” Sergi asked as he stared at her.

  “That what happened last night had nothing to do with you, that I was rescued from death by a man I didn’t know.” She raised her head and met Sergi’s eyes head on.

  “Will you tell them that a Bratva man found you?” he asked softly.

  “No but I will give you a chance to make your case.” She lifted her head and stared at the older man. “You told me that not all the Bratva are like Ivan Solvastan. You can talk the talk now, but you must walk the walk and prove yourself to my brother and his men.” She paused then added, “Can you do that?”

  Sergi gritted his teeth. It had been years since he’d had to prove himself. To anyone. Let alone to someone like her. Just who the hell did she think she was anyway?

  Misha watched as his father glared at Zeta. No one had dared speak to him the way she did in a very long time. He turned to her to remind her of just who they were when he heard his father tell her, “Da, I can walk the walk as well as talk the talk. The problem is, can your brother and his friends? You call my honor to the table but they are the unknown here. They are the ones who spent years behind bars, then escaped. Not only the prison they were in but they snuck out of the country as well. Then they remain in hiding to this day, hiding in the shadows like rats. And you dare to question my honor? How dare you?”

  Zeta stepped up and poked the head of all Bratva in the chest. “I dare because your man Ivan didn’t give a crap when he came to our farm and tried to abduct me. I was but a child and he wanted me for sex. He made that very clear from the beginning. There is something just disgusting about that. I dare because without cause he threw my brother in a prison and wouldn’t let him out after he served his time on a trumped up charge. I dare because all the Bratva have done to us is take and take and take.” She took a deep breath and huffed out air, “I will go down and talk to my brother. I will ask if he will meet with you but I cannot guarantee he or any of the rest of them will want to speak to you.” She glared at him.

  Her words held a bitter promise and for a moment Sergi, Misha and Nikoli were silent as they thought about what she’d said.

  “And… they aren’t rats in hiding, they are just men trying to earn a living in an unjust world. These are men that just want to hold their heads up with pride. Your organization has stripped them of that pride, of their freedom and their home. They know they can’t go back to their families and be welcomed with open arms. Here in this country, they have their freedom and that means everything to them. Oh and before you condemn them, put yourself in their shoes for just a moment. They had no choice in what happened to them, no say in being condemned to prison for nothing more than standing up to your man. Days turned to year
s and there was no one there to help them. No one there to stand up for them in the courts run by the Bratva.” Taking a deep breath, she dared to ask, “If they won’t speak with you, will you let them go? They came to find me, not to cause trouble.”

  After a moment of hesitation, Sergi nodded. “Da, they can leave if they don’t want to talk to us.”

  If the men could verify her claims then Sergi knew Ivan had a lot to answer for.

  They watched as she laid her daughter down on the sofa in the room and walked toward the door. When she disappeared, they had no worries about her returning. She never would have left her daughter if she had no plans on coming back.

  Getting into the elevator, Zeta pushed the button that would take her to the parking garage. Her palms got sweaty and she rubbed them on her jeans. She was taking the biggest chance in her life and she just hoped Sergi would come through for her the way he claimed.

  When the door opened, the parking lot was quiet. She stepped out and looked around, but she couldn’t see anyone. She took a few steps out and began walking around. She could feel eyes watching her but she didn’t know from where.

  “Maxim, are you here?” she called out softly as she came to stand next to one of the cars parked there.

  “Da, I am here.” Her brother called out. “Where is Anya? Is she safe?”