Chapter 3: Emperor of Wrath: Chapter 3

The second I walk into the hospital room, Freya launches herself into my arms.

“Fuck,” she sobs against my chest.

Really, what else is there to say?

Over her shoulder, my eyes land on Damian, lying motionless in the hospital bed. I hate the grotesque plastic tube snaking out of his slack mouth. I hate the machines breathing and pumping his blood for him. I hate the wires and the rhythmic beeping sounds, and the bleachy hospital smell of antiseptic and death.

I hate all of it. But mostly, I hate that I still don’t know if I’m about to lose a family member.

I was eighteen when I lost everything. The daughter of a Serbian mafia kingpin and his American wife, I’d already been married off to another crime lord who hated me and the forced marriage as much as I hated him for the same reason.

Right after the wedding, a mafia war broke out and his family was annihilated in an attack on their home. I managed to escape, and one of my father’s men, Ruslan, managed to get me home.

But it was too late.

The war had been there first, taking my whole family as well and burning our home to the ground. Ruslan got me as far as Greece before he died from the wounds sustained in the attack on our family. That’s the day I lost all that I’d ever known.

I’d lived my entire life as a pampered mafia princess, wanting for nothing. But when it’s steal or starve to death because you don’t have that wealth anymore, the world of black and white becomes a lot grayer.

I stole because I had to. I stole because I had nothing to eat. I met other people like me—kids and teenagers who lived on the streets of Athens. There were girls like me who found…other ways…to keep themselves fed and from dying in a gutter.

I almost did it once myself. I was starving, I was sleeping in an alley, and I had an infected cut that was getting gross.

It was just sex, I rationalized. Insert tab A into slot B. Repeat. Get paid. No big deal, right?

Wrong.

I cleaned myself up as best I could and walked around the square in the seedy section of town with the other girls looking for work. I said yes to the first man who walked up to me with an evil, lustful look on his face, and quoted him the same price I’d heard a girl say to her client ten minutes before.

He brought me to his car. Before anything happened, he opened the back door, punched me in the face, then threw me in.

There are moments in your life that define how the rest of it will play out. That was mine.

I could have let it go. I already had the money, since I saw all the other girls getting paid up front. When he shuffled into the backseat after me and climbed on top of me, I could have just…tuned out.

But while I may have been born into this world a princess, it wasn’t without fire and fury in my veins.

So I fought.

I slammed my forehead over and over into his face as he pawed at me, until I heard the crunch of broken bone and his screams of pain. Until I felt the hot drip of blood. When he rolled off me, I kicked him as hard as I could in the balls, over and over, until he threw up and screamed for mercy.

Then I ran and never looked back.

And that was the day I decided I would take from this world what I needed and give nothing in return.

I spent the next few years completely on my own. I ignored the world and those around me, took what I needed, and survived.

But then one day, in Milan, I saw something I couldn’t ignore. Two teenaged boys were dragging a screaming, clawing young girl out from the makeshift tarp shelter she’d set up in the crumbling wreckage of a condemned building. It was obvious they were trying to rip her clothes off, probably to rape her or something heinous. But that’s not the only reason the girl was screaming.

It took me a second to realize she was afraid of the sunlight.

In any case, something in me snapped, and the blinders I’d kept on for the last three or four years fell away. I grabbed the first thing I could lay my hands on—a rusty metal pole—and I beat those boys with it over and over until they ran away, screaming and bloodied.

That’s how I met Freya.

Like me, she’d been born into one life and then found herself in another, living in alleys and fighting to survive. It was even harder for her because of her condition.

Freya has a rare kind of extreme photosensitivity called xeroderma pigmentosum. Her gothy look isn’t just an aesthetic. She’s ghostly pale because she literally can’t go out in the sun without getting horrific burns on any exposed skin.

After that first day, we became fast friends. Like me, Freya had learned to take what she needed, although she wasn’t the type to walk into a store and slip groceries into her hoodie. Her M.O. was to slip a card skimmer onto the checkout machine and then use a library computer to convert the money she’d skimmed into Bitcoin.

We teamed up and started taking on bigger jobs, stealing more than just “what we needed”. Eventually, we got in with certain types of people, and started to make connections and a name for ourselves.

Then came the dark years.

The years with…him.

I don’t like to talk about those years, or even think about that time in my life.

I smile weakly as Frey pulls away, letting me walk over to Damian’s bed. I sit in the chair next to it, biting my lip and feeling my breath hitch as I reach out and lay my hand on top of his pallid, unmoving one with the IV snaking out of it.

“Remember his opening line?”

I grin despite the horrible feeling that’s settled in my chest, turning to roll my eyes at Freya. “You mean ‘Tell me when you’re ready to stop wasting your time and start playing in the big leagues’?” I grunt in my best impression of Damian’s deep baritone.

And that was when Freya’s and my double act became a band of three, after the dark he-who-shall-not-be-named years. The two of us had disguised ourselves as catering staff for an elite dinner party in London being attended by a who’s-who of VIPs, state leaders, and a few criminal world kingpins.

We’d made out like fucking bandits. I lifted about a dozen six-figure watches, a bunch of jewelry, even a painting from the wall of the venue itself. Freya had been smiling away, pouring cognac and wine, skimming the no-limit credit cards in every pocket in the room.

A few hours later, we were enjoying a few celebratory drinks at a pub down the street when Damian made his dramatic entrance.

What we didn’t know until later was that it was his pub. Like, he owned the joint. That was how he was able to quietly empty the place of all staff and patrons before making his presence known, which we didn’t even notice because we were four drinks in.

Tell me when you’re ready to stop wasting your time and start playing in the big leagues.

I will never, ever forget seeing Damian for the first time—turning around and feeling surprised through my buzz at the built, six-foot-three, white-haired, frighteningly handsome young man with the purple eyes and the leering devilish grin.

Damian had been a guest at the dinner we’d just robbed. We’d even stolen his Rolex. But he wasn’t mad.

He was intrigued.

Like I said, Freya and I like taking things for the thrill as much as the money.

Damian likes hurting people he considers his enemies. And if he doesn’t want to straight up punch them in the face, hurting them in the wallet is always a good alternative. I guess he thought we could help him there.

I wince as I gaze at his unresponsive body lying in the bed. He’s so strong, and a total gym rat. To see him like this is just…crushing.

“Anni.”

I look up to see Freya staring at me with a haunted expression. We texted briefly earlier, and she knows what happened with Kenzo, but we haven’t had a chance to speak about it.

I’m not sure I’m ready for that, especially not here, with everything going on with Damian.

“Not yet,” I whisper hoarsely.

She nods.

Then her face crumples, her eyes dragging back to Damian.

“I just don’t understand how something like this could happ⁠—”

“Bullets.”

We whip around when we hear Kir’s voice—the accent a mix of polished Oxford English and grubby Russian prisons—as he steps into the room. He and I didn’t speak much on our drive back into the city from Cillian’s estate, and even if we had, it’s honestly all been a blur since I opened that goddamn safe.

A blur of Kenzo scaring the shit out of me, dragging me downstairs, and telling the whole party that I was his fiancée.

Yeah.

It came up in the silence of the car ride back to New York. Kir had just shaken his head.

“Not now, Anni,” he’d murmured quietly, staring out the window in a daze. “Not yet.”

My heart twists. Damian is like a brother to Frey and me, but he’s basically a son to Kir…has been since Kir’s sister and her husband passed when Damian was seven.

“Bullets do this,” he says quietly. Freya’s chest hitches as she runs over and throws her arms around him, hugging him fiercely as he pats her back.

“What’d the surgeon say?”

He exhales. “He’s cautiously optimistic. They removed the bullet fragments close to his lungs, so he’s in the clear there. The shooter missed his artery by about a millimeter.”

“Thank fuck,” I croak.

“But he’s not out of the woods yet. They’re going to keep him in a medically induced coma while they figure out the best way to get the fragments near his heart.” Kir’s eyes glisten. “I’m bringing the best specialist in the world over from Dubai.”

I stand and walk over to them, hugging them both as I twist my head to look at Damian.

This is the ragtag family I’ve put together since mine was lost. Obviously Taylor, now that we’ve found each other again, is my other half. But even after reconnecting, and even though she’s married to Drazen Krylov of all people, I feel I need to distance her from this side of my life.

Drazen isn’t just some street thug. He’s arguably one of the most powerful Bratva kingpins in the world, if not the most. He’s next-level, meaning Taylor is protected in a way I can’t even fathom.

But even so, my life is…messy, and complicated, and dangerous. And I won’t bring that to her door.

She’s found a perfect balance. I would bring chaos to that balance.

Chaos like Kenzo Mori.

A shiver ripples up my spine as the words I can never forget replay through my head.

I’m going to remember you.

In your dreams, sunshine.

No, princess, in yours, which I’ll be fucking haunting.

I’d cringe at the cocky tone I used back then if it wasn’t so fucking serious.

In your dreams, sunshine.

I mean I literally said that to the heir to a Yakuza empire I’d just drugged as I was robbing him with the taste of his sinful lips still on mine. Who the fuck did I think I was, Anne Hathaway playing Catwoman?

And now it’s all coming back to bite me in the ass.

Hard.

Five years ago, Kenzo was an easy mark. A young hotshot in the Yakuza world, flashing money and sports cars all over Kyoto, practically begging to be robbed.

But the man I stole from that night was barely a man at all. He was still outrageously hot—dark brooding eyes, lean muscle, Yakuza ink for days. But he wasn’t even thirty yet. Still a twenty-something carefree playboy gangster. Emphasis on “boy”.

The Kenzo that grabbed me tonight, wrapped his hand around my neck and stared into my very soul is another beast altogether.

Bigger. Stronger. Darker. More sinister and far more dangerous. Like a lord of wrath, savaging me with his piercing gaze.

I pull away from Kir and Freya and I turn to look back at Damian as Frey walks over and sits in the chair next to his bed.

“Aoki shot first, if that’s important,” Kir says bitterly.

The shooting took place at a nightclub that hadn’t even opened for the night yet. It’s still unclear how it happened, but Damian and some of Kir’s men were sitting around talking business when Aoki and four of his men walked right in.

“Words were said, and Aoki pulled his gun,” Kir grunts. “Damian was defending himself and his men.”

Word is that in addition to Aoki Jura, three of the other Jura-kai men were killed, along with two of Kir’s.

I turn to look at Kir, and start to open my mouth, but he shakes his head.

“There’s no other way, Anni,” he mutters. “I don’t like it, and I know you fucking hate it. But we’re past anything else,” he says coldly, pulling his hand from mine to rub both of his up over his tired-looking face. He lets his gaze settle on his nephew, and his jaw tightens as he turns to me. “It isn’t up for discussion.”

“Kir—”

He holds up a hand, silencing Freya when she tries to come to my rescue.

“I’m truly sorry, but this is done, settled. It’s happening.”

He looks at Damian, then at Freya. Then his eyes slide over to lock with mine.

“You’re marrying Kenzo Mori, Annika. And that’s final.”