Vik (Shot Callers Book 2) Read online

  His breathing turned heavy. “It can’t happen.”

  What was going on here? The tension was thick enough to cut with a knife.

  My lips pulsed as his hooded gaze landed on them.

  I didn’t know much, but I knew—in that moment—that Vik was utterly at war with himself. And I could’ve sworn he wanted to kiss me.

  “Vik,” I breathed out, my lips parting slightly.

  “It can’t, baby.” Those whispered words said one thing, but as he dipped his face and hesitated a hairsbreadth away from my mouth, his actions said another.

  We stayed that way for a while, the intensity of his gaze and the feeling of his warm, minty breath on my lips more than I could take. He wasn’t going to make the first move.

  Call it a moment’s madness; call it sheer stupidity. Either way, my shaking hands rested on Vik’s stomach, and I slowly slid them up his torso until they rested on his shoulders. He watched me intently, and when he licked his bottom lip, I couldn’t wait any longer. I had already waited a lifetime.

  Perhaps he would regret what was about to happen. Right now, I was so caught up in him that I didn’t have the room in me to care.

  And so, I stood on my tiptoes, my eyes on his, and ever so gently, I tilted my head to place a single hot kiss to Viktor Nikulin’s full mouth.

  A week ago, I kissed him hard and fast. I caught him by surprise. It was a sneak attack, impulsive and childish, in the hallway by my room.

  It was dangerous. A mistake.

  Now, the moment our lips met, it was warm and inviting. This kiss felt like a promise, and I knew—I just knew—I would never feel this way about another man so long as I lived.

  I pulled back long enough to witness his composure break. One arm slid around me while the other rose up my back until his warm, large hand cradled my nape, holding me close while he ate at my lips as though he’d been poisoned and I was his only hope of survival, my lips the antidote.

  We kissed and nipped at each other’s mouths, and when our tongues finally touched, I died a silent death.

  We should not have been doing this, and knowing that made me all the more desperate to have it.

  Who knows how long passed? Minutes? Hours? It felt like an eternity. But when we finally pulled away from one another, lips swollen, panting quietly into the night, I was sure we were both thinking an identical thought.

  Oh Lord.

  We’re in trouble.

  1

  Nastasia

  I was going to fuck a bitch up and have fun doing it.

  The bitch in question?

  Viktor Nikulin.

  My ex-boyfriend. My ex-best friend. My ex-everything.

  But, why, Nastasia? He seems like a decent guy. A caring friend. A god in the sack. Someone you can tell your innermost secrets to. And, Lord above, that smile. Why must you fuck him up?

  Because breaking up was never easy, and although I did my best to remain civil for the sake of our friends and closely connected families, Vik was being difficult.

  Look, I’ll admit I cried for a while.

  Okay. I cried for a long freaking while. I mourned and grieved and lamented and all that shit. But then I woke up one day and chose to be a mature and accepting person.

  On that very same day, Vik woke up and chose violence.

  It took months of unease until I finally snapped, but when it happened, everything I’d been feeling came out of my mouth like buckshot out of a shotgun.

  It had been a hundred and three days since our official breakup, not that I was counting. And for a while, it was awkward. That awkwardness turned to anger. And because there was clearly something wrong with me, seeing Vik angry did something odd. The kind of thing that made you bite your lip and squeeze your legs together tightly.

  Now, when we fought, it got intense. Vik knew this. He played on it. And, dear Lord, sometimes I played right back.

  My eldest brother, Sasha, decided to host a business meeting under the guise of dinner at his house—if you could call the three-story monstrosity a house—to talk about upcoming events and new ideas for the club. Attendance was not optional. When Sasha requested you, you came. That was just how things were.

  Was it all a little kingpin of him?

  Yeah.

  Did he secretly love to wield that kind of power?

  Have you met the guy? Of course, he did.

  Business was booming. Bleeding Hearts—once a sleazy strip club, now a classy burlesque joint—had one hell of a transformation in the past year. And although it was Sasha’s baby, we were involved in one way or another. After all, we all worked there, and like a well-oiled machine, each of us were a cog in the engine, making it run.

  To see the business fail was not an option. Our family prided itself on going legit. And unless we wanted to take a step back into a seedy underworld where people did nothing more than sell weapons, violence, drugs, and women, we had no backup.

  It had to work.

  My front door opened, then shut. “Oh my God,” I heard a feminine voice mutter, and when fast footsteps came rushing up the steps, my brow furrowed. Even more so when she panted out, “It’s okay. It’s fine. We’re okay.”

  The hell?

  Stepping back from the vanity in my bathroom, I heard the footsteps get closer and closer, and when she stepped into view, wide-eyed and looking terrified, I moved toward my sister-in-law, Mina, with a feeling of deep panic sitting heavy in my gut.

  Shit. Something was wrong.

  I didn’t even notice the white bag she was holding until she freaking threw it at me. I caught it clumsily, making the contents jostle, and when I all but blustered, “What’s wrong?” she stood there, chewing on her thumbnail, murmuring under her breath.

  Her long brown hair was tied in a low ponytail, and I looked over her yoga pants, black tee, wearing one sock, and slides. She looked a mess.

  Then, suddenly, she regained focus and said, “Out.” When her brown doe eyes landed on mine, she put her hands to my arms and gently pushed me backward until I was just outside the open door. “Out!”

  For a tiny thing, she was remarkably strong. The door slammed in my face, and I just stood there, confused as hell, mouth agape.

  Firstly, excuse the shit out of me. This was my house, dammit. She had some nerve pushing me around in my own home. But when I heard her whine through the door, my anger left as quickly as it came.

  I wrapped my fingers around the doorknob and slowly tried to open it. “Mina? Are you okay?” I jiggled it. “Shorty?”

  There were three of us in the family. Sasha, the eldest, who took over the role of patriarch when our father died. Lev, the middle sibling, whose quirks made him both infuriating and endearing as hell. Lastly came me, the youngest. The girl who grew up with mobsters and criminals and thought nothing of it, because although it wasn’t normal, it was normal for me.

  When you’re a teenager and your brothers are members of a subsidiary of the Russian Bratva… well, you could imagine how colorful life must’ve been.

  On the day our father died, Sasha had been expected to take over control of Chaos. It seemed like the natural course of events, and Sasha never did things half-assed. He was in, which meant we were in.

  I’d seen shit, heard shit, and taken part in shit that no teenager should have ever been part of. And it didn’t take long for Sasha to come to the same conclusion.

  It took some convincing, but Sasha talked himself out of the role, and soon enough, without a proper leader, Chaos was falling apart. Bratva soon heard of the mismanagement and bickering between its firms, and the motherland came calling. And when Bratva tells you to stand down and disband, that’s what you do.

  Now, any Russian firms out there were acting on their own. They no longer had the backing of the big guns. And although I had a feeling Sasha sometimes missed that life, I knew he did what he did for me.

  Because family was everything.

  The door to the bathroom shot open, and Mina, anxious as
a gazelle drinking from the waterhole, stood there holding a plastic cup filled with a light-yellow liquid. I spotted the rectangular box in her other hand, and my brows bunched.

  Her voice shook as she begged quietly, “Help.”

  It took me about ten seconds for it all to click.

  My brows rose, and I let out a humble, “Mina.”

  “I know.” She nodded with tears in her eyes.

  I tried to speak, but nothing came out.

  She nodded again. “I know.” Higher in pitch this time.

  I found my voice and asked gently, “Are you sure?”

  She let out a watery laugh. “Um….” Reaching for the white bag, she turned it upside down, and the contents fell to the white-tiled floor of my bathroom. Nine different brands of pregnancy tests told me she wasn’t sure.

  “Okay,” I said calmly.

  “I’m scared,” the little woman croaked out, and, goddammit, it broke my heart.

  “Look,” I tried to reason with her, “this is not an issue. You’re married. You’re in love. You’re not some teenager who did it with the quarterback under the bleachers, got knocked up, and is now being sent away to live with her grandma.”

  But Mina wasn’t listening to me. She moved to sit cross-legged on the cold floor, opening each box and taking out one test, and when her fingers began to shake too much, she started to rip open the cardboard with her teeth.

  My brows rose.

  Oh yeah. This was fine.

  Breathing shakily, she tried to read the instructions and talked to herself. “How do I do this?”

  “It depends. Some of them, you dip in and wait, and others, you put a couple of drops into the little hole.”

  She stilled, then blinked up at me. “You’ve done this before?”

  My eyes widened a moment, and all I said was “Yeah.”

  Two men. In my entire life, I’d only ever been with two men. One, to whom I was briefly engaged, and we used a condom each and every time. The other was Vik, who had my head swimming with nothing more than a glance of his fingers down my spine. He hadn’t used a condom with me since I was nineteen years old, so, yes, I knew how to use a pregnancy test.

  I helped her. I told her she didn’t need to use all nine, but she just kept handing them to me, and before we knew it, the counter of my bathroom sink was covered in white plastic sticks.

  We waited a full three minutes, and we did this in complete silence. One look at Mina told me that nothing I said would distract her from what was going on inside her head.

  And when the timer went off and I began to check the tests, relief fell over my expression. I looked over at her and smiled kindly. “See? All good, li’l bit.” I held up a test. “You’re not pregnant.”

  Her face blank, she took the test from my hand and stared at it. She then stood and looked over all the others, her face remaining passive. But when she sat on the closed toilet lid, her bottom lip started to tremble.

  Oh, sweet girl. “You had a scare. It’s stressful,” I said in way of understanding.

  “You don’t get it” was her soggy reply.

  I choked down the scoff threatening to rush up my throat. “I do. I really do. But it’s okay, Mina.”

  She shook her head and blinked away tears. “It’s not okay.”

  “It is,” I reassured her with a squeeze to her knee.

  Mina looked down at the floor, her face crumbling, and her hands came up to cover her eyes as she began to cry.

  No, not cry.

  She was sobbing. Body-wracking sobs.

  My brow furrowed in perplexity. “Hey,” I crooned, moving to squat down in front of her. “What’s going on?”

  She continued to cry, and when she removed her hands, she rolled her red eyes, shrugged, and let out a laugh that held no humor. Her voice shook. “I don’t know.”

  And then it hit me.

  I spoke slowly. “Did you want it to be positive?”

  Her eyes closed, and she dipped her chin, nodding as she began to weep again.

  Well, shit.

  My arms went around her, and I held her tightly as she cried openly. I began to feel her loss on a personal level, and when my own eyes began to sting, I sighed softly, then asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She spoke into my shoulder, miserable. “We’re not trying, but I haven’t been feeling well, and it made sense that I might be… and I was scared, but once I thought about it… then I was kind of happy about it. And thinking about how nice it would be for Lidi to have a brother or sister… I started planning where the nursery might go and wondering who the baby might look like… and now—” She took in a deep breath and let it out shakily. “—it’s over before it began.”

  I squeezed her, gently rubbing her back.

  Her incoherent babbling should not have made sense, but it did. And it was heartbreaking.

  I pulled back, taking hold of her hand and swiping away a stray tear trailing my cheek. “Look,” I told her. “If you want it, this is going to happen for you. Now just wasn’t the time, okay?”

  Mina started to calm. “I guess.”

  “If you want a baby, you need to talk to Lev, get off the birth control, and start trying. Like, really trying. You get what I mean?” She snuffled out a small laugh, and I smiled widely, then swallowed down the sickness in my throat at the thought of my brother shooting his boys into Mina, but that was how it was done. “Go home and seduce my brother. Enjoy the process.” I sobered quickly. “It’ll happen, Mina. I just know it.”

  I helped her wash her face, gave her another comforting squeeze, then sent her on her way, leaving me to clean up. As I disposed of the used pregnancy tests and wiped down the sink, I smiled at the thought of another niece or nephew to spoil. I’d have to get that from Lev and Mina, because—let’s be honest—Sasha wasn’t going to give me that.

  It wasn’t that he was a manwhore or that he had commitment issues. Actually, it was the exact opposite.

  I hadn’t seen Sasha with a woman in years, which didn’t mean much. I was sure he still got some. He was just uber discreet about it. And unless he was willing to introduce us to a woman, he sure as shit wasn’t going to have a baby with her.

  So, when I arrived at Sasha’s later that night and saw the cars parked out front, I knew I was likely the last to arrive, as per usual. I let myself in and heard Sasha say, “You live down the path, Nastasia. Must you always be tardy?” That confirmed it.

  He stood wearing a scowl with both hands on his hips like a disappointed father. Looked like one too in his dark-gray suit and impatient stance.

  I removed my coat and placed it in the hall closet, then walked toward him, wearing a wide smile. “Nice to see you too, brother.” When I got close enough, I stood on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek briefly. He continued to glare at me, his golden eyes darkening slightly. I rolled my eyes and walked past him. “Relax. God, I’m here now. Let’s eat.”

  Following the sounds of conversation into the living room, I entered the room and stopped in my tracks.

  “There you are,” said Mina.

  “Nastasia, must you always be late? Mina’s hungry.” That was Lev.

  Anika was next. “Hey, honey.”

  Then Cora. “About time you got here, bitch.”

  But my eyes were fixed.

  Vik moved to sit up the moment he heard my name, my three-year-old niece, Lidiya, hanging upside down in his muscly arms, giggling, her curly pigtails dangling from her head. And my uterus awoke.

  Fuck me with a jackhammer.

  Please, God. I beg you. Have mercy.

  It was hard enough seeing the dark-haired, blue-eyed, built man be his beautiful, tattooed self, but playing with a child?

  Ugh.

  My heart stood no chance against that. None at all.

  “Nas” was all he said. His whisky-smooth voice may as well have been whispered into my ear as goosebumps lined my arms. His intense gaze caressed me from across the room. I felt him everywhere.
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  This wasn’t new. This was how things were with us. We had an extreme effect on one another.

  The best thing we could do for the sake of everyone around us was simply get along, and for a while, we did just that. But lately, Vik had been itching for an argument.

  How could I tell?

  Because he was doing everything possible to push my buttons. He made no effort to hide it either. If he wasn’t questioning my every decision, he was blatantly flirting with the dancers at Bleeding Hearts or making crude jokes to get a rise out of me. I knew he was hurt, so I kept it together, but my God, my patience had worn thin.

  In short, Vik was punishing me. Again.

  From behind me, with the king of all sighs, Sasha announced, “Let’s eat.”

  The conversation was moved to the dining room, and once everyone was seated, Sasha got right to it. I should have been listening, but I wasn’t. I was too focused on the man sitting opposite me who looked to be undressing me with his eyes.

  I swallowed hard and squirmed in my seat, staring down at my untouched plate.

  When I chanced a look at him again, his eyes dipped to my throat, and the way his lips tipped up at one corner told me he noticed.

  God, he looked amazing in black fitted jeans, a light-gray Henley, and the white Lacoste court master sneakers I’d bought him just because I thought they’d look good on him.

  Spoiler alert—they did.

  With his dark hair cut into a low fade with texture on the top, my hands clenched into fists under the table as I itched to run my fingers through it. I could almost feel his neatly trimmed stubble scraping along my inner thigh.

  A shudder swept over me.

  I picked up my fork and held it in distraction.

  And Jesus wept.

  My eyes landed on the Cupid’s bow of his full mouth. It was sweet torture just looking at him. As the tip of his tongue came out to wet his bottom lip, my fork fell from my hand and onto my plate with a clatter. Then everyone was staring at me.

  “What do you think about that, Nastasia?” Vik asked, blinking slowly, knowing full well I hadn’t been listening.

  Uh….

  “What?” was my very smart, very croaky response.