Twilight Sins (Kulikov Bratva Book 1)

“Mariya should stay with you. She needs her mother.”

My mother scoffs on her end of the call. “She doesn’t think so. She doesn’t think she needs anyone. If Mariya had her way, she’d walk out that door and never come back. Some days, I’m tempted to let her.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose. “You know that letting her run off wouldn’t be safe for her.”

“I know it just fine! Now, I need Mariya to know it. But she is stubborn. As stubborn as your father was. Maybe worse.” She sighs. “She’s just like him, anyway. He was her favorite. Out of the two of us, he was the one who could talk sense into her.”

“Mariya loves you, but she’s a teenager. She’s going to act out. It’s normal.”

“This isn’t normal, Yakov,” she insists. “I’ve never dealt with anything like this before. Three kids and I am out of my depth. You were never like this.”

That’s not true. I was just better at hiding it. The things I did that my mother knew nothing about could fill books and those books could fill libraries.

“I was raised knowing what I would inherit. It was different for me.”

“Your brother was never like this, either. Nik was such a good boy,” she says fondly. “He never gave me any trouble.”

That’s because she left the country when Nikandr was sixteen. He didn’t have time to give her trouble.

In a matter of two months, our father was shot in front of us, our mother took Mariya with her across the globe, and I became Nik’s only family member and his pakhan.

I could point all of this out, but it would just send her into a grief spiral I don’t have time to pull her out of. I didn’t even want to take this call. The plan was to ignore it and wait for her to text the way she always does. After a few hours had passed and whatever fight she and Mariya had gotten into had cooled off, then I’d text back.

But she called and called and called.

By the time I finally picked up, my mother was crying. “You know what it does to me when you don’t answer the phone right away. It takes me right back.”

The day my father was killed, I rode with him in the ambulance. His phone kept ringing in his pocket. The EMT handed it to me and said I could answer it if I wanted to. It was my mother.

I let it ring.

“Nikandr and Mariya are not the same people,” I tell her.

“Then let Mariya come live with you. Maybe Nik can rub off on her.”

“You don’t want that, either.” My mother wouldn’t be thrilled to know that her baby boy spends any evening he isn’t working drowning in drinks and random women. He isn’t what I would call a “good role model” for a seventeen-year-old girl.

She releases a sob. “You don’t know what it has been like, Yakov. Mariya is hardly home. I ground her, but she leaves in the middle of the night. She comes home without explaining where she has been. I’m afraid to go to sleep. The doctor keeps telling me to rest, but I can’t when this girl is running around the city with no protection.”

I massage my temple. “I’ll assign new guards to watch her. More guards. So she can’t slip past them.”

“She wouldn’t be able to slip past the guards at the mansion,” my mother fires back. “You have the gates and cameras. It’s a fortress.”

A fortress with one too many infuriating damsels as it is.

Luna is long past trying to escape. She’s made herself right at home. Which is a problem in and of itself.

It’s bad enough that Luna is one more person I need to take care of. One more person I could lose. The last thing I need to do is add Mariya to that list.

“Mariya is safer in Moscow. Coming here now isn’t a good idea.”

“Why not? Are you in trouble? Is it the Gustevs? I don’t want to lose any more of you to this needless violence,” she whimpers. “Maybe you and Nik should⁠—”

“Nik and I are fine, but we’re busy. We don’t have time to spend with Mariya. She’d be in the mansion alone a lot. I don’t think it would be good for her.”

All true—except the part where she’d be alone. Mariya would be with Luna, which would be cataclysmic in its own way.

Suddenly, I hear Mariya’s voice in the background. “Is that Yakov? I want to talk to him!”

Before my mother can say anything, the other line rings. It’s Nik.

“I’m getting another call. I have to go.”

“But your sister is⁠—”

I switch over to Nik’s call and growl, “From now on, you field our mother’s calls. Anytime she calls, I’m forwarding it to you.”

“Yakov.”

Usually, Nik would make some jab about being mother’s favorite or complain about being my secretary, but not today. The way he says my name makes me sit up.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“After you and Luna left the restaurant together that first night, I had every bank account and line of credit under her name flagged. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t being paid by Akim or anyone else to get close to you.”

I asked Nik to do that and forgot. I never even followed up with him. That says more than it should about the hold Luna has had on me.

“Okay. And?”

“Well, something turned up,” he says. “Her debit card pinged this morning. Looks like your girl purchased some credit for a burner phone. Has she been in your office recently?”

The image of Luna perched on the edge of my desk pops into my mind. I’ve gone back to it a lot. Her lips swollen, long legs wrapped around me…

Fuck.

“The burner number is one of ours?”

“Appears to be,” he says. “And based on the way you’re saying it, I’m going to guess you had no idea she took it.”

She told me she trusted me. Worse, I fucking trusted her.

Then she stole from me.

This is why I don’t let people in. This is why I keep my circle small. People die or they betray you. There is no in-between.

“Yakov?” Nik asks. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to handle it.”