Page 67 of Ash

I finally felt things shift in my mind.

Perhaps it was time to start healing and forgive myself? Gracie said I should. She told me that’s what Krissa would want.

I sighed. I knew deep down Gracie was right, but I wasn’t quite ready to do that yet.

The weight of guilt that I had carried around the last two years had certainly lifted, but it wasn’t yet gone. Not completely. I’d been living with the blame too long. It had become a part of me, but perhaps when I got my revenge, I could finally let it all go.

I looked at the beautiful woman sleeping on my chest and knew I wanted to. I needed to be the man she deserved. A man that wasn’t eaten up by useless guilt. A man who didn’t allow himself to be consumed with impotent rage. A man who could control himself. Like the man I had been before. Resolve settled in me. I would be that man again. Every day, I would work a little more towards him, for Krissa, for my family, for Gracie, and for me.

I kissed the top of Gracie’s head, but she didn’t stir.

I continued watching her for a long while, thinking of everything that had happened between us since we’d met at Glitz. I couldn’t believe it had only been just over a week. Life had got a whole lot more exciting for me since she entered it. I had begun to feel alive again, not just going through the motions.

I wanted to get all this Bratva shit sorted out as soon as possible so we could explore our relationship properly. I always knew that if I fell, it would be fast and hard, and it certainly had been. I’d already told her she was mine, and she’d agreed, but I wanted to make sure she never regretted that. I wanted to make up for our difficult start, but we hadn’t even been out on a date yet.

While I had tended to keep things casual in the past, I wanted to have a real relationship with Gracie, starting with dating and hopefully leading to something more serious in the future. The near future! She was the one for me, but I didn’t want her to ever feel like she’d missed out on anything. So, as soon as things had calmed down and were safer, I was going to whisk her off to somewhere nice and bombard her with one date after another to be sure she never did.

In the meantime, I would have to continue to woo her with my sexual prowess. I laughed to myself at that and bent down to kiss her forehead, then her nose, her mouth, her cheeks, her chin. Soon, she was awake and smiling up at me. My cock was already hard by then, and so I got down to business and showed her again just how much I wanted her. Several times!

Much later, we headed down for breakfast, fully sated, hand in hand and grinning like a couple of idiots. I could get used to this.

When we finished eating, I headed to Miki’s office to discuss the plans he’d put in place after I left last night. He briefed me on things, and we then sorted out some more of the finer details.

Apparently, last night, another of our dealers and one of Glowacki’s were attacked. Ours wasn’t killed outright this time but stabbed and left for dead. Thankfully, he was now recovering in one of our safe houses. However, Glowacki’s guy was shot dead.

More attacks, just like Juana had said.

Of the four traitors we’d discovered within the Bratva, Ivor was the one we’d let get closest to us. The others were merely foot soldiers who hadn’t proved themselves enough to go up the ranks yet and now never would.

Ivor, however, had been sent to us from Russia by Uncle Maxim. He’d worked as a bodyguard there, though not one of Uncle Maxim’s own, but had gotten into trouble by sleeping with a police officer’s wife, so Uncle Maxim had sent him to us to get him out of the way. Despite his penchant for chasing the wrong kind of women, he’d been thought of as loyal and trustworthy, so we’d taken him in and allowed him into our main security team.

I fumed with rage just thinking about how we had allowed him access to our home and family. We’d treated him well, and he had betrayed us, providing Siri with details of the Lab’s location and our drug shipments. He would pay dearly for that, but not yet. Unfortunately, if he disappeared at this point, it would cause too much suspicion, and so we needed to let him live. For now!

He would be one of the ones we’d deal with at the last minute. In the meantime, he’d be kept busy with other things that took him away from the Estate as much as possible. That way, we could make the required arrangements to defend ourselves, and he’d be none the wiser.

So, the first part of our plan was to create a fake war with fake attacks being staged tonight and over the next few days, using our most trusted men. We were going to make it seem that some men were killed on both sides. This would give the impression that our forces were being weakened. In reality, we’d fake their deaths, then hide them away in some abandoned farm buildings within easy reach of the Lab and use them against the Malia Boys when they attacked.

The next part of the plan was to grab Petrov on Wednesday when he was due to get out under his witness protection deal. We needed to get to him, incapacitate the National Crime Agency officers, and then snatch him before the Malia Boys could. We didn’t want to kill the officers unless we had to either, so that had to be taken into account. We would, however, be killing Petrov, but not until we got any information we could out of him.

I was to oversee his capture. Marko had already hacked into the National Crime Agency database and was monitoring it. He’d let me know when he got information on the route they’d take so we could pick the best spot to intercept them.

On Thursday, Glowacki and his family will be coming to the Estate in secret. Although we knew the Estate was to be attacked, we were not sure if any attacks were planned on Glowacki’s home. However, with so many of the traitors being his men, we weren’t taking any chances. When the attacks took place, his daughter would be staying at our house with the rest of the women in the panic room, along with Glowacki’s younger son, Sebastian.

Miki had brought in a couple of our lower-ranking soldiers yesterday to guard the Estate gates over the next few days. They weren’t involved with the Malia Boys or Broxy’s, but they were disloyal and a pair of thieves. The idiots had thought we didn’t know they were stealing from one of our money laundering businesses. They worked security there and thought we were too stupid to notice. Stupid fuckers now thought they’d been promoted. They had, to cannon fodder!

When the attack happened, it was expected that the guys at the gate would be taken out first. That would get rid of another issue for us while keeping our loyal guards safe. We weren’t planning on sacrificing any of them.

Miki and I had discussed bringing in Anton for some additional help, and I had initially been reluctant to get him involved but eventually capitulated. We needed people we could trust guarding the Estate while we were elsewhere, so it made sense. Nevertheless, I hadn’t wanted to involve him but, in the end, he insisted. As a Bratva Blood Brother, he said it was his duty to help protect us, our home and our family. We might have made the oath when we were just kids, but we all took it seriously.

Anton’s guys were ex-military, and most had been special forces trained. That gave us a great advantage over our opponents. The Broxy’s had a few ex-military in their ranks themselves, but not as many and not so well trained. They wouldn’t be a match for Anton’s men, or even our own for that matter. The hope was that our combined force would take out as many Broxy’s as possible before they reached our home, women, and children. However, if anyone did get too close to the house, Romi, Marko, and a few of our most loyal guys would be waiting.

In order to give us the element of surprise, we planned on keeping up the pretence of war and our seeming ignorance of the planned attacks until the last minute. Therefore, Romi would leave early Friday night with a couple of men and put the word out that he was going to attack another of Glowacki’s businesses. In the meantime, Dariusz would be doing the same, saying he was about to attack one of ours. That way, our enemies would think that we were too distracted and short of men to protect ourselves properly.

In actual fact, once the word was out, they would all head back here via our secret back entrance to be ready for when our enemies appeared. They’d also bring Derrick with them to ensure a medic was close at hand if needed. I’d called him, and he had agreed to help out. He was already planning on helping anyway, apparently, because Anton would be here along with Derrick’s boyfriend. I knew I liked the guy.

Marko would remain here to monitor police activity and the phones of Siri and the Broxy’s leader, Scot Maitlock. He’d successfully hacked them already, and we were keeping tabs on both. That should give us the heads up on when the attacks were about to happen and where exactly we could find Siri. We wanted to capture him. We had a lot of questions to ask him.

Although our Estate was out in the countryside, it wasn’t that far from civilisation that the noise of an attack would go unnoticed, so I had some of our guys set up traps around the grounds to help take some of the Broxy’s out as quickly and quietly as possible.