Chapter 7: The Price of Betrayal
“Alexei won’t even look at me,” Elena sobbed. “His lawyers served me with divorce papers this morning. I’m losing everything. The house. The cars. The accounts. Everything.”
“You have your life,” Dimitri said darkly. “Which is more than Pavel probably has right now.”
“This was supposed to be my life. I was supposed to be safe and protected and respected—”
“You dishonored your husband, your family, and your sister,” Sergei cut in, his scarred face hard with contempt. “In our world, honor is the only thing that matters.”
Elena raised wild eyes to his face. “Then what about Anya? She destroyed a family alliance. She made us all look weak. What’s her honor worth in that?”
“She kept faith with herself when no one else would,” Sergei replied. “That’s the highest honor of all.”
The phone rang. Dimitri didn’t even hesitate to pick it up this time.
“Dmitri Kozlov?” The voice was young and unfamiliar and pitched with nervous energy.
“Who wants to know?”
“My name is Chen. I work for the Tran family. We… we found your brother.”
Dimitri’s blood turned to ice. “Is he alive?”
“Yes. But you need to come get him. Soon. The hospital says he might not make it through the night.”
The drive to the hospital was done in silence. Elena sat in the back seat staring out the window looking at her ghostly reflection in the glass.
Pavel was in the intensive care unit, hooked up to a nest of machines that beeped and hummed with angry determination. His face was so swollen and bruised that Dimitri was barely sure he was looking at his brother. Both arms were in casts.
“He’ll live,” the doctor told them softly. “But it’s going to be a long recovery. Months, maybe years. And he may never be the same.”
Dimitri nodded. His face was carved from stone. In Bratva world, this kind of beating was a message. Pavel had been methodically broken as a demonstration of what happened to families that lost their protection.
“Who did this?” Katarina asked when the doctor left them alone.
“Does it matter?” Dimitri replied. “Everyone knows we’re vulnerable now. Everyone wants to send a message that the Kozlov family is finished.”
Elena started sobbing again. “I’m sorry. I never meant for this to happen.”
“Intentions don’t matter,” Dimitri said without looking at her. “Results matter. And the result of your choices is this.” He waved a hand toward Pavel’s broken body. “This is what your seven months of fun cost us.”
“What do we do?” Katarina asked. “How do we survive this?”
Dimitri was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, there was no question in his voice at all.
“We can’t. The Kozlov family is finished. Our protection is gone, our alliances are broken, our reputation is destroyed.”
“There has to be something—” Elena began.
“Nothing,” Dimitri cut her off. “You killed us, Elena. You and that lawyer killed everything three generations of Kozlov’s built in this city. I hope he was worth it.”
“We need to leave the city,” he continued quietly. “Tonight. Take what cash we have and disappear before someone decides that beating Pavel wasn’t enough.”
“Leave?” Katarina’s voice was hollow. “This is our home. Everything we’ve built—”
“Is gone,” Dimitri finished. “We’re nobody now and in this world, being nobody gets you killed.”
Elena’s phone buzzed with a text message. She looked at it with desperate hope, but her face fell as she read.
“What is it?” Katarina asked.
“Marcus,” Elena whispered. “He says he can’t see me anymore. That is too dangerous now. That I should ‘find someone else to solve my problems.’”
The ultimate betrayal. The man she had destroyed her family for was dropping her now that she had nothing left to offer him.
Dimitri laughed, a sound like breaking glass. “Perfect. You gave up everything for a man who drops you the second you become inconvenient.”
Elena slumped into a chair and began to sob again. She had lost everything. Her husband, her family, her protection, her lover, her future. She was twenty-eight years old, and her life was effectively over.
“Anya warned us,” Katarina said suddenly. “She tried to tell us something was wrong. We called her paranoid.”
“Anya saw the truth when we were all blinded by what we wanted to see,” Dimitri agreed. “We should have listened to her.”
“Where is she now?” Elena asked through heaving sobs.
“I don’t know,” Dimitri replied. “And after what we did to her, I wouldn’t blame her if she never wanted to see any of us again.”
As they packed Pavel’s things and prepared to leave the city, one thought hammered through all of their minds. Anya had been right about everything. The weak little sister they had all dismissed had seen the truth with stark clarity while they stumbled around in willful blindness.
Katarina’s phone buzzed as they walked toward the hospital exit. She glanced at it and came to a dead stop in the middle of the hallway.
“What is it?” Dimitri asked.
Katarina’s face was white. She held up the phone with a trembling hand.
The message was simple, from an unknown number: I know where Anya is. And I know what she’s planning. Meet me at the old pier at midnight if you want to save what’s left of your family.”
Below the text was a single photo, a surveillance image of a young woman with dark hair walking into what looked like a federal building.
Elena gasped. “Is that…?”
“Anya,” Dimitri whispered. “But what is she doing at—”
His blood turned to ice as he recognized the building in the background.
The FBI field office.
