Total pages in book: 51
Estimated words: 45957 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 230(@200wpm)___ 184(@250wpm)___ 153(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 45957 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 230(@200wpm)___ 184(@250wpm)___ 153(@300wpm)
I keep myself in a tiny little box surrounded by paperwork, constant emails, and strategizing because being in the fields is too dangerous for someone like me.
A sociopath.
I’m terrified of losing myself, and I never want to put my family in the position of choosing between me and keeping the family name protected.
But then I’m given orders to spend the foreseeable future with him.
Ivan Volkov.
He’s the bane of my existence. He has a way of looking through me. Like he can see the monster that lurks beneath my skin.
He looks at me like he wants it to come out and play with him.
I’m not being given a choice in the matter. I’m the only trusted family member to take care of this problem.
I’m not sure I’ll survive the next however long this takes with my sanity intact.
Especially not when Ivan drops to his knees in front of me and tempts me the sweetest deal I’ve ever been offered.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
Adrian
I sighed and paused typing, looking up at James, the Don of the family, as he stepped into my office. I arched a brow at him. “Ever heard of knocking?” I asked.
He grunted and dropped into the chair across from my desk. At nearly forty, James was still fit, and it was clear he took damn good care of himself. But even I knew his back and knees weren’t what they were ten years ago. Definitely weren’t what they were when he became head of the Jackson family.
Hell, none of us were. In fact, just the other day, I’d ordered a standing desk I was still waiting to be delivered because sitting at my desk for hours on end was killing my back.
“Don’t need to knock,” James said.
I scoffed. “It’d be nice if you did,” I retorted. “You know, this is my personal space. What if I’d been jerking off?”
He arched a brow at me. “You going to do that with the door open, Adrian?”
I scowled at him. “Fuck you, James.”
He snorted. I went back to typing out the email I’d been working on. James had tasked me with arranging a meeting with the new chief of police, and I was just finding time to get around to it. Darren, James’s brother, might have been home for a few years now, and Jaxon, James’s head-of-security-turned-consigliere, might have gotten a promotion not long after, but that didn’t mean my workload was any lighter, especially since James mainly kept them out in the field and not doing up-close-and-personal work with people like politicians and law enforcement officers.
Neither of them were… fit for that kind of work, honestly. They were savages in their own right. Jaxon was a monster beneath his calm and cool exterior, and he wasn’t all that great at keeping his cool when something irritated him. And after spending nine years in prison, Darren wasn’t all that civilized either. The only person either of them were always civil around were their wives and the kids.
“What do you want, James?” I asked. I tapped the pile of paperwork on my desk, drawing his eyes to it. “I have shit to do.”
James shook his head. “Jaxon will be coming to get all of that.” At his words, I paused again, turning my head to frown at him. Why the fuck was Jaxon coming to get my damn work? The man hated sitting at a desk, and he would fight tooth and nail on it. Which meant if he was taking a desk job, something was wrong.
“What the fuck is going on, James?” I demanded.
James scrubbed a hand down his face. “We have a rat amongst us, it seems. Ivan brought it to my attention when a contact of his let it slip that he had some… valuable information about the Jacksons in exchange for his life.”
Ivan Volkov was the goddamn bane of my existence. I respected him because I had to, but fuck, I hated him, too. He was a cocky piece of shit who’d risen to power extremely fast, and he basically ruled all of Russia. Granted, I understood to some extent why he was like that considering he was the youngest man to ever become Pakhan at just the age of twenty-two. But I’d have thought that damn near being thirty now would have chilled him out a bit.
It hadn’t.
I could barely stand to be around him. There was a way he looked at me that put me on edge. Like he could see right into my fucking soul and to all the dark bits of me I hid from the world. The unhinged pieces. The parts of me that reveled in a kill.
The monster that craved the blood of others on my skin. A monster, that if unleashed, would destroy everything James had worked hard to build.