by Christa Wick
Scarred
(Mikhael & Alina: A Savage Trust Romance)
C.M. Wick
Christa Wick
Contents
Book Description
1. Mikhael
2. Mikhael
3. Mikhael
4. Alina
5. Alina
6. Mikhael
7. Mikhael
8. Mikhael
9. Mikhael
10. Mikhael
11. Mikhael
12. Alina
13. Alina
14. Alina
15. Mikhael
16. Mikhael
17. Mikhael
18. Mikhael
19. Mikhael
20. Mikhael
21. Mikhael
22. Alina
23. Mikhael
24. Mikhael
25. Alina
26. Mikhael
Epilogue
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Also by C.M. Wick
About the Author
Copyright © 2019 by Christa Wick
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, this book and any portion thereof may not be reproduced, scanned, reverse-engineered, decompiled, transferred, or distributed in any print or electronic form without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Participation in any aspect of piracy of copyrighted materials, inclusive of the downloading and obtainment of this book through non-retail or other unauthorized means, is in actionable violation of the author’s rights.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, media, brands, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and registered trademark owners of all branded names referenced without TM, SM, or (R) symbols due to formatting constraints, and is not claiming ownership of or collaboration with said trademark brands. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events is purely coincidental.
Published by Evergreen Books Publishing
Copy edits and line edits by GBI Author Services
Proofreading by Rosa Sharon
Cover design by Violet Duke
Previously published as Moskva by Christa Wick (c) 2016.
Book Description
Growing up, he was her only protection from the violent crime syndicate their families bore them into, and she his only source of joy.
Her first love, the only person to love her at all.
His reason to exist, the one person he’d risk everything for.
That was ten years ago.
He never knew she'd protected him the only way she could by refusing to escape with him then.
And she never knew he'd survived the fire set to kill him despite her sacrifice.
It isn’t until her name appears on a kill order ten years later that Mikhael finally learns of the decade of torture Alina has suffered at the hands of a man more evil than even he realized.
But rescuing her is just the beginning.
Now, with secrets too painful to reveal, and the horrors from her imprisonment still shackling her psyche, the only question left unanswered between them is whether the scars she bears are too deep for even his love to heal.
The SAVAGE TRUST Series
Wrecked (Luke & Marie)
Scarred (Mikhael & Alina)
Frayed (Kane & Daniella)
Previously published as Moskva (c) 2016, revised throughout with newly added content, new characters, and a different extended ending.
1
Mikhael
Russia – Present Day
Hidden in the shadowed doorway of an abandoned shop, Mikhael Nazarov watched as his target left a small grocery store carrying a bag of costly oranges. Smiling broadly, her wide hips swinging with her good mood, she walked two stores down and entered a bakery, the door chimes audible from where Nazarov stood on the opposite side of the street.
Nothing about the woman's appearance suggested she had a contract on her life. Her clothes were cheap and simple. She didn't wear makeup. A thick braid down the center of her back restrained her long, dark hair.
He wondered for one fleeting second what she would look like all done up. Clothes that flattered her curves, a little color on her pale cheeks, her hair free and trimmed by a hand other than her own.
Snapping back to the moment, he scanned the sidewalks and entrances, then the windows above the shops. His chest grew tighter with each second that passed. For three days, he had followed her. Every day was the same. She left the walled compound of a former monastery with only a single guard in tow, setting out on foot with a big smile and a bounce in her step. She stopped first at the grocer for fruit, then continued to the baker, where she paid the man extra and waited while he custom decorated two jumbo sized cupcakes.
Her guard, a soft, lazy male whom Mikhael placed somewhere in his late fifties, was just as predictable.
Glancing at the corner, he confirmed the man had stepped into the poorly disguised whorehouse to get his own cupcake frosted for the ten or so minutes the woman would remain in the baker's before she was ready to return to the compound.
Mikhael casually pushed away from the building and started across the street. He wore jeans and steel-toed hiking boots topped by a hooded sweatshirt roomy enough to conceal the Glock 20 nestled against his hip. The hood was down. Small beads of sweat from the late summer heat in Moscow dotted his freshly shaved head.
His gaze stayed locked on the woman, but his ears were tuned to the sounds of the street. He listened for the occasional car or a sudden change in the low hum of activity as mostly women went about their errands for the morning.
The target's smile never faltered. It was there when she left the compound, its intensity building as the baker started to decorate the cupcakes, the act producing an unexplainable giddiness that made her shoulders shake.
Nazarov knew it wasn't the sweets that excited her. Food had never been the cause of Alina Rodchenka's full waistline. The luscious curves that made his mouth water as he approached the bakery had been there since childhood, her father's attempts to starve them off always failing.
He turned over the fact that she never left with just any two cupcakes. They were specially decorated each morning after her arrival with a different design judging by the changing colors. Her smile would build during their manufacture to an expression of pure joy in a way that hurt Mikhael to his marrow.
It was not the treat that made her glow with happiness, he concluded, but the other person whose teeth and lips and tongue would consume the spongy cake and sweet icing.
Reaching the door to the bakery, he dipped his head and chastised the jealousy that flared inside him. Did he really want to find her after ten years and see her miserable instead of smiling?
She was not his widow, even if they had once been lovers and she thought him dead. She was not his sister, either, even though they had spent part of their childhood growing up together in the same house, Mikhael protecting her within the vicious crime family that claimed them both. In her own way, she had protected him, too, her innocent affection offering comfort in a home where no other kind words or gestures were tendered.
Oblivious to the danger around her, Alina didn't look in his direction when the door chimes announced his arrival. The baker did, his expression deadening as he took in Mikhael's size and the dark shades that hid his eyes. The old man's gaze darted towar
d Alina in warning, but her attention was on his hands and the wave jumping dolphin he had been drawing.
Mikhael touched her elbow, just the lightest whisper of flesh on flesh. An electric current sizzled through his fingertips and up his arm. There was no similar effect on the woman, at least not that he could see. She adjusted her stance as if the contact had been accidental.
When Mikhael didn't move, she looked up, her smile faltering when she saw the grim slash of his mouth. Her dark chocolate gaze darted around his face, attempting to piece together the features into someone she recognized. When he tilted his chin toward the floor and the sunglasses slid down, she saw the stark blue eyes and her smile crumbled completely.
"Mishka?" she whispered, calling him by his pet name as she had so long ago. No one ever used the Russian nickname for Mikhael before Alina. No one after her, either. Hearing it now uttered in the voice he still heard in his dreams hit him much harder than he thought it would.
He didn't have time to explain. The baker would sound an alarm if the man hadn't already triggered something electronically. Her guard, as lazy as the old slob was, would soon exit the whorehouse and light a cigarette. By the time the fast burning Russian tobacco was done, he would expect Alina to have finished with the baker and be almost to the corner where he waited.
"We're leaving out the back—"
She shook her head and began digging in her purse. "You are leaving!"
Reaching past the rubles in her purse, she pulled out hundred dollar bills, her luminous eyes wide and pleading with the baker. Naively, she was trying to buy his silence in an area of Moscow brutally controlled by the Rodchenko family.
Mikhael knew the man would pocket the money then sell her out within minutes of her leaving. None of that mattered if Mikhael managed to get her out the back door and into the van he had parked at the end of the alley.
"Not without you," he growled, his big hand circling her elbow and locking it in a hard grip. Lowering his mouth to her ear, he whispered as he crowded her toward the swinging door that led into the bakery's kitchen. "Little devil has a kill order on you."
"Little devil" was their childhood name for Dima Rodchenko, the only legitimate child of Papa Rodchenko and the current boss of the Rodchenko crime family after the old man's death eight years ago. Groomed by his father to one day lead the family, Dima was already a full-blown psychopath at nineteen when Papa Rodchenko claimed Mikhael's mother as his in-house mistress.
For a few fleeting seconds, Alina stopped resisting. Fear replaced the vague panic that had filled her eyes upon recognizing her childhood friend and former lover. Then her gaze hardened to black agates and she pushed back, throwing every pound packed into her plentiful curves against him as he had taught her to do so long ago.
"I cannot leave him," she choked, her protest ending with a quiver of lips and tears swimming in her eyes. "Go now before they kill you!"
Her words stabbed at his chest. He had expected a moment's resistance spurred by almost eleven years of thinking him dead. But he didn't expect her to fight back, didn't think he'd see her hand curling around the slim neck of a metal cake stand, the dark eyes warning him that she would pound it into his skull if she had to.
Releasing her, he pulled back. However much things had changed in the last decade, he didn't expect her to cling to a half-brother who wanted her dead, especially since Mikhael was no longer a mere boy but a man battle-tested when it came to taking down scum like the Rodchenko crime boss.
He had to convince her the danger was real and that he could protect her.
"Dima has arranged to have you assassinated—"
The door chimes rattled as the front door of the bakery was slammed open. Alina lifted the cake stand and hurled it past Mikhael's shoulder as she tried to side step around him. He spun, pulling out the Glock as his other hand reached for Alina.
His fingers grabbed at empty air. She stepped in front of Mikhael, her back to the thuggish guard who had finally abandoned his whores and cigarettes to check on his charge.
"Go! Now!" she screamed, her face purpling from the tears she refused to cry. "I won't leave him for a ghost!"
The guard had his gun out, its tip pointed at the middle of Alina's back, her body serving as a shield for each man. Mikhael backed slowly toward the door to the kitchen, his eyes begging, willing the woman to move, to give him a shot at the guard who didn't give a shit if he needed to shoot through her.
Shaking her head, she stretched her arms out, bracing one hand against the counter and the other against a bread rack.
With no other choice that wouldn't result in Alina's immediate injury or death, he hurled his body through the swinging door to the kitchen, slid across a table of cooling pies and burst out the alley's back door at top speed. Lungs burning as he pumped his long legs, Mikhael passed the accuracy range of the guard's pistol by the time the old man reached the alley and fired off his first wild shot.
Diving into the van, he jammed the key into the ignition, turning it as he threw the vehicle into reverse and peeled out of the alley. He headed east, toward Moscow's center where he could dump the van, find another vehicle and start the task of saving Alina from her psychotic half-brother all over again.
Whether or not she wanted him to.
2
Mikhael
A meaty fist connected with the side of Nazarov's jaw. His head snapped left, blood from earlier blows to his mouth spraying the air. The heavy metal chair he was tied to began to tilt from the force of the punch. He threw his weight toward his abuser, the man the others called Osip. He managed to right the chair just in time for a second, more vicious punch. His head and the chair shot a hard left.
He hit the ground, his upper arm pinned between the chair's metal frame and the concrete flooring of the industrial building in which the three men held him.
"Nice one," a thick voice slurred.
Kostya delivered the compliment, his Russian almost incomprehensible to Nazarov because of the heavy accent and the frequent convergence of his mouth with the bottle of vodka he had purchased while fetching the men's dinner.
"Too nice."
This last voice was younger than the others, the few words more precisely spoken and belonging to Arkady, the "brains" of the trio consigned to sit on Nazarov until Dima Rodchenko returned to Moscow from a syndicate meeting in St. Petersburg.
The fact that they had freely used one another's names, both first and patronymic depending on the exchange, only solidified Nazarov's understanding that they considered him a dead man.
Feet appeared in front of his face. Bracing for the inevitable kick, he twisted his neck and upper torso so that his closed eyes pointed toward the floor and not the incoming boot.
Waiting for the impact, he counted off the breaths he took, his nasal passages clogged with blood from a nose broken just that morning.
Nothing happened. They were playing with him, waiting for him to turn his head. They had nothing but time and no entertainment beyond torturing him. They were on their third day of it, ever since eight of the bastards had surrounded his replacement vehicle less than a day after his attempt at kidnapping Alina at the bakery.
"He's going to die before Rodchenko gets here," Arkady cautioned. "You know he wants to finish the job himself."
Mikhael cautiously turned his head to look at the young man. With his right eye swollen almost completely shut, he could make out little more than the shape of Arkady's narrow head and upper torso against the ballast light behind the man. Unlike Osip and Kostya, he was slight and hadn't done anything physical against Mikhael. Most of his time had been spent walking around the room trying to get a signal for his smartphone.
Leaning over, Osip tugged the chair upright. "Can't help it if I'm good at my job."
"You better," Arkady warned. "Rodchenko will be primed to kill. What happens if all we have to show is a corpse?"
Osip leaned forward, his hand cupping Mikhael's balls and threatening to rip them off as
he put his ear close to the beaten man's lips and listened to him breathe. Blood gurgled in Mikhael's throat. He coughed, splattering Osip's ear with blood.
"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" Osip yelled, his big hand closing around the top of Nazarov's skull, the fingers splayed wide, their tips digging at flesh and bone as he hyperextended his victim's neck and wrapped his other hand around Nazarov's throat. "Son of a whore!"
Nazarov squeezed out one word before Osip cut his air off completely.
"Money."
Osip laughed and tightened his grip. "What, so I can have a tsar's funeral?"
Too drunk for caution, Kostya slid away from the wall and nudged Osip's hand away from their prisoner's throat.
"Let us pretend I find this conversation amusing," he said with a vodka lisp.
Retreating, Osip shoved his fists into the pockets of his loose cargo pants.
"I can get you millions," Nazarov wheezed then added. "In dollars."
He wasn't lying, but they couldn't exactly fact check him from the rundown building.