Shotgun Wedding: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance

A
ll Rights Reserved
. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the authors’ imagination.

Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 or over.

I
watch as Viktor Solonik
—the crew's
pakhan,
my boss, and the biggest pain in my ass—casually swings a hammer as he paces the room. I haven't met the unlucky guy who's tied to the chair in front of Solonik, but even if I had, chances are once Solonik begins beating on him, I wouldn't be able to recognize him.

Solonik is a twisted fuck, but he doesn't like to get blood on his fancy suits. Maybe it's because his face is so ugly. I’m not being petty. He loves his deeply pockmarked cheeks, the scar on his lip that makes half his mouth a quarter-inch higher than the rest. He preens and prances in his ten-thousand-dollar suits, while intimidating the hell out of his enemies—not to mention subordinates, women, the police, fucking dogs on the street—with his looks.

Call him ugly, fat, a dirty shit, a bastard, a minion from hell. He's probably heard all of it and worse.

Just don't get one speck of dirt or drop of blood on his designer shoes.

He leaves the dirty work to his us, the
boyevik
boys, his warriors. He doesn't mind ordering us to get waist-deep into the shit and mud and blood. He loves it, in fact. I seriously think he gets off on the violence—and, of course—the money.

But it's that cruel, soulless thing he's got going that's quickly elevated him from a minor player in Brighton Beach to one of the biggest, newest forces in New York's criminal elite. As Solonik would say, fuck the Italians. And the Irish, Chinese, Mexicans and—well, basically, he'll say that to anyone.

Not to me, though. Not anymore.

Maybe once, when I first started with his crew. But I've grown a lot in the past seven years. I'm not a scared-shitless
shestyorka,
a glorified errand boy keeping a lookout as Solonik's crew did their worse.

I'm an assassin, my aim sharper and truer than my father's ever was.

It helps that I never touch the vodka he loved so much.

The man in the chair jerks and shouts as Solonik swings the hammer—a feint—over the prisoner's head. The man's voice nags at me, and I frown. It makes me think of my father, but it must be because in one week, I'm free.

Free from the promise I made, to be in Solonik's debt for seven years in exchange for my father's life.

It was the stupid, rash promise of youth. Noble, but meaningless: my father drank himself to death less than a year into my "sentence." I'd left my home, I'd left my friends, I'd left my youth—I'd left
her
—and all for naught.

I was only twenty-nine, but I felt almost one hundred.

Solonik threw back his head and laughed as the man in the chair began to weep.

Of course, working for this asshole would age anyone.

I roll my shoulders and freeze my face into the same impassive mask that I've perfected over the years. I could be at a wedding, a funeral, or a fucking Fourth of July fireworks show and I'd look the same. It was how I'd earned the nickname Ghost.

Partially because, hit after hit, I would appear, take out my target, and disappear into the night. Like a specter. And my face. After the brutal beatings and
mafia
initiation rights, I learned to clamp down, never show weakness. Never show anything. People thought nothing ever touched me, that I just coasted through the world.

And after awhile, after enough pretending, they were right.

Now, in one more week, none of this shit would touch me, ever again. I'd saved enough money to leave Viktor Solonik, New York, and all this shit far, far behind.

"Petrokov."

I stiffened but didn't move as Markov called my name. Markov, my second least-favorite person on earth, never referred to me as Ghost—that would give me too much power in his mind.

Markov moved to stand next to me, both of us in the shadows of Solonik's club's basement. Solonik had stepped back and was letting one of the new guys begin the beating; the man in the chair howled after the first punch. The second punch to the gut shut him up, except for the wheezing.

"I should have known," Markov said, grinning. He had squat, pug-like features, and he acted like a dog who’d tasted blood: you knew, sooner or later, he’d have to be put down. "You really do have ice in your veins. You grew up with that asshole, and you don't even care he'll be beat to death."

What the fuck
?

It's not often Markov, or anyone, surprises me. I don't like that he knows something I don't. I shrug, knowing Markov just wants to get a rise out of me.

"He owes Viktor too much money to ever pay it off," Markov whispers. He sounds gleeful. "Viktor says he'll give us the bar to save his life—it won't be enough, of course."

The bar? Markov loves to lord his relationship with Solonik over the rest of us. Of course, you kiss ass well enough, anyone can get close to the throne.

The man in the chair moans again, begging for his life, saying he'll give up anything—his bar—anything Solonik wants.

Something's niggling at the back of my mind. A bar. The man's voice.

I keep thinking of my father, of my years growing up on Poplar Street, deep in Brooklyn, deep in poverty.

"He owes Viktor for gambling," Markov continues. I'm surprised he's not rubbing his fucking hands together with glee. "Then he tried to run drugs for us, out of his family's bar. He's a shitty gambler, but an even worse dealer."

I look down at Markov, shrug, then look back at the man. But my mind is racing…family bar…my father's voice.

"Please! I'll give you anything!" the man screams as the new recruit takes the hammer and aims it as the poor bastard's knees.

Now Markov actually laughs. "Solonik's going to take the bar. It's a shitty old Irish place, but it'll be a great cover for getting clean money. But even that wouldn't pay off this asshole's debts. He's got a pretty daughter, though. A real looker. Viktor says he'll take her, pass her around. If I want her, I can have her. If not, the Red Room brothel will get a sweet little Irish girl to add to their collection. You should see her tits…"

I see red.

Irish bar.

Irish girl.

They're talking about
my
Kat.

I
t's my wedding day
.

At least, that's what my father told me, before he took my cell phone and locked me in the women's restroom in the basement of St. Ignatius Vasily Catholic Church.

Dear ol' dad didn't bother to throw a wedding dress in here with me, so I'm wearing jeans and a t-shirt, which is a much more appropriate outfit for what I'm attempting to do: get the hell out of here.

Unfortunately, I'm a bartender and waitress, not a locksmith. So I can't get the door open. The only window is about the size of
one
of my butt cheeks, and it's about five inches from the top of the ceiling. Ever the optimist, I stacked three, large cardboard boxes full of toilet paper and am now balancing on them, trying to pry open the bathroom window.

It's welded shut.

I drop my head, and the nail file I was trying to pry open the window with; wild guess, but I don’t think my Hello Kitty file is what people use to break out of prison.

Oh God, oh God, oh God
is the only thing going through my mind right now. I take a deep breath and slowly exhale. I need to move past the panic and into problem-solving mode. I need to breathe. I need to get the fuck out of this church basement.

Maybe I should try and pray. I
am
in a church, after all.

Dear God, as you probably know, I've been kidnapped.

By my own father.

Please help me escape this bathroom. Please don't let this "arranged marriage" to some crazy Russian mobster actually happen.

And please, please don't let the Russians kill my father…

…because
I want to do that
the next time I see him.

I wait a minute, foolishly expecting an answer. A sign. A savior?

Instead, the cardboard boxes beneath me shift. I knew it was stupid to stack half-empty boxes on top of each other, and even more stupid for me to then climb up on them—but there was nothing else to stand on and nowhere else to go.

I try to balance on the stronger, outer edges but the boxes wobble and begin to bend beneath my weight. I'm little, but I'm not
that
little. For a five-two chick, I've got curves and ass to spare. I spend my days and nights working at my family's bar, which mean I'm adept at dodging drunks' groping hands, but that's about the extent of my athletic abilities. I'm about the last person in the world who should be attempting a gymnastics-meets-balancing-act escape.

I'm also in a complete, panic-induced mental meltdown. All of which adds up to imminent disaster.

The boxes wobble again. I gasp and my old Converse tennis shoes slip. I reach for the window ledge above me, but of course, one inch of finger grip does
nothing
for me. I'm not a fucking Russian gymnast. I yelp and shriek and begin to teeter toward the bathroom floor. Great, I'll break my tailbone.

Maybe they won't make me get married if I'm in a full-body cast.

Suddenly falling on my ass from six feet up isn't the worst idea ever.

I shout again, instinctually, when the boxes shift and begin to collapse, my left foot going straight down and through the top box. And that's when the door flies open—like, hinges
be gone!
—and I really scream.

Both because my makeshift escape-ladder is collapsing beneath me, and because my first love—the boy I haven't seen in seven years, but who still haunts my dreams at night—is standing, chest heaving, in the doorway.

"Gray!" I shout instinctually as he rushes forward. And suddenly I'm falling, straight into his waiting arms.