The dark hood tilted slowly to the side, and the heavy rise and fall of his chest seemed to increase. He didn’t want me to see his eyes. That only made me more curious. Keeping the jar tucked under his left arm, he stopped pushing against my hands. Taking the chance while I could, I cautiously reached up and torpidly pulled back his hood.

My eyes were trained on his face as it came into view—that strong jaw, that unruly sandy-blond hair, his dark stubbled cheeks, high cheekbones, and…

I waited with bated breath for his dipped head to rise and finally meet my eyes. He did so with painstaking slowness, long, dark lashes downcast, like he was fighting against his instincts, like gravity was keeping his eyes pulled down. Until, with nostrils flaring and his breath blowing hard, he lost the battle to keep his anonymity and his eyelids lifted to reveal the dark irises underneath and his hard gaze suddenly bored into my eyes…

Then everything stopped—time, the ability to breathe… my whole entire world.

Choking on a gasp, my hand flew to my mouth and my legs collapsed beneath me. In a New York minute, my ass hit the hard ground and cold shivers tracked down my spine.

The man’s face was blank as he towered over me, knowing I had been felled by his stare. He was raw, stern, and he was glaring at me like a killer before he rips apart his victim, a predator before he devours his prey. There was no emotion in his expression, no compassion for me now sitting on the sidewalk, no thanks for a generous donation. He was as cold as an arctic winter… but he was a beautiful monster, and he had no idea why I despaired.

Hearing the kicking of a can down the far side of the nearby alley, the man pulled up his hood, his disguise and, in a flash, sprinted away into the darkness.

I failed to pull oxygen into my lungs, wheezing as I tried. Those eyes… those eyes were imprinted into my brain, they were soldered onto my soul. My voice was stolen by the shock of what I’d just seen.

Brown eyes… a pair of rich chocolate-brown eyes, the left iris smudged with a flash of blue… the exact blue from my eyes… just like…

No… how could it be?

He died… He had died over twelve years ago.

That man was a monster, a killer, devoid of emotion, with little ability to communicate. Luka… Luka was my best friend, my love, a Bratva boy… He died…

But… But…?

“Kisa!” Serge’s voice cut through my panic. Suddenly appearing before me, his arms instantly scooped me off the floor. “What the hell?” he spat out before carrying me back to the car, placing me in the backseat. “Shit!”

He asked me several times what was wrong, but I didn’t know what to say, what to believe… My mind kept replaying what I had just witnessed.

Brown eyes… rich chocolate-brown eyes, the left iris smudged with a flash of blue… the same color of my eyes.

“Kisa!” Serge called from the driver’s seat as he fired up the car. “What happened? Were you harmed?”

I shook my head in response to his increasingly frantic questions, all the time gripping my seatbelt with fisted, trembling hands.

“Fuck! Then what?” Serge pushed. “Where did the man go? Why are you crying? Shaking?”

I met Serge’s eyes with my vacant stare, still too busy replaying the scene in my head to really see him. It couldn’t be Luka… It was impossible… He was dead…

My heart exploded like a cannon. Serge slammed his heavy fist down on the steering wheel and threatened, “Kisa! You tell me what’s wrong or I’m telling your father that you took money from the gym and handed it out on the street to a homeless man like it was fucking Christmas!”

Silence filled the Lincoln. I took a deep breath, wrapped my arms around my waist, and I whispered, “I… I think I’ve just seen a ghost…”

Chapter Eight

818

“So are you ready to kill or are you ready to be killed?”

As I sat on the bench in the back room, the cries of hundreds of men shouting their bets beyond the door made my hands shake with nerves. 362 sat in front of me, smiling with a shit-eating grin as he wrapped his hand in a well-soiled white sports bandage.

This guy had been on my ass since I’d arrived a month ago. He was three years older than me, one of the best fighters in his division here at the Gulag, yet he immediately saw me as a threat. Three years his junior, I still matched his size. For a few weeks, the warden took me to a gym, made me train in fight techniques, telling me I would have my first match soon. Every day, I would wake, train, eat, and sleep. I had a routine, but my dreams were plagued with the boy I’d seen in the ring. The one with the dead look in his eyes, his opponent’s guts on the canvas. I knew it would be me soon, forced to kill or be killed.