Chapter 389: Of Green-Eyed Envy Over A Time Bomb

* Bonus Chapter woo (thanks for 500k views yhii)

[BRATVA]

Alek stared at the footage.

Watched it.

Again.

And again.

Hell, he could identify every move frame by frame from the footage, given the number of times he had watched that thing.

As he watched, Alek replayed the past week. How it had gone for him. For Sergei. For the Moskowskys and their associates.

Even for Katya Romanov.

He thought back to the Saturday that had changed his life. How Sergei had come. How Katya had made his choice obvious while mocking Alek.

The way that Sergei had kicked him out indirectly. The announcement at the fashion show. The way Katya came out of that fashion show marked and the revelation of Katya being Sergei’s true mate.

He remembered the way that Saturday had gone by and how Monday morning had been for him. How he had been rejected by Katya, and he’d sent mercs after Sergei, hoping to get to Katya Romanov.

How he failed because Sergei had protected Katya... the released the footage, and instead of the city frowning, everyone was swooning at the ultimate love story.

In the middle of all that, a ghost from his past had conveniently arrived at his gates. Doped up on cocaine and fentanyl.

And while Alek was focused on the patient, things had happened.

They were not coincidences; that much he was sure of now.

As Alek replayed the hospital sequence, even that doctor...

He knew.

There was only one person who could have done that in the cruelest of ways.

The shopkeeper: a man so loyal to Sergei he would give up his life before he ever failed Sergei.

Rastenkin.

Rastenkin had been there that night. The day he lost Joe. Rastenkin had rained bullets on his beloved. Three, to be precise. Alek remembered them all too well.

The patient at the hospital... Alek hadn’t checked him properly.

He’d seen curls and went into a hopeless rabbit hole of who did what and why. It had been four days since the patient first appeared at the gates of the Bratva.

And today...

He’d been there too. Yet even then it never occurred to Alek to check the patient.

That...

That was his weakness.

The one thing Rastenkin could exploit.

Joe.

"I’m going back to the hospital," Alek said, not even giving Kenzo the chance to say anything to him. He was out before his protector could give an opinion, and honestly, it had Kenzo worried.

But Aleksandr knew he had been played.

He didn’t even need to ask and check the body to be sure.

Joe... Joe was dead.

"The Moskowskys send their regards," Yaroslav had said in that call while butchering one of Aleksandr’s men. He had not even paused to think too and that should have been the perfect pointer.

Because Alek knew Yaroslav.

Not the weapon that had just been unleashed.

Not the man who was out there in a thousand and one relationship scandals.

He knew Yaroslav... The man who loved and lived for Katya Romanov.

The depot attack...

That wasn’t Sergei; that was purely Yaroslav.

Not the playboy in the city.

The lover.

The beta who had strolled into Alek’s Bratva and tortured Alek for twelve long hours, all because Alek had called Katya pathetic and inferred that Katya was a loose omega.

That was who Alek was facing right now.

Yaroslav Moskowsky was brutal in protecting people that he loved. He had sworn to protect and avenge Katya at the courthouse. Alek hadn’t really paid attention to it. He’d thought that the beta was just being emotional then.

But Moskowskys never got emotional. They never made emotional decisions.

And it explained the sudden appearance of Joe. The man he loved from his past.

Alek had been bested in this battle.

He knew it.

Even as he drove like a maniac to Aslava, he had not suspected it once because he had been too emotional. Too busy being Daniil instead of being the person Joe had left behind.

He had been compromised. And now his people were dead. People he should have protected. They were dead for no good reason. Because Alek was playing politics with men who had nothing to lose.

The door to the private ward opened, and Alek stared at it.

The empty bed.

Where once his apparent Joe had lain was just a cleared-out bed. The machines had been turned off. There wasn’t even a hint that some patient had been in this room.

Even Aleksandr’s men were waiting outside.

"Where is he?" Alek asked even though a part of him already knew. Already suspected.

The patient had been too weak. Too overdosed.

He shouldn’t have survived longer than a day.

Yet by some miracle the patient survived five days.

Even miracle workers didn’t believe in things like that. Because everything else had been too much. The pressure of what Alek had been ignoring. The pain of seeing Joe on the bed. The way that the doctor had looked at him.

Doctor Marjan Malik- he’d remembered the name.

Out of curiosity, Alek ran the name in the hospital and the entire medical database for the city and the realm.

No results.

The doctor was a fake.

Of course she was.

The bed was empty.

The patient... was dead.

Joe...

Gods, Alek stared defeatedly.

When he’d started preparing for revenge, he had told himself he would never let himself be compromised. That he would never fall for anything. That he would never be compromised.

Yet one man with the right name on his lips had Alek unraveling.

Pietro.

That was what Joe had called him.

Even the night Joe died, he used that name.

Pietro.

Begged Alek to leave.

Rastenkin was there.

Fuck if Alek didn’t just realize it a little too late.

He had been set up. He had been bested by the Moskowskys. He had been dragged into TV mud, and he had been strung along.

Maybe he should have listened to Kenzo, because now the patient was dead. Alek didn’t even need to ask to know.

Still, he willed himself to ask.

"The patient died and was cremated earlier today because of hospital policy. There were substances in his body that couldn’t be allowed in the morgue or even among patients," the nurse explained softly.

She was just doing her job; Alek had to remind himself as he laughed at the absurdity of it all.

Rastenkin had brought his dead boyfriend back to life and, for four days, strung him like a puppet. And when they were done, Rastenkin used the doctor to make sure the patient died.

’Bury Daniil if you are going to be Aleksandr,’ Kenzo had told him a year after Joe’s death. Back when Alek was desperate to get his vengeance.

He had listened.

But the heart was a stubborn little thing.

Because now, he was in an empty hospital room, staring at the place that screamed at him. That mocked his skills and declared him far too incompetent.

He couldn’t even deny it this time.

Because he was bested.

Fuck.

And suddenly, Alek started checking out the room. Like he was looking for something. Anything that had been stashed somewhere.

His men and his doctors stared at him worriedly, but he didn’t stop. He kept looking.

Then he saw the pillow on the bed.

The pillowcase had been changed.

But the pillow itself was still the same.

So, Alek took off the pillowcase and ripped open the pillow.

And as expected...

He found what he was looking for.

"I’m going to burn all of you for this," Aleksandr swore, staring coldly at the contents of the pillow.

Then he looked around the room again.

The high spaces. The window. The curtain rods.

His men didn’t ask what he was looking for. Because honestly, given what was on that bed after he ripped open the pillow, they knew they wouldn’t ask the alpha anything.

So, they waited.

Watched as Alek pulled down the curtains, tore the room apart save for the bed.

"Turn the lights off," he demanded after making his men return the blackout curtains.

And suddenly the room was dark.

But high in the bulb, Alek saw it.

A camera with a microphone in it.

Small enough to be missed by anyone mundane. But big enough for anyone to see that it was there. Anyone who was looking for it anyway.

And Alek knew it was left intentionally.

Because Moskowskys never made mistakes.

Not with surveillance. And certainly not with any evidence.

So, he pulled the camera from the bulb, raging while silently amused that he had truly been bested.

"I found your message, shopkeeper," Alek growled lowly.

"I’m gonna make you watch as I ruin your precious Sergei and his empire. After I’m done, I’m gonna kill you slowly. See you soon."

Then Alek stepped on the camera, breaking it.

And he grabbed the contents from the pillow and walked out.

The Moskowskys had truly sent their regards.

Alek was done being Daniil.

Was he, though, or was he just convincing himself?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the broken camera, the Hercules camp laughed at the senator’s pettiness and stupidity.

"He’s cute talking to the camera like that," Meera said, playing with a huge ring on her finger.

"You really stole a dead man’s ring to play with?" Elara sighed exaggeratedly as if they didn’t have a feud that had just escalated.

"He ruined my childhood; I ruined his future. If you ask me, I deserve this as a souvenir from fuckass Raul Kosov," Meera defended.

"Once we kill Aleksandr, we can tear his insides and measure the length of a beta’s intestines. The last beta we ripped open had a punctured intestine, so the experiment didn’t go well," Reeves said, like that was the most important of things.

"Do not touch his hair. I need to smell that hair gel and know what it is," Meera added.

"Why?" Rastenkin asked.

"So, I can avoid it because it clearly blocks Aleksandr’s brain functionality," Meera deadpanned.

"Good point... Get back to work, everyone," Rastenkin laughed excitedly.

Oh, Aleksandr.