Free Sons of Anarchy: Bratva by Christopher Golden Page A

kill our enemies and their entire families.”
    He surveyed those gathered around him. A chill went through Trinity, and she wiped tears and smudged dirt from her cheeks.
    “Feliks died for these guns,” Kirill said. “And we will use every last bullet.”
    Oleg nodded slowly, lips pressed into a tight line. “Amen,” he said, as if Kirill’s declaration had been another prayer.
    “Amen,” the rest of them echoed.
    Trinity felt sick. Feliks’s death, the digging of his grave, and this pauper’s funeral had disturbed her enough, but this …
    She whispered her own private little prayer and turned away, walking back across the rough ground and past the empty pool.
    Oleg caught up to her just as she was entering their room, took her wrist and followed her inside, closing the door behind them. Her heart pounded, and she felt her face flush as tears spilled down her cheeks. She hated herself for crying, hated the vulnerability it made her feel, even though she believed that empathy showed strength, not weakness. Angrily, she wiped her eyes again.
    “What is it?” Oleg asked.
    Trinity turned away from him. “You mean besides Feliks being dead? Isn’t that enough?”
    Oleg grunted. He did that a lot. It was practically a third language for him.
    “There is more. You turned your back on us, came rushing back here. Something upset you, and it wasn’t just Feliks dying.”
    He touched her shoulder and she pulled away, then spun to face him.
    “It wasn’t a prayer,” she whispered, barely controlling her fury.
    Oleg frowned, grunted again.
    “What Kirill said? I understand it. You don’t grow up like I did and not understand violence … vengeance. I’m not gonna try to persuade you to turn the other cheek, ’cause in my life turnin’ the other cheek just means givin’ the bullet a clear path to your brain. But bloodlust is not prayer.”
    “Of course it’s not!” Oleg snapped, throwing up his hands. “You think we don’t know that?”
    Trinity scoffed. “You said, ‘Amen.’ You all did.”
    “And what does it mean, ‘Amen’?” Oleg said quietly, reaching out to touch her face, to lift her chin so that she would look him in the eye and see the love he had for her. “It means ‘I believe,’ Trinity. When I said it, that’s all I meant. The others just repeated it.”
    She closed her eyes tightly and let out a shuddering breath. His touch had broken a dam of emotion within her, but somehow this wave of grief and anger stopped the flow of her tears.
    “Don’t say it like that again, okay? It means somethin’ real to me.”
    Oleg kissed her forehead. “I promise,” he said.
    He kissed her gently on the lips, and then more firmly, and she pressed her body against his and let all of her emotions crash into him, shared it with him in a way she never had with anyone. She trusted him with all she felt, love and fear and rage.
    To the end.
    *   *   *
    The eastern sky had begun to lighten by the time Jax, Chibs, and Opie rolled into North Las Vegas. It had been a long time since either Jax or Chibs had paid the North Vegas charter a visit, but Opie had never been there before. Bone-tired, his jaw tight and his hands aching from gripping so long, Jax guided them into the parking lot of the Tombstone Bar, so named because the building had once housed a business that sold gravestones and other funerary monuments. The growl of the Harleys’ engines echoed off the bar and the building across the lot, loud in the darkness just before dawn.
    The Tombstone was a grade-A shithole, a dive with a faded, tilted sign above the door and dying neon beer logos in the windows that burned 24-7. It had just about the least curb appeal of any bar Jax had ever seen, which made it perfect for SAMNOV to use as the legitimate front for whatever illegal business they might do. Truth was, the North Vegas charter didn’t invest a lot of time or energy into criminal enterprise. Their president, Rollie Thurman, didn’t