Read Online Sons of Anarchy: Bratva by Christopher Golden - Free Book Online Page B

opened, and Kirill emerged with a pistol and a bottle of beer. Perhaps forty-five years old, Kirill had skin so leathery that its lines seemed more like scars. He kept his remaining hair buzzed tight to his scalp, and he had icy, blue-white eyes that never smiled, even when he himself might laugh. Louis Drinkwater—who’d told Trinity everything she knew about the area—was a local real estate agent who owed Kirill Sokolov many favors and owed the Bratva tens of thousands of dollars. He’d given them the keys to the Wonderland Hotel. Sokolov didn’t trust Louis, but Trinity did. The real estate man had more than his share of sorrow, but he didn’t strike her as a coward.
    Still, they kept watch. Someone would have been on guard in the front, hiding behind darkened windows. Kirill would have known they were coming, but still he had the gun. It was impossible to be too careful.
    They should have been more careful with Oscar Temple.
    Kirill watched them as they climbed from the car, his brow furrowed. He said something in Russian. Trinity heard Feliks’s name and knew what he was asking.
    “In the trunk,” Oleg replied.
    Kirill swore and cast his beer aside, striding toward the car as Oleg went around to the back, keys in hand. Trinity refused to look, marching toward the room she and Oleg had been sharing. She halted before she reached it and forced herself to turn and watch as they opened the car trunk and Kirill clapped his hands to the sides of his skull.
    Grieving for his brother.
    No one brought up the fact that they’d managed to get the guns. It was important—it might give them the edge they needed to survive, maybe even win—but Kirill Sokolov didn’t care about guns just then. He leaned against the car, lay his head back, and stared at the stars.
    Trinity wasn’t close enough to see if he cried.
    The Wonderland Hotel had been their refuge for weeks, but none of them had expected to be buried there.
    *   *   *
    On long rides, Jax couldn’t help thinking about his little brother Tommy. With the sky spreading out in front of him and the road whipping by beneath him, he could hear Tommy’s laughter. There’d been many times when Jax, six years older, had been appointed guardian and protector for his brother while JT had worked on restoring a vintage Harley he’d picked up somewhere.
    Gemma would be making dinner. Jax would take Tommy out to the small yard or to the concrete basketball square next door, the one with the dingy, torn net hanging from the hoop … and they’d run. They never had a destination, the Teller boys—they just ran. From the time Tommy could walk, they would run together. Sometimes they would put out their arms and fly together, or pretend they were astride a Harley when they were far too young to ride. By the time Jax turned eleven, his urgency had faded a little and Tommy tended to take the lead, even though he was only five years old.
    At six, Tommy had died of a congenital heart defect. It was the family flaw—Gemma had it, too.
    Jax didn’t do a lot of running these days—not unless there was trouble. But on these long rides, he remembered what it had felt like to fly with his little brother. Those memories should have caused him pain, made him grieve, but instead they made him happy. For a little while, Tommy was with him again. He wondered if his sons, Abel and Thomas—named after an uncle he’d never known—would run together. Jax hoped that they would.
    Three headlights cut the darkness out on that ribbon of highway. Jax, Opie, and Chibs had been riding for a couple of hours already, and they wound along two-lane blacktop that curved through pine forests, up hills, and into canyons. Later, they would ride through desolate badlands that had a rugged beauty all their own, but long after dark in the middle of a workweek, these roads could be just as desolate. Quiet and peaceful.
    He felt the weight of the gun at the small of his back and knew that quiet and