Defiant Devotion (The Baranov Legacy #4)

1. Sonya

1

SONYA

T he last time I tried to break out of this house was during the coldest weeks of winter. Almost a year ago, at the end of January, the snow gave me away. My footprints were too traceable in my route from this damn farmhouse I’d been held captive in for the last eleven years. Blizzard-like conditions were supposed to have been my cover, both to mask my path and to prohibit any of these thugs from chasing me down.

They always did. Every time. Without fail, these Ilyin assholes would find me and drag me back into the room I was supposed to wait and live in until they deemed I was “ready”.

The snow foiled my last grand plans to get the fuck out of here. It hadn’t mattered how quickly I ran and darted behind structures coated with thick snow. They’d found me.

That time, I almost reached the second fence to scale it to flee.

This time…

I paused at the fence and glanced back over my shoulder, glad that in this last week of February no snow was blanketing the landscape on this night. No white fluff to indicate where I’d placed my feet. No winds to send my long brown hair flowing out of my hood and giving away my location.

No guards or patrolmen noticing my attempt to bolt.

Only the navy-blue darkness of the starless sky hung overhead. Shadows concealed me in this pitch blackness.

Go. Stop stalling and just go !

I wouldn’t have another chance. Driven not only by the need to survive and escape this captivity, but I was also motivated with the urgency to thwart those bastards’ plans.

For eleven damn years, I’d been held here upstate and cut off from the rest of the world. For over a decade, I had to accept that the Ilyins wanted to stoop so low as to kidnap a Mafia princess like me just to marry me off when they deemed the timing to be right.

And that time was now. Yesterday, I eavesdropped and listened in to the guards talking about finally being done with keeping me up here. That I would be sent off to my “fiancé” within the week. That I’d be shipped away and expected to serve as a pawn in a dangerous political game.

“Fuck that,” I muttered under my breath. The mere notion of being used as a virginal transaction lit a fire within me. Despite the bite of the chill in the wintry air, I felt as though I was burning up from the inside out.

With rage. Fury. Anger born of the darkest wrath. I harbored all three.

I hated my captors for taking me. I loathed those same Mafia men for raping my mother and killing her before my eyes. I scorned them for distancing me from my family.

And I dared them to steal anything else from me.

As I ran again, careful to slip under the eyeline of the patrolmen who’d hawk around the perimeter fence of the property, I let that fiery thought be my mantra.

I’ll be damned if you use me.

I’ll be goddamned if you try to rob my virginity as a power play.

Pumping my arms, I dug my feet in faster and harder after climbing the second fence. I wasn’t escaping under any illusion that I’d succeed, not with my freedom. I would never be free. In each of my five attempts to get away from these men who’d kidnapped me so many years ago, I learned and relearned the cruel lesson that there were simply too many loyalists and fearful men in this small town for me to ever actually leave. All my previous attempts to flee ended the same. I had been dragged back, beaten, and expected to stay put. Again.

This time would be different.

This time, I would not be returned in defeat.

I would be married to whoever they wanted to force me to be with. I knew that. They outnumbered me and were in control here.

But I would not be a virginal bride when they found me again.

I wouldn’t let them steal that one thing they had no business even concerning themselves with.

Instead of running my breath ragged as I sprinted toward the main street of the small town with an intention to disappear, I focused on accomplishing the ultimate twist. I concentrated on how I could mess up their grand plan to offer me as a virginal bride to someone I didn’t know, much less want.

“Whoa!” a man said as he exited the small bar at the end of the main street.

I hadn’t been granted many chances to see this town, but over the last eleven years, I’d pieced together small snippets of this rural area to have a halfway decent mental map in my head. The bar, just like the guards often said, was right at the end of the street, near the property I had been held at. And exactly like the guards said, it was often dark, full of smoke, and narrow.

“Sorry,” I muttered to whoever I’d crashed into with my rush to enter the tiny establishment. I wasn’t sorry. I didn’t give a shit who I knocked into. I was on a mission to fuck the first man I saw, and nothing else mattered. Yet, I halfheartedly apologized to the old senior as he used his cane to lumber out of the bar. It was by rote, automatically expected of me just because I was a woman in a man’s world. Always just a little “girl” in the big, bad man's world.

Passing him by, I let the cloak of impatience settle over me. I scanned the small bar, checking that none of the occupants were members of the Ilyin force. If I risked running out a week before my engagement would be official, all to be caught by one of the men out here drinking, I’d never forgive myself. That was why I’d chosen this night, though. Why I had decided to attempt this stunt when they were most likely drinking at the guesthouse for one of their habitual, biweekly parties. They never lowered their guard enough for me to be confident about escaping, but if there were ever a chance to sneak out of their sight for a little while, it’d be now.

There. I narrowed my eyes, still catching my breath, and studied the tall, lone man seated at the end of the bar. He was by himself, drinking a beer. But his lack of company wasn’t all that made me zero in on him. It was his distance from the others, as though he wanted nothing to do with the other older men in here drinking and bullshitting. Besides him, the clientele were either in groups or coupled with a woman.

It has to be him.

No one else would work, and I couldn’t fail.

After I swallowed, annoyed with how dry my mouth was, I lifted my chin and strode directly toward him.

Even though I’d been a resident of the area for eleven years, none of the locals knew me. I was just another random stranger here, one with a clear and needy goal.

I walked too quickly, pretending to trip over my feet just as I neared him. Crashing against his shoulder, I was treated to the first demonstration of how rugged and fit this tall guy was.

Damn.

I was familiar with strong, buff men. All the Baranov guards and soldiers back home were built like this, and the Ilyin assholes here who kept me captive were cut of the same cloth. Mafia men were all the same—strong and fit to incite danger and violence.

Up this close, as he reached out to steady me from my fake fall, he gave me a hint of his scent, that spicy cologne and muskier note of all male. This was a manly man, and I prayed I could dupe him. I hoped he wasn’t too experienced and wizened that he wouldn’t still fall for my best stab at seduction.

“Oh!” I blinked my eyes, feigning shock as I righted myself. “I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s all right.” He chuckled slightly, and I couldn’t help but guess that he made that sound at my expense. That he was laughing at me for being so clumsy, not that he was laughing with me at the silly collision.

He had to be one of those serious ones, then. I cringed, worried that might be an obstacle.

I nodded, keeping my gaze down so I could look demure and shy. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.” Relying on the old memories of my aunt whose favorite pastime had been fucking all the Baranov soldiers and guards at the mansion, I traced the tip of my tongue along my lower lip then set my teeth on it.

He swiveled. Just like that, it worked. Spinning on his stool to fully face me as I stood next to him, he slapped all his attention on me. I’d caught his attention, and now, I had to keep it.

“Interrupt what?” he asked with a lazy shrug of one massive shoulder.

“Your evening,” I said softly, smiling a bit to let him think I was na?ve and meek. Men liked that, didn’t they? They always had to be superior and calling the shots, not just in my life as Mafia men, but all over the world.

“It’s been dull,” he said, gesturing with his hand for me to sit next to him. “But now that you’re here, maybe you can help me liven it up.”

Yes. Yes! I couldn’t believe that it was working. That merely facing this rugged man with impossibly dark eyes could make this a reality. I’d planned to sneak out and fuck a stranger all to thwart my captors, but not once did I have the confidence that it could work.

“Oh, I can’t.” I shook my head slightly without stepping back.

Play hard to get. Look shy. Smile sweetly.

I was a virgin, closed off from the world for the last eleven years. I didn’t know how to flirt or how to seduce a man. All I had were the memories of my horny cougar of an aunt from long ago.

“No?” He arched a brow, calmly setting his elbow on the top of the bar so he could continue to face me. “You can’t or won’t?”

I did that shy smile again, giving him a little more rope to think that he was tempting me. “Can’t. I really… Well, I really shouldn’t.”

“Why’s that?” he asked. Not nosy. Not pushy. Merely curious.

When I risked another glance at his handsome face, I wondered if that smoldering gaze truly meant he desired me. It felt like it. Under his serious stare, I felt like he was stripping me bare.

“I have something else to do tonight.”

“Hmm.” He lifted his beer and took a drink, not tearing his gaze off me for a second. The door opened and closed behind me, and I couldn’t help but flinch. In the process, I stepped closer to him, that much further between his legs that he parted to let me stand in his space. “And what’s that? What does a gorgeous woman like you have planned for the night?”

Here goes. I licked my lip again, then touched my teeth to the corner of it. “I plan to…” Lowering my gaze wasn’t an act. It was hard to just come out and so bluntly dare to say this.

Hurry up. You have to try. You can’t go back and let them take this from you too.

I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and raised my gaze to his. “I plan to lose my virginity tonight.”

He didn’t react. Not a flinch. No lift of his brows in surprise. He was a serious guy, all right.

“I want to find someone to sleep with,” I said, amazed that my tone was stronger the more I spoke. Something about him relaxed me.

“Someone willing to show me a good time,” I clarified. It didn’t matter if I enjoyed it. It’d probably hurt having sex for the first time. But it would be my choice to make. My only choice to ever make again before I was some asshole’s wife.

Still, he watched me with that stern seriousness. But the longer he didn’t reply, the more I worried he would reject such an out-of-the-blue comment like that. Or maybe he knew an Ilyin guard. What if…

“Anyone would do?” he asked at last, his voice so gruff and thick, like the whiskey they might pour here.

I nodded, braving another small step toward him when his gaze darkened with lust. “Any?—”

He gripped the front of my coat and pulled me even closer. With the force of his tug, I almost crashed against him again. Stopped when I slammed against his chest, I held my breath at how he’d nearly wrenched me all the way forward until our lips could’ve touched.

He remained an inch apart from me, his mouth curling up in a slow, mischievous smile at my gasp of surprise. “Anyone?” he asked again. Dragging his hand lower until he snaked his arm around my back, until he hugged me as he studied me, he brushed my hair back and tucked it behind my ear.

Holy shit. How can… How can he be this good? This sexy and… and…

I’d come here desperate to seduce the first man I found. But I hadn’t been prepared for a cunning guy like him to turn the tables and make me needy instead.

His touch burned. That steady, deep stare of his unraveled me. It was the soft press of his lips on my cheek that had my pulse racing, though. “Even me?” he whispered against my ear.

Oh, my God.

“Yes,” I replied. “Even you.”

“A stranger?” he asked.

I nodded, more eagerly. “No names. Just… sex.” Slanting into him felt natural. As he reared back to see my face as he talked, I mourned the absence of his warmth.

“This isn’t some kind of a prank or something, is it?”

“No. I just want…” I swallowed hard, closing my eyes more under the tender caress of his palm as he cupped my face. “I just want to live my life. To be wild for once.”

“Say no more, stranger .” A devilish grin covered his face as he leaned in to kiss me slowly. Deeply.

It was my first kiss.

My first foray into the dangerous game of desire.

The electric pressure of his hot mouth over mine was over all too soon. In an instant, I craved him to do it again. I craved all he could give me. Wanting his lips on me again, I gasped at the pure need he’d caused me to struggle with so instantly.

“Let’s get out of here,” he suggested, taking my hand and guiding me to follow him out of the bar.

I opened and closed my mouth, stupefied by the lingering burn of his kiss. Clinging to the hot grip of his strong hand over mine, I tried not to sink under the overwhelming excitement—and slight nervousness—of being led to the one and only time I’d have sex with someone of my choosing.

Just like that, I was about to lose my virginity.

It was a fool’s errand when I’d be subjected to whatever my husband demanded of me soon enough. But right now, under this stranger’s warm hold on my hand, I felt more alive than I ever had before.

For the first time in eleven years, I was acting out.

I was defiant.

I was rebelling against my captors’ wishes.

Finally, after having no control, I’d wrested a little of it back to me.

I wouldn’t be some thing to barter with. I wouldn’t be a pure virgin anymore.

And it would all be worth it.

A small smile teased my lips as the stranger opened the door and led me out into the cold once more.