Boardroom Vows (Boardroom Billionaires #1)

Caroline

If I get one more bug bite on my ass, I'm going to lose my ever-loving mind.

And then wage holy war against the entire species.

Who invented these creatures? What kind of sick, vengeful God designed the mosquito?

Once I die, I fully intend to march up to the Big Man and demand some answers.

Airborne, itch-inducing bloodsuckers—really, Mr. Almighty?

As if menstrual periods and biting the same spot on the inside of your cheek over and over again weren't bad enough, you had to go and craft the most despicable insects of all time, and then give them WINGS?

! Where is your Human Resources department? I'd like to have a word.

He'll rue the day He made me.

Then again, the way my day is going, that meeting between me and my Maker might come sooner rather than later.

Because I've been hiking through these woods since dawn, and the sun is now setting behind the treetops, and I am hopelessly, irretrievably lost.

There's no more denying it. I've spent the better part of the evening pretending I was right on track, that I knew how to read a map, that I'm not the prissy city girl I've always known in my bones that I am.

But I am. I'm New York through and through.

I like PopUp bagels on a Saturday morning after yoga in Central Park.

I know my nail tech's daughters' names and birthdays.

I have a standing order at the bodega on the corner of 78th and Lex, I know that any first date who suggests we go to Carbone is to be avoided like the plague, and I cannot, for the life of me, operate a motor vehicle.

My last driving instructor handed me his card and quietly suggested Uber.

Yet here I am.

Deep in the Catskill mountains.

As darkness sets in.

With no non-mosquito friends anywhere nearby to save me from my imminent demise.

I'd like to phone a friend, but (A) I don't have any of those anymore and (B) my phone died three hours ago.

I can't blame God or the skeeters for that one.

I knew it was at 12% when I first ventured off of the trailhead, and I made the executive decision that I would simply find Afon Satyrin before the battery gave up the ghost. Bad move.

I mean, confident move, right? Like, you go girl, way to believe in yourself.

But, uh, yeah. Bad move.

I just figured it couldn't possibly be that hard. Surely a man does not hide from civilization for six months without leaving some sort of breadcrumb trail, right?

And surely I, Caroline Eleanor Oglethorpe, daughter of one of New York's smartest attorneys, would be able to follow that trail like a bloodhound, right?

Wrong. God, I don't think I've ever been more wrong.

As it turns out, Afon is extremely good at covering his tracks, and I stand no chance of hunting him down.

The trail—if you can call it that, which is generous—has dissolved into empty, featureless forest. Pine needles slap me in the face every fourteen seconds.

There are leaves in my bra, in my hair, nestled deep in my unmentionables.

Have I seen that rock before? I definitely have.

Fuck me sideways. Am I going in circles?

I shift the strap of my backpack, summon all of my remaining willpower, and continue trudging up the side of this hostile mountain.

"You're fine," I say out loud. I started talking to myself around mid-afternoon. That's not what we in the Afon-finding business call "a sign that things are going well." "You're fine, Caroline. Any second now, you're gonna round a bend and run right into this elusive S.O.B."

I force myself to focus on my feet. One boot in front of the other, rinse and repeat. Like a bad dog on a leash, though, my mind keeps wandering back to my couch back home.

Well, it's not "my" couch, technically speaking, although I guess it also sort of is.

My parents' will was complex, so it's taking a long time for the estate lawyers to sort through things.

But I've been living in their brownstone pretty much since the funerals, so I guess calling it mine isn't crazy.

Regardless of the possession issue, it is definitely a nice couch. On a normal night, I'd be settling into it right about now to watch Naked & Afraid and smash a pint of Talenti Gelato (tiramisu flavor, obviously). Wouldn't that be nice? I check my Apple Watch for the time and—

Shit. I forgot. That's dead, too.

The mosquito on my forearm, however, is not dead. It's actually thriving, which is extremely rude under the circumstances. I smack it so hard I leave a bloody smear shaped like a skull and crossbones.

"Good," I snarl at it with no remorse. "Tell your friends."

Then, with a sigh, I keep walking.

Afon Satyrin. What a thing to try to find. I don't know him that well, which is to say I basically don't know him at all. But I don't think anyone really knows him, you know what I mean? Like, the man is kind of fundamentally unknowable. Existentially speaking.

I know I'm not making sense. That's partially the sleep deprivation and the dehydration, as well as the frustration of a six-month-long goose chase. But I really do mean what I'm saying.

He's the silence between two heartbeats. The pause before bad news. The temperature drop before the storm starts, and also kind of in some ways the storm itself.

I've only met him three times. The first was when I buried my murdered parents. He stood in the back, dressed in all black, and didn't say a word to anyone.

The second was in my father's study three weeks later, when he handed me a manila envelope and told me, in that gravelly, baritone voice of his, that if I ever needed anything, I should call.

I wanted to, but I didn't have the guts to do it. So when I happened to see him at Cassandra's cousin Dani's wedding in May, I told myself that I'd walk up to him and ask him the question he's clearly been waiting years for me to ask.

But before I could, he vanished.

I caught a glimpse of his silhouette slipping through the exit door, and by the time I caught up, the city had swallowed him entirely, with not a crumb left behind.

Cut to six months later, and I'm prepared to die on this godforsaken mountain just to find him.

Needless to say, this wasn't Plan A. Plan A was ask Afon's nephew, Matvei, where to find him.

But Matvei had no clue. He just knew that his uncle had left New York after a lifetime of service to the Lazarev Bratva and had no intentions of coming back.

Afon's old bosses, Kir and Lukas Lazarev, co-pakhans of the Lazarev Bratva, were similarly clueless about where their former fixer had gone.

Plan B involved a private investigator with the unfortunate name of Guns McTaggart. Whether his parents hated him at birth or he had just suffered enough blunt force trauma to the head to decide that was a cool D.B.A., I'm not sure, but he really did have that printed on his business cards.

Anyway, Guns took my money—lots of it—only to eventually leave me with nothing but a vague crayon sketch of the Catskills on the back of a bar napkin and a half-hearted, morale-boosting departing phrase of "Good luck, kiddo."

So, here I am.

Plan Z.

Hunt down Afon myself.

I crest a ridge and the woods open up just enough for me to see the sky. It might be beautiful if it weren't so bleak and black tonight. Only a thin ray of moonlight peaks through the thick clouds.

My stomach rumbles, an unnecessary reminder that I'm very hungry and have only a single granola bar left.

I sit down on a rock to relieve my aching feet and sit down to unwrap it.

As I chew, I ruminate—not for the first time in these last six months—about how fucking stupid I am.

I brought one of these bad boys—one!—because I had this insane idea that I would find Afon and be back at the trailhead by lunchtime.

If the Caroline of Today could meet the Caroline of Yesterday, she'd punch her right in her dumb, smug little mouth.

It's only when I'm done licking the wrapper and have begun folding it into a tiny square—because my mama raised no litterer, even in extremis—that I see exactly the kind of Hail Mary I've been praying for.

Smoke.

A thin, faint, barely-there curl of smoke, rising through the trees about a quarter mile to the northeast. I'm not exactly Girl Scout of the Year, but I know deep in my bones that that smoke came from a chimney. It just has a quaint, domestic, log cabin feel to it. Don't ask me how I know.

And if there's a chimney, there's a house. And if there's a house…

… There's a person.

"Oh, thank God," I whisper, to the various woodland flora and fauna paying witness to my despair, to my dead parents, to the Big Man Himself, with whom I am willing to negotiate a temporary ceasefire pending further review of the mosquito issue. "Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God."

I start jogging toward it.

I don't let myself think it's him just yet.

I can't bear the letdown that would follow if it isn't. After six months, I've learned not to let myself think anything is anything, because hope, it turns out, is the bug bite of emotions—small, persistent, maddening, and capable of ruining your entire week.

It's probably some retired dentist from Poughkeepsie. Or, if not that, a meth lab. It might even be—and I would, at this point, settle for this—a very large bear who has learned to make a fire.

If so, fuck it. Eat me up, baby.

One way or another, this journey has reached its conclusion.

I keep charging through. No mosquito or pine needle whip to the face can slow me down now. The woods thin, little by little, and then all at once, sending me rocketing out into a clearing.

In that clearing is a cabin.

It's straight out of Hansel and Gretel. Cedar shingles, a stone chimney, a weathered tin roof. A hefty woodpile is stacked neatly against one outer wall and a pair of boots rests on the porch. I wouldn't be surprised to look down and find a trail of breadcrumbs leading to the front door.

There's also a window.

And in that window is a man.

He's shirtless. I would like the record to reflect that I notice this aspect last. I'm a serious woman on a serious mission, and the shirtlessness of any man encountered during the prosecution of said mission is incidental, irrelevant, and—

He turns toward the window.

—Okay, fine, it's very, very relevant.

Because it is him.

Afon Satyrin, in the flesh, quite literally, standing at a kitchen sink with a dish towel over one shoulder.

He's thinner than I remember from the foyer of my parents' house.

Or no—not thinner. Harder. Like the city softness has been sanded off him.

His shoulders are still broad, though, and the lines of his muscles are stark and undeniable.

His chest is riddled with the proof of bad decisions.

Tattoos I can't read from here run alongside scars I can read just fine—a long one down his sternum, a shorter one across his ribs, and a third, raised and pale, on his left shoulder.

His beard and hair are long and dark, though shot through with more gray than I remember.

The eight-pointed star inked on the side of his throat looks darker against skin that has clearly seen a summer of sun.

He looks good.

Too good, for a man with a decade on me.

Definitely too good for a man who is a known associate of some very dangerous organized criminals, with a rap sheet longer than my arm that still doesn't fit even a quarter of his many, many sins.

As I watch, he turns his head to reveal half of his face in profile. His brow is heavy and knotted downwards, his mouth set in that ever-present frown.

I feel a prickle of fear race through me.

I'm twenty yards from the cabin, half-hidden behind a tree, and it's dark out.

There's absolutely no way he can see me, and yet the back of my neck tingles like he can, like he's known I was coming for the last six months, like he's been waiting at that window for the precise moment a silly girl from Manhattan would crash out of his woods with leaves in her hair and undergarments to ruin his hard-won peace.

I take a step forward to tell him why I've come.

That, I realize immediately, is the fatal mistake.

There've been a lot of little ones along the way—the lone granola bar comes to mind—but this is the metaphorical straw that breaks the camel's back.

Or, to shape that metaphor a bit more closely to this situation, it is the metaphorical tree root that breaks the city girl's neck.

We are not on the same page, my foot and this root, and the negotiation between them is brief, brutal, and not in my favor.

My ankle goes one way.

My knee goes the other.

My center of gravity makes a break for it and leaves me sideways in midair, arms windmilling like a cartoon coyote who has just realized there is no more cliff.

There's only time for one coherent thought, and to my complete embarrassment, it is not Help or Mom! or Roll to protect your face from smashing into the earth.

It is, unfortunately, I really hope he's not looking right now.

Then the ground comes up to meet me, and it brings a rock with it.

Oh.

This is going to leave a mark.

WHAM.

After that, everything goes black.