Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
LUKYAN VOLKOV
Taking a drag from the blunt pressed firmly to my lips, I inhaled deeply, letting the smoke fill my lungs before blowing it out, watching it dance up into the dark sky. Dozens of buildings were in front of me, some even bigger and taller than the one I was staying in.
There were thousands of windows, some dark and quiet, indicating the occupants were most likely asleep.
Others lit up, making it very easy to see into their apartments or hotel rooms. Lights danced across the sky from the dozens of other buildings in front of me, the world still wide awake and going strong despite the fact that it was two in the morning.
It was my last night of absolute freedom.
It wasn’t what you might think. I wasn’t going to jail or dying from some sort of illness. I was just moving to Russia to marry some random woman I’d never met.
You know, normal shit.
An arranged marriage was pretty common in our world. It was the easiest way to solidify alliances between organizations. Fuck, even my sister’s marriage was arranged.
I never thought that would be in my future, though. I always envisioned that I’d settle down, marry a woman of my choice who would pop out a couple of kids, and then live the rest of my life with my wife, children, and annoying siblings at my side.
But the world decided something else for me instead.
I had no one to blame but myself. It was all my fault, really. I had offered to take my big brother’s place. He was originally going to marry Anya, the bride my horrid grandfather arranged to be wed into the family in exchange for access to her family’s trade routes.
But then, he’d gone and grown a heart.
Okay, that wasn’t fair. Aleksandr always had a heart. It was just stuck behind an impenetrable wall of grumpiness until a five-foot-nothing cartel queen came a-knocking.
She had bulldozed that wall down with a goddamn sledgehammer. Suddenly, he was all lovey and sappy. Which, yes, I acknowledged was a good thing because he was finally happy. But it also meant there was no way in hell he could marry Anya.
The same went for Nikolai, my other, slightly less grumpy but also still grumpy older brother. He was even more head over heels for his woman than Aleksandr was for his, and that was saying something.
Plus, Tatiana was currently six months pregnant with his twins.
So, yeah, he was out. And if one of us didn’t marry Anya, that horrid grandfather I mentioned earlier was going to kill Illayana, our sister.
It had to be me. Little old me.
I wasn’t complaining. It was just the hand I’d been dealt, and I had no problem adjusting to my circumstances. Life always threw crappy shit at you. How you dealt with that crappy shit was what made a person. Determined if you were going to thrive or just survive.
The cold wind skated over my skin, and despite the goose bumps running down my body, I welcomed it. Welcomed the refreshingness of it.
I leaned forward, bracing my forearms on the railing, and took a deep breath in.
Not a lot of people knew it, but I liked the quiet.
It was calming. Peaceful. The complete opposite of the chaos in my brain.
My life. I felt as though I could finally breathe in moments like that.
The dark sky. The cold, icy wind. The spatterings of bright stars in the night.
Tranquil was the word to describe it. And for someone who ran a mile a minute in everyday life, moments like that were hard to come by. Hard to enjoy.
I savored it, basking in that moment and clearing my mind. Clearing all the noise and all the bullshit and just—
A dark chill shot down my spine. I stiffened and straightened to my full height, going from relaxed to hyperalert in an instant.
She’s watching me.
There was a certain feeling you got when someone was watching you. You couldn’t see them, you couldn’t hear them, but there was a part of you that just knew they were there, almost as if they were breathing down the back of your neck.
That was the feeling coursing through my bones.
I shouldn’t have been as excited as I was at that prospect…but fuck, I was. I was yet to meet anyone who matched my crazy, but that woman…My stalker…
Oh, she matched it to a tee, and it was fucking exhilarating.
I couldn’t help but be curious about what she would do once she found out I was going to be married in only a few short days. She’d shown a certain level of possessiveness toward me already. That was evident based on the fingers she’d sent me of a woman she thought I’d had sex with.
You’d think something like that would have freaked me out.
Surprise, surprise. It didn’t. It turned me on. And I found myself deliberately trying to antagonize her. To get her to reveal herself instead of hiding in the damn shadows all the time.
I wanted to see her.
My grandfather, Sergei Volkov, had called a few weeks before to tell me the date had officially been set. That I had three weeks to get my affairs in order before my ass was to be on a plane to Russia.
He’d been pushing the wedding back for months, giving excuse after excuse as to why it was being postponed.
My father suspected Sergei was having trouble maintaining the deal.
That my bride-to-be’s family was trying to renegotiate the terms, forcing my grandfather to push the wedding back until they could come to some sort of agreement that suited them both.
I think it was partly that, and my father, that were responsible for the delay. Sergei had placed an open contract on my father. Ten millions dollars to whoever could end his life.
For the past six months, assassins from all over the world had tried to claim that bounty. Tried breaking into our home. Murdering him in his bed. Shooting him in drive-bys. The whole nine yards.
None of those attempts had been successful, thanks to Autumn, the Crimson Death. World-renowned assassin. His girlfriend. A word I never thought I would say in conjunction with my father, but there we were.
They’d met when they were both kidnapped by the same man. Talon Scardo. A fucktard of man with a huge daddy complex and a need to have the world view him as a smart and important man.
Bore.
He’d made the mistake of making them partners in a gladiator-style fight-to-the-death tournament where four people entered the arena, and only two walked out alive.
My father and Autumn hated each other at the start. Had actually tried to kill each other several times before they reluctantly entered into an alliance with the sole objective of working together to try to escape Talon.
And thanks to a joint effort from the Bratva, La Cosa Nostra, and Los Zetas, that escape came to fruition.
After a lot, and I mean a lot of fuckery—mainly from my father’s side—they had worked on their feelings for one another and were all in.
There was no denying the fact that it was a little weird for me. I’d only ever seen him with one woman before. My mother had been murdered over ten years earlier by a rival family, the Voznesenskys. But seeing how happy he was made all that weirdness more than worth it.
I never noticed before how much he was just coasting through life. How unhappy he truly was. Merely existing and not living.
Autumn had brought him back from the darkness.
She, along with a four-man security team, had managed to thwart every attempt on my father’s life.
I suspected Sergei was desperately trying to have my father killed before the wedding because he didn’t want to risk something happening during the event itself and possibly ruining the deal he so urgently needed with the Tarasovs.
He must have given up, though, because it had been a month since the last attempt. And in two days’ time, I would be walking down the aisle.
That dark chill vanished.
I exhaled heavily. She wasn’t watching me anymore.
I ignored the tug of disappointment in my gut because it was completely and totally irrational, and went inside.