Chapter 11 - Andre
ANDRE
My father never needed to formally call for a meeting. The four of us—me, my father, Sergei, and Roman—were always near and we never suffered any major obstacles to talking about business.
When he told me to come for a meeting and lunch, I knew something was up.
“Bring your supposed assistant, too,” he’d said.
His expectation to have Sofia there had to mean something. And after our meeting concluded, I knew what it was.
He was still suspicious of her, not trusting her in my office. Or even in my life. He’d never cared about the women I wanted in my life. But I supposed one hadn’t retained my attention for as long as I’d been obsessed with Sofia.
He was jaded, no doubt about it. My mother hadn’t wanted anything to do with him after their arranged marriage.
She’d lived in Russia with Anya and didn’t act like a wife to him at all.
When he encountered Claire, she’d resisted being with someone from a Mafia family, his total opposite.
He’d struggled with getting her to want to be in his life and then more so when her security was compromised.
And yes, he was distracted when he’d fallen for her.
We witnessed the same thing between Sergei and Natalie.
Bringing a woman into our circle wasn’t a simple matter of introducing them and assuming it would take its course like any other couple might expect.
Our family was rooted in generations of drama, bloodshed, and wealth.
My father was looking out for me, naturally guarded and suspicious of anyone getting close to any of us. Our circle was small for a good reason.
But it seemed that his resistance to welcoming Sofia as someone who’d stay was due to his need to look out for the family. For the business.
“Intel is leaking,” he’d started out as saying to kick off this meeting. “And it’s leaking from your office.”
I shook my head, automatically rejecting his claim. “I haven’t even been doing anything. I haven’t been working or in my office.”
Roman frowned. “I thought you said you wanted your sexy little maid to be a new office assistant.”
I held back a growl at his calling her sexy. Any other man noticing her beauty rubbed me the wrong way. “She is. She’s been cleaning up my office for when I’m off this light-duty nonsense.”
“Then that simplifies it,” my father said. “She is leaking the intel.”
I bristled, gritting my teeth and sitting upright.
“What? What the fuck is being leaked?” I huffed a mirthless laugh at the preposterous idea.
“There isn’t anything to leak in that office.
It’s a dumping ground for the fucking bookkeepers we used to hire.
All the papers are old and meaningless for anything any enemy could use against us. ”
“You do everything digitally anyway,” Sergei said. “Mostly.”
I nodded. “I do. That’s why when our security team found Emilio Ricci was hacking into my system, I had Oleg take him out.”
“And that coincided with the end of any intel about the drug routes being shared,” Roman said.
“Yes. That and I caught Yusef snooping in my office. Sofia said that when she saw him in there, he said he was looking for a map. I killed him right then and there.” I splayed my hands out. “Ergo, the leak of intel stopped.”
My father pointed at me. “That. Why was she in your office to begin with?”
I was getting sick of this third degree. He had the right to be this strict and careful, but for fuck’s sake, Sofia wasn’t doing anything.
“I don’t know. It was her first day and she was probably lost. Renee had her doing stupid bullshit tasks, probably testing her and seeing if she’d quit with the nonsense.”
“Fine.” My father nodded once and sat back.
“You caught Yusef red-handed and killed him. You had the clues to target Emilio Ricci, and you had Oleg kill him. Some intel had stopped being leaked, anything pertaining to the drugs. But other intel is being leaked. It may not be anything too important, but it’s only coming from things you’d have in your office.
” He sat forward. “You’ve always been my negotiator, Andre.
My trusted right-hand man. The chatter that our men are picking up on, that the Giovannis are aware of what political candidates we’re planning to sponsor, or that Roberto Giovanni is following up on some of our investment moves…
That’s information sourced back to you and what you manage. ”
I furrowed my brow. The political sponsorships and investments weren’t even dirty. We had grown our wealth through legal and illegal means of revenue. But it didn’t seem likely that Roberto Giovanni or any other crime family rival would want to care about our legal business and economic decisions.
“So you’re saying that Sofia’s spying? That she’s been in my office snooping and sharing intel with enemies?” I couldn’t help another preposterous laugh. “I’ve been in the office with her. She hasn’t been in there without my supervision. If she were trying to do something, I’d know it.”
But would I?
I was in the office, but that was because of my need to be near her.
While I sat there and let her tidy up for the couple of hours in the morning that she actually worked, I was often on my phone—either with calls or tending to emails and messages.
I wasn’t hovering over her and hawking over her every move.
“Consider it,” my father concluded sternly. “Consider the possibility that she could be a threat.”
“You think every woman’s a threat,” Roman teased.
He narrowed his eyes at him. “The very real and obvious effect of living and learning,” he quipped dryly. Facing me again, he sighed. “Don’t make the mistake of being led by your dick, Son. Use your head and make sure this maid or assistant of yours isn’t going to be a problem.”
We spoke about a few other matters, and then we headed out to eat with the women.
Maisie’s mistake of mixing up ass with sass helped to break the serious mood, but after the meal and once we’d gone back to my building, I felt ragged with the nagging worries about whether my father was being paranoid or if he had a good point about trusting Sofia.
Maybe I was biased in wanting her so badly.
Perhaps I wasn’t thinking straight and being logical about her showing up in my life.
However, the slight chance that I could be letting down my father ate away at me. The possibility that a woman could be duping me peeved me.
I didn’t want to test her, but I would. I’d make sure that Sofia wasn’t a spy or anything like that.
My sister contacted me, saying she wanted to talk to Sofia that evening, and it was the window of opportunity for me to spring a slight trap.
Anya: If Sofia is free, I’m going to come over and talk about that nursing program with her.
Andre: Sure. Go ahead.
After I checked that Anya—and Daria, since she’d tagged along—were busy talking about nursing coursework with Sofia in the kitchen, I headed to my office to prepare some bogus documents and lies about a made-up drug shipment.
It’d been a while since I had gotten on my laptop or used the printer, and I wasn’t really eager to be back in the swing of things.
Everyone was right about me. I did work too much.
A lot of my duties as a negotiator meant speaking with people and cutting deals.
Those were done via calls, emails, and in-person meetings.
I never let myself be bogged down with administrative crap, but I imagined that if I expanded our legal business ventures, I’d need a real office with real staff.
For now, my only task was to make up some correspondence about a fake drug shipment and leave it stuffed among papers that Sofia would likely be organizing and straightening up tomorrow when she came in here to “work”.
The next morning, I woke up with apprehension about how this would play out. Testing Sofia’s loyalty was a necessity. I knew that. But it also bothered me to have to do it at all.
If she’d just submit to me and be mine, I wouldn’t doubt her.
If she’d stop this game of keeping distance between us, I’d know her to beat down any suspicions anyone had about her.
“Is your shoulder bothering you?” she asked as we walked to my office together.
In another skirt and short-sleeve blouse outfit, she looked semi-professional yet casual and, as always, fresh-faced and fuckable.
She was also as observant as ever, noticing that I had been rubbing my shoulder.
The fifteen minutes or so that I’d spent on my laptop last night had been enough to tweak it all into the realm of discomfort.
My injuries hadn’t been that severe, but they didn’t go well with my admittedly shitty posture when at the computer.
That was another reason I preferred to work on the go, on my phone.
“It’s fine,” I lied. I was probably being stupid to deny any massages, like what Claire advised me to get to better speed up the recovery and soothe out any stiffness with the scar tissue.
We entered my office, as usual.
I set my coffee on the edge of my desk, as usual.
She sighed and grabbed a coaster to insert under the mug, as usual.
Instead of biting back a smile at her attention to detail like that, I sat and got my phone out.
“Did you have a good conversation with Anya and Daria last night?” I asked without looking up.
This was how we did this. She’d tidy up and I’d sit there and “work”. Our mutual presence wasn’t something we could deny, but we left each other to our own devices.
“I did. Anya is very interested in becoming a nurse. She seems like a very determined young lady.”
I shrugged. “She does seem like she’s determined.”
“Seems?”
I felt the burn of her gaze as she glanced at me, but I didn’t look up, held in the suspense of waiting for her to find the fake papers I’d set out.
“You say that like you don’t know your own sibling.”
“I don’t. Not really.” I sighed as she moved to another pile of papers opposite from the fake ones I’d left out. It wasn’t like I could tell her to go to those. She had to find it and show me her reaction—if any.
“Anya was estranged for most of my life.” While I tracked through older messages with someone who wanted to sell us property in Florida, a potential site that could be used for international shipping, I elaborated on how my sister lived in Russia, how my mother had brainwashed her to view my father as a villain and criminal and nothing else.
After I concluded that Anya was coming around and that we’d been getting to know each other much more since she’d moved here, Sofia surprised me by telling me about a cousin who had been on-and-off estranged for long bouts of time due to an illness.
The guise of autopilot working—her cleaning and me reviewing messages—seemed to give us a neutrality that enabled us to open up to each other.
“Is this cousin nearby now?” I asked, wondering if she was a reason Sofia had begun—and paused—a nursing program.
When she didn’t reply, I looked up.
She’d found the fake papers. The ones I’d made up last night. While we’d talked, she’d moved across my desk and had reached the decoy documents.
Staying still and watching her closely, I noticed her furrowing her brow at the papers.
Her gorgeous brown eyes tracked from side to side as she quickly skimmed the contents.
That alone wasn’t anything concerning. She had to at least check over what she was looking at to store the junk in some manner of organization.
Her looking at a receipt for a restaurant would prevent her from stashing the paper with other documents that wouldn’t match up, like the pile of old tax receipts from charitable donations the family made.
“Sofia?”
She furrowed her brow yet, seeming stuck on reading through the lines on the paper that would give the false indication that product would be shipped to a dock that was practically abandoned.
“Sof—”
“Hmm?” She jerked her face up, quickly masking her overly curious frown. “Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”
Because something else captured your attention? I smiled instead of calling her out on it. “I asked if your cousin is still nearby.”
“Oh. Um. Yes. She is. She is close to me. Well, not here.” She set the paper down and set it on top of a miscellaneous pile. “She, uh…” She shook her head and cleared her throat. “She’s with another relative for now.”
While we didn’t resume talking about her cousin or my sister, there wasn’t a chance for awkward silence to settle over us. My stomach growled, and I stood to tell her that we should go get lunch.
See?
I shoved my hands in my pockets, letting my desire and admiration for Sofia sink in a little deeper.
Nothing happened.
She’s not stealing intel or anything like that.
She might have seemed curious about that paper, but that didn’t mean she wanted it to sell it. She was probably confused about it and wasn’t sure what category of paperwork it belonged in.
She’s not a threat.
My father was wrong.
And with that conviction firm in my mind, I let out a deep breath and hoped that I was right. Not about her, but about good things coming to those who waited.
She’d passed my loyalty test so far.
But would she ever pass the test of submitting to me and quit this farce of denying this attraction that sizzled between us?