Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
Lucy
I woke up gasping for air and with a fire in my nostrils.
“Wake up.”
Through the film of tears, I made out Kirill’s looming, forbidding shape. I blinked, gasped some more, and tried to shake out the burn streaking up my nose.
“What the fuck?” I choked. “What was that?”
“You were taking too long to wake up. I grew impatient.”
He tossed something on the coffee table. I sat up on a wide leather couch as if that would give me leverage over his…six-three? Six-four frame. We were in a room paneled with dark wood. Behind him, an overhead rectangular light fixture illuminated the area through warm-toned stained glass.
I glared at him. “Smelling salts?” The events of the night resurfaced in my mind, and I dipped my chin to avoid the chill in his eyes because it set off a creepy-crawly sensation down my spine. “You knocked me out.”
He shrugged. “Blood choke.”
“You could have killed me!”
“I have absolute control over my actions. Unfortunately, I signed a covenant not to kill you.”
My brows shot up as my anxiety waned a smidge. I grinned, finally tipping my face up to look at him. “Of course.” The covenant. I kept forgetting about that damn contract we signed that forced a truce between the bratva and the De Lucci crime family so the feds would leave both organizations alone.
It was the only thing preventing Kirill from breaking my neck.
He crouched in front of me. “You’ve presented me with a problem.” His icy blue eyes revealed nothing. Not even his dark hair falling over his forehead softened the sharp angles of his face.
“Viktor…”
“Is dead.”
“It was self-defense,” I argued. “It was me or him. He killed Bruce Davenport, too.”
“Oh, I know, but you’ve still given me a problem. It’s complicated to clean. We have two dead state troopers, which left me with only one choice.”
“Stage it as a traffic stop gone wrong.”
A telltale smile played on his mouth. “You’ve thought this out.”
“There’s not much to think out. It’s what happened,” I said, trying to ignore the pounding in my temples and the sandy feeling in my mouth. “Did you drug me?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Choking me wasn’t enough?”
“You had to remain unconscious while I dealt with the clusterfuck you created.” Kirill got up from his crouch and returned with a glass of water.
“Clusterfuck I created?” I winced when the increased volume of my voice sent a stab through my skull. I stared at the offered water dubiously.
“I would hardly go to the trouble of waking you up only to drug you all over again. We have time-sensitive arrangements to make.”
“Arrangements?”
He sighed heavily and held the water under the tip of my nose. “Maybe I damaged your brain. You seem to parrot everything I say.”
Asshole.
“Drink this,” he ordered, touching the rim of the glass to my mouth. “Don’t force me to pour this down your throat.”
“You’re impossible.” I grabbed the glass from him, unmindful that it sloshed over my hand, and took a tentative sip. But the relief of the liquid to my parched palate was so good, I took healthy gulps until I finished.
“Good girl. Now we talk.”
Kirill sat on the coffee table across from me. “You know the ramifications of Viktor’s death.”
“The heat is on you.”
“We can help each other.” Kirill Zahkarov was the acting pakhan of the New York bratva after his father stepped down last year.
I’d met him face-to-face twice. Once during a dinner party where he mostly glared at me, and the second time was in a meeting with the feds where he was forced to play nice or risk more scrutiny on his organization.
“Why? You already staged the scene, right?”
“I can unmake it.” He held out his phone to show me a video. At first all I could make out were the backs of Viktor and his crew, but when they both fell to the ground and I got up, there was no mistaking my face on the video.
“You asshole. You stood there and would have let him shoot me.”
Kirill’s animosity sprang from my personal mission to expose the perpetrators of my friend’s murder.
He’d been a corporate lawyer but got entangled in an investigation involving high-ranking officials of the government in a sex scandal.
I wasn’t expecting the bratva angle, but my actions had the unexpected domino effect that took out key players of the New York bratva, landed one of their investment firms under SEC scrutiny, and sent Kirill’s best friend to prison.
“I don’t owe you anything except you’re not dying by my hands. And you forget the Moscow and New York bratvas have an alliance. If anything, I should turn you over to Peter and have him mete out justice on his brother’s killer.”
Years of bluffing as a fixer lubricated my vocal cords to coat my tone in false bravado. “Then I don’t understand what there is to discuss. You think I’m going to beg you for my life?”
“I don’t know…are you?”
“Not in this lifetime.”
“How about your family’s?”
My gut tightened.
“As much as I hate to say this, turning you over to Peter is only going to start a bloody war between the Russian and Italian mafias. I’d rather not begin my reign as pakhan in the middle of one.
And it will not end with your life, or the De Luccis, or the Morettis.
Peter would wipe out three generations of your family. ”
I inhaled sharply at this. The initial adrenaline I woke up with was slowly fading into a reality that my feet were lodged in shit-sucking quicksand. No, I was already waist-deep in it.
“I don’t know what else you need from me. Looks like you’ve already solved the problem.”
A crooked smile twisted his mouth. It was a smile that reminded me of the sharp blade of a scimitar and the blood it was going to draw.
“You think I did this out of an altruistic heart?”
“Didn’t know you have a heart to begin with,” I muttered.
He brushed my insult off. “You owe me, Miss De Lucci, and I’m going to collect on that debt.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “You have a scandal you want me to fix?”
He scoffed. “I don’t need your fixer capabilities seeing that many of your clients end up dead.”
Again. Asshole. But it did sting.
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense.” I held my tongue so I could go home because, the little I understood of Kirill, I was sure he was going to keep me from doing exactly that. “Is the traffic stop shootout on the police scanners now?”
“Yes, they’re taping off the crime scene as we speak.”
“Don’t state troopers have body cams and dash cams? They would have captured everything.”
“That’s taken care of. There was a disruption to the cloud storage. It never uploaded. My hackers had already edited the footage. When they finally dock what’s stored internally, it won’t show past when the trooper made the stop.”
“Wouldn’t that make the investigators suspicious?”
“That’s why we have to act now. Establish your whereabouts.”
I sat up straighter, my gaze turning wary. “That I was here?”
“Where else?”
“That I was with you?”
Kirill gave a condescending sigh. “Lyutsiferka, you’re not obtuse.”
I laughed a bit maniacally. “No one would believe it. Least of all, Dom or Luca. They know I hate you.”
“Ouch.” The way Kirill said ouch was bland and without so much of an eye flicker. “You wound me.”
“And don’t think I didn’t know you just called me Lucifer.”
“Little Lucifer. I’ll think of a better endearment.”
“All right. I’m on the verge of hysteria in this alternate universe. What exactly are you trying to tell me?”
“My dear Lucy.” Again in a chilling tone without inflection. “Since I can’t kill you, please do me the honor of becoming my wife.”
I burst out laughing. Hysterically. I didn’t even stop to think whether I’d insulted him or he'd insulted me.
Oh my God. He was more psychotic than I had first perceived.
My rib cage heaved and started to hurt from the uncontrolled laughter.
My head throbbed. My eyes filled with tears.
Kirill’s face blurred. I was trapped in a dark comedy hell with the person who wanted me dead.
It must have eaten at him that the covenant had forbidden him to physically harm me.
Genius, actually, to have Viktor do his dirty work, but I wouldn’t put it past Kirill that he would find other ways to take his vengeance.
When I finally harnessed my hysteria, I stared at him. He was still stoically unaffected. Bored even. Did this man possess any shred of emotion? A nagging inside me wanted to test that limit. Make his life a living hell. Why not as his wife?
I squashed that thought. “Good one. I almost believed you.”
“I’m serious.”
“Convince me.”
“I called Margo.”
My eyes widened. “You didn’t.” If he called the matchmaker, he was dead serious.
When Kirill put a contract on my head, Margo stepped in before a mafia war could break out between the Russian and Italian mafias.
She brokered a truce. But to finally get the evidence for the feds to leave the Russian and Italian mafias alone, I had to sign a covenant with Margo that would allow her to send marriage contracts my way.
It also prevented bratva retaliation.
So far, in the last six months, I’d turned down eight proposals. Margo was getting impatient, and she was the last person I wanted to see tonight.
Or rather, morning. God, I’m exhausted.
A knock sounded on the door, and a man stepped in. “Pakhan.”
Kirill stood and walked over.
As the newcomer whispered in his ear, Kirill’s expressionless eyes slowly and uncomfortably focused on me.
It was damn unnerving. How could I even stand at an altar exchanging vows with him?
His eyes alone could freeze me into a block of ice before I said, “I do.”
After their conversation, Kirill returned to me, but he did not sit again. “I’m not the one to convince you about this marriage. It will make sense, and you can divorce me within a year, maybe two. We’ll have prenups drawn up—”