Chapter 1 #3
If it wasn’t for Tetya Ana, we’d have been left to the streets. She took both of our mothers under her wing, then, after they died, raised Sophie and me like we were her own.
Tetya Ana hated the men of our world. She’d survived them herself, only to lose all her children to the bratva, one way or another. She did all she could to protect Sophie and me from that life, right up until the day she died when both of us were eight.
My father came for us three days later.
I was blonde, petite, and pretty. Marketable.
But Sophie was plump, shy, and clumsy, and my father was never a patient man.
“Zinaida.” My father puts his hand beneath my chin, tilting my face up to his own and turning it this way and that. “You’re a pretty thing. And it’s a good name, this one. Your mother was a useless whore, but she always had good taste.” He steps back. “Spin for me.”
I’ve taken ballet classes since I could walk.
I perform a perfect pirouette.
Oleg laughs, nudging the man next to him. “This one can dance already, huh?”
“Sophie can dance too.” I pull my cousin forward, but she doesn’t move, her head hanging down. It took Tetya Ana’s lawyer three days to track down my father. We’ve just learned that Sophie’s is dead, killed in some pointless fight.
She’s been crying ever since we found out.
I nudge my cousin. “Show them how you can dance, Sophie.”
I’m nervous, some sixth sense warning me that our lives now depend on what happens in this room.
“Nobody wants to watch a fat girl dance.” Oleg and his friend laugh.
Sophie’s sniffs turn into audible sobs. Oleg’s laughter disappears.
“No man wants to hear little girls cry.” His eyes are narrow and mean, his mouth curled in contempt.
He strikes Sophie without warning, hard enough to knock her to the floor.
She clutches her face, staring up at him with wide, shocked brown eyes.
Neither of us have ever been hit before.
Oleg bends down and stares into her eyes. “Men want little girls to be pretty and do as they’re told.”
Sophie, swallowing her tears, shrinks away from him.
Oleg sneers. “You’re pathetic.” He grabs a chunk of her limp brown hair, eyeing it in disgust. “And you’ll never be pretty enough for the cage.”
A cage?
I don’t like the sound of a cage.
Oleg lets go of Sophie’s hair and pushes her away. “But that doesn’t mean men won’t pay for you.”
I feel a stab of fear. What if they take Sophie and leave me behind?
“What about me?” I take her hand, forcing myself to smile at Oleg. “Men will pay for me, too.”
He and his friend laugh at that. “Oh, yes, lyubimaya.” He touches my blonde plait. “They certainly will.”
He nods at Sophie and addresses the man with him. “Add this one to the special delivery to New York.”
The man nods. “Boss.”
New York? All I know about New York is that it’s in America, which is somewhere a long way away from London.
Sophie clutches my hand, looking up at me with wide, terrified eyes.
“We’re sisters,” I tell Oleg. “We have to stay together.”
He lights a cigarette and smiles coldly at me through the rising smoke.
“You’re cousins. And she’s not my daughter.
You are.” He runs his eyes over me critically.
“The daughter of Oleg the Whip. You belong to me. And I will make you famous, lyubimaya. I will make you so famous that when I do finally sell you, men will pay a fortune to be the first to make you bleed.”
He stands up. “Get her out of here,” he says, nodding at Sophie.
“You want me to take them both?” The man eyes me greedily.
Oleg laughs unpleasantly. “No, muy droog. Nobody touches this one but me. Not for many years to come.”
“Zinny!” Sophie makes a sudden lunge for me, screaming my name. Oleg hits her again, this time so hard that her eyes close, her body falling limp to the floor. The other man picks her up, throwing Sophie’s unconscious body over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
Oleg bends down and stares into my eyes. “I said I will make you famous, daughter,” he says softly. “But take a look at your fat friend and know this: if you cry, if you complain, if you ever do anything to make me angry, I will sell you like I’ve just sold her. Do you understand me?”
I nod.
“Good girl,” he says, straightening up. He sees me staring at Sophie’s body disappearing down the stairs. “Forget her,” he says curtly. “You won’t ever see her again.”
My hand falls from the books on the shelf, the past sliding away.
Oleg told the truth, at least about the second part. I never have seen Sophie again.
But he was also wrong.
I never forgot her. Not for a single moment.
And I’ve never, ever stopped looking for her.
Tetya Ana was no fool. She bequeathed her loft apartment in Covent Garden to a cat charity, which sent Oleg into an uncontrollable fit of rage that left me with marks from his whip that are still visible today.
She left no inheritance for my father to steal.
Or rather, she left nothing he could find.
I was sixteen when her lawyers came to me in secret. Tetya Ana had left Sophie and me a modest fortune in diamonds, the only legacy from her family’s flight out of revolutionary Russia, with strict instructions that we, and not our fathers, receive them.
I overthrew my father six months later and used the diamonds as collateral to start Pigalle, my first gambling and burlesque club.
I’d lived through enough hell by then to know that good luck was extremely unlikely to strike twice.
That club has since expanded into London’s three most elite members-only venues: Pigalle Soho, for men; Pigalle Mayfair, for women; and the Quartier, the club that lies behind the elegant Pigalle brand, to which membership is the city’s most coveted prize.
The Quartier is whispered about in wood-paneled rooms, discussed in hushed voices in some of England’s most prestigious stately homes, and has been the subject of more than one article by eager reporters convinced they’ve stumbled upon the next great conspiracy.
The articles are quickly shut down, of course, and the journalists quietly shown the error of their ways.
Despite lavish bribes, questions in Parliament, and the media’s best efforts, nobody will ever talk about the abandoned theater that lies behind Pigalle Soho’s gaming rooms.
Nobody is stupid enough to throw away power when they are at the hub of it.
Those who are already members of the Quartier have too much to lose.
Everyone else wants membership too much to jeopardize any chance they might have of getting it.
Information.
It’s the eternal currency in the world of the rich, famous, and powerful. A world where everyone has a secret, nobody is safe, and anyone can betray you at a moment’s notice.
It’s my world.
I created clubs where the rich can play their games in privacy. Now their secrets belong to me, along with the power to grant favors where I choose.
That power makes me the person to whom others whisper.
Whispers they all know I pay well for.
About places and parties that might otherwise never be spoken of, for example, where men can indulge their darkest, unspeakable desires. About the shadowy men who supply the girls and boys forced to service those desires.
Men like Georgiy Ivanov.
I founded Sophie’s House with half of Tetya Ana’s diamonds, not only to help the victims of those men, but to hunt them, too. It was the only way I knew to give Sophie her share of our inheritance.
On the surface, it’s a charitable foundation that offers refuge to the victims of sex trafficking.
Beneath the philanthropic cover, it’s far more lethal.
Sophie’s House doesn’t wait for victims to come through its doors. I’m proactive about rescuing people, and I have a team of female operatives who don’t mind joining me in getting blood on their hands to do it.
Every contact I build in the Quartier, every member of my clubs, is cultivated with one aim: to gain access to the people and information I need to disrupt the trafficking of women.
I know the chances of ever finding Sophie at all, let alone alive, are next to zero.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up trying. Every time we open a shipping container, intercept a boat, or break down a door, part of me hopes I’ll find her.
If I don’t wind up dead first.
That idea has never bothered me before. Or not for long enough to get me down.
I’m used to being alone, to being an army of one. It’s the life I chose, after the life I was born into. I’ve always been good with that.
But something about Mak’s words has gotten under my skin.
You need someone to have your back.
I push the annoying echo away impatiently.
If there’s one thing I learned from the day Oleg took me from Tetya Ana’s house, it’s that nobody can ever truly have my back.
Just like nobody had Sophie’s when she disappeared into the black hole of human slavery.
Not even me.
The guilt of that day has never left me. It’s a void in my heart, a constant reminder that nothing in this life can be relied upon, least of all those we love.
Sooner or later, people either betray me or become a weakness to be used against me.
It isn’t an exaggeration. It’s just fact. It’s the price I pay for being Zinaida Melikov.
But I’ve made that name work for me, too.
Used it to instill fear into those who dwell in the darkest shadows of our world, twist them to my will.
To circumvent the law and the glacial pace of authorities.
Doing all I can to save the millions of women who go missing every year, cast into the hell of trafficking, where they are no more than a product to be bought and sold.
Sophie’s House is how I make amends for failing to protect Sophie, and the other girls like her my father sold, from whatever hell became their future.
And if I’m going to continue doing that, I need to get rid of anyone who stands in my way, including whoever this fucker is that keeps trying to kill me.
My phone buzzes with a message from Mak and a link to an encrypted file titled Luke Macarthur.
It contains a brief résumé and a photograph. I open the résumé first.
Luke Macarthur, apparently, is Australian. Thirty-nine years old, six and a half feet tall, 240 pounds.
That’s a lot of man.
Joined the British army at eighteen and was the youngest ever candidate to pass selection for the SAS, their most elite regiment. Specialized in reconnaissance and direct action.
Hunting and killing.
Served for over a decade, made captain, then moved into private contracting for Mak. Has since run large teams conducting recon, security, and lethal ops for corporate clients and private mercenary forces in some of the toughest parts of the world.
So he can handle the big jobs, then.
Still. It’s a long way from private contracting to my world.
I scroll down, but Mak, no doubt in a deliberate attempt to rouse my curiosity, hasn’t included any further detail.
I click on the photograph.
Holy shit.
He’s not handsome. Not exactly.
There’s something about the rugged weariness in the lines etched around his eyes, and a particular strength to his jaw, that turns what once might have been boyish charm into a compelling mystery.
He’s a fucking savage.
I can read it in his scars and see it in his eyes, which are the color of the Indian Ocean, high and bright as turquoise.
But behind the piercing stare and rugged good looks, Luke Macarthur is something else, too. Something much more dangerous.
He’s kind.
I can see it in the slight quirk of his mouth, the creases of laughter and sorrow in his face. Captain Luke Macarthur might be all Mak clearly believes him to be—but he’s also as wholesome as apple pie.
Wholesome. Kind.
Neither trait has any place in the dark world I inhabit.
I close the file, determined to tell Mak to find someone else.
Because I know all too well that there are only two ways wholesome, kind men ever leave my world.
In the middle of the night, with their life and the few things they can carry—or in a fucking body bag, buried by the darkness.