Chapter 21 - Mira
Mira was terrified. She replayed the voice note Sarah had sent her and felt her insides quiver with fear and alarm as she heard the thread of fear in Sarah’s voice. The voice note said Oleg Dostoevsky suspected Sarah of helping Mira escape her wedding and had been relentless in watching her and getting people to watch her ever since.
Sarah was also being treated like dirt by all the servants and everyone else in the villa, and she was increasingly scared of being attacked or killed.
Mira needed to save Sarah, but there was no way she could save Sarah without going back home herself. And if she went home, her father would take her captive. She remembered the anger on his face when he accused her of being a slut, and she knew he wouldn’t let her escape if he was able to get his hands on her.
Only Mikhail would be able to help her, she thought, running to his office in the villa without thinking. She’d been there only a handful of times since their marriage.
It was a few doors down from the library, but because it was also where he conducted his mafia business, it was generally off-limits to her. He hadn’t said so in so many words, but it was understood.
She walked in on him and Williams studying several pictures of different yachts, private jets, and mansions. She didn’t spare a thought for them. Mikhail was a wealthy man, which meant people would often try to sell him properties.
He looked up in surprise when she barged in, but she noticed his expression lit up when he saw her. He dropped all the documents he was holding at once and crossed the room to her. “What’s going on, Mira?”
Mira rushed to his side. “I need your help, Mikhail. Listen to this. Sarah’s in trouble, we have to help her.”
“Who the hell’s Sarah?” he demanded.
“She’s the one who encouraged me to come and meet with you in order to escape Edgar,” she announced.
“Listen to her voice note, Mikhail,” Mira said, clutching his arm in her urgency.
She felt him go still at her touch, and it made her look up at him. His dark eyes had darkened even more and they blazed down at her with something so raw and naked and powerful that she felt scorched. She jerked her hand away and pressed play on the voice note.
Sarah’s trembling voice filled the room again.
When they were done listening to it, Mikhail looked from her to Williams and something passed between the two men, something like understanding, but no words were spoken.
Mikhail transferred his gaze to hers. “I understand she’s important to you?”
“Yes. Please get Sarah out. Get her out of there for me,” Mira pleaded, beside herself with alarm for her friend. “Sarah rarely complains about anything. She bears everything quietly. If she’s saying anything now, it means it’s a whole lot worse than she’s letting on.”
Mikhail searched her gaze for a minute, then he sighed and said, “Give me the layout of your father’s house. I need to know my way around if I’m going to get her out.”
Mira hesitated for a fraction of a second before she began mapping out the sketch of her father’s villa with a pen and paper. Some inner instinct, a deep-seated loyalty to her undeserving father, made her omit the location of his bedroom and his library from her sketch.
When she was done, something in the way Mikhail’s gaze scanned the document quickly, flicked to her face, and then scanned the page again made her realize that he knew exactly what she’d done and what it meant.
Mira felt her heart sink to her toes when he said nothing at all of this discovery that she didn’t trust him. He was willing to walk into his enemy’s den at her behest, even though, for all he knew, it might well have been a trick by her and her father to trap him. He was willing to trust her, but she hadn’t trusted him.
“Mikhail, wait!” she called.
But he had already thrust the paper into the back pocket of his jeans. “I’ll be seeing you,” he said as he leaned forward and pressed an incredibly gentle kiss against her lips.
Then he strode from the room.
“That boy has given you his trust, you know,” Williams said quietly, worsening her pain and guilt.
“Mikhail is a mafia boss. He doesn’t trust anyone, Williams,” she said.
The old man stared at her through narrowed eyes for a minute, and Mira had the unnerving feeling that he saw far more than he was letting on. Finally he said, “Whenever you’re ready to talk to me, little one, I’ll be here.”
He gave her a gentle paternal pat on the shoulder and turned and walked away.
Mira was beside herself with worry as she waited for Mikhail to return. She already knew how dangerous her own father was, and she was sure she probably didn’t know the half of it—unlike Mikhail, who was in the same business as her father and who her father had tried countless times to kill.
Yet knowing all that, he had risked his life for a servant he had never met, simply because she’d asked him to. That was saying a lot. Her heart turned over in her chest as she thought about it.
Mira sank onto the nearest chair in his office, thinking about Mikhail and what he had done. He was special, she thought. He was the reason she still had any faith left in humanity.
He was so tough and so powerful and yet he could be so gentle and thoughtful. When he made love to her, he was so giving and generous. He showered her with gifts every chance he got, no matter how much she protested that she didn’t want them. He made her feel safe. He was possessive, and—
Are you falling in love with him? her subconscious queried.
Mira sank onto the bed, letting the thought wash over her. But before she could consider her feelings, her phone beeped with the sound of an incoming message. She looked down at her WhatsApp chats and saw that it was a message from her father. She’d forgotten to block him on WhatsApp.
Why was he messaging her? He hadn’t captured Mikhail, had he?
Mira opened the message with more than a little trepidation, and the entire world tilted on its axis.
It was an old picture of a seventeen-year-old Mikhail. His face was that of a teenage boy, but the dark heavy eyebrows, the proud aristocratic nose, and the granite jaw were unmistakable.
He was standing over a woman; she was red-haired and bent at an unnatural angle that made it obvious she was dead. A keening cry escaped Mira’s throat as she recognized the woman at once.
That was her mother in the picture—Marybeth Dostoevsky.
Mikhail was standing over her mother’s dead body with the murder weapon, a knife, in his hand. Her mother’s entire midsection was covered in blood where she had been stabbed, and the knife he held dripped blood.
Underneath the picture, her father had written a cryptic note: Happy married life .
Anger warred with confusion inside of her. Her mother had died when Mikhail had been a mere seventeen-year-old boy. How could he have already been a killer as far back as then? And why had he killed her mother?
She was going to discount the picture as another of her father’s tricks, when she suddenly recalled how she had overheard Mikhail, on their wedding night, telling Williams that Mira could never find out he’d been present at her mother’s death.
She paled as she stared at the picture again in a new light.
Now she was assailed by suddenly painful memories of how she had let Mikhail touch her and screw her to his heart’s content. She’d offered herself up for his touch like a sacrificial lamb, and all the while, he must have been laughing at her. She’d let her mother’s killer fuck her and touch her whenever he wanted.
Even before they got married, she’d proved she had no self-control whatsoever where he was concerned.
Bile rose in her throat and before she could hold it back, Mira retched and then vomited all over the thick, expensive rug in her room.
As she considered the mess, her thoughts were in turmoil. She hated Mikhail, she realized. She hated him with a passion that defied all logic. She hated him more than any feelings of tenderness she had ever felt toward him.
It didn’t make sense that he had rushed her into marriage. It didn’t make sense that he had let her think her father was a killer. The only thing that made sense was the knowledge that he was her father’s long-sworn enemy, and he had evidently decided to use her as a pawn in his games.
He had tricked her into marriage. She had at least respected him before, but now she was filled with nothing but contempt for him. She hated Mikhail with a virulence that defied all logic.
As she gathered up the ruined rug and dumped it outside her door for the servants, one thought continued to ring through her mind—she would avenge her mother’s death if it was the last thing she did.
Mikhail Nikolai would have to die at her hands.
Now that she was ensconced in his home as his reluctant, captive wife, she had only one mission—his death.