Chapter 15
ARTYOM
Ireacted instinctively to the sound.
Someone shouted something I didn’t catch in Russian. A blur passed my peripheral vision. That was all it took to register the threat.
“Get down,” I yelled.
Nina’s blank expression was the only sign that my panicked words to her were in Russian, but it was too late for words to help us.
She was frozen.
I wrapped my arms tighter around her and dived to the ground, cushioning her fall with my body. The ground knocked the air out of my lungs.
But all that matters is that she’s safe, in my arms, even as her expression shifts from outraged to confused to afraid.
More gunshots echo across the ballroom, smashing a chandelier right above us. The crash of breaking glass makes people react. Someone lets out a scream, and then there’s a stampede of people towards the exit.
All I can think about is Nina. She’s here, she’s breathing, she’s looking up at me with her wide amber eyes. She’s okay.
One, two, three shots follow the melee as people rush in mass confusion. Each shot glances off a surface near us, closer and closer to where we’re hidden. None of them find the intended target.
Questions. I have so many questions. To start with, where the fuck are my guards and what am I paying them for if not to stop attacks at fundraising galas?
As I slowly rise to my feet and survey the scene, I realize my cousins’ guards haven’t appeared either. So whoever did this, planned it out enough to neutralize our protection before storming the ballroom.
Nikolai is hauling a man into the center of the room with his hand around his neck. The man wears a mask, and he’s dressed in black leather, his jacket marked with the symbol of a hand holding a broken knife. An old Bratva emblem meaning revenge.
His arms are twisted behind his back at a painful angle as Nikolai marches him into the center of the room.
“Who the fuck are you working for?” he asks in low Russian, spitting his words. Something has enraged him.
He bends low over the masked man to ask another question.
Then, as he shoves the attacker to his knees, I see the silver glint of a blade.
I call out to my cousin, but it’s too late.
The man’s neck gushes with blood, and he collapses forward to the floor.
Another scream goes out from the crowd, but the doctors are too busy gathering around someone else — and too scared of my giant cousin, wielding a silver knife, to respond.
Only then, when the blood loss has obviously killed him, does Nikolai rip the mask back to reveal a face we all know. One of Polina and Denis’s guards.
Anton.
It’s so like Nikolai to kill first, ask questions later.
“Why the fuck did you kill him, cousin?” I call across the room. I run to his side, and then I see what I’d overlooked in my hurry to keep Nina safe.
Her best friend, Lily, is slumped on the floor at the center of the crowd, her pink tulle dress stained with blood.
Medics are working to apply pressure to the bleeding, while someone else has called for an ambulance, but judging by the whiteness of her skin and the blood spreading through the ballroom, it doesn’t look good.
“He shot her. Someone who wasn’t even involved in any of this.” Nikolai spits at me as I approach. “Besides, why am I doing your dirty work for you, Tyoma?”
“Who was he aiming for?” I ask in Russian, pressing a hand to his shoulder to steady him.
Nikolai has seen a lot of shit, but since he came back from a trip to the old land a few years ago, he’s been jumpier than ever. Unpredictable.
He shrugs his shoulder away from my hand, looking at me with accusation in his eyes as he points at the guard whose throat he slit.
“Anton was looking for you, of course,” he hisses at me. “They’ve been targeting you for weeks, Artyom. You must have known coming to a big public event like this, away from Vanya’s watch, would be a risk.”
“I didn’t think they’d put the family name in danger by bringing death to a fundraising gala.”
His blue eyes spark with anger. “One of your many oversights lately. You’ve been so distracted by this doctor of yours that you don’t see what’s staring you in the face.”
I don’t like his tone, but I let the comment slide. Nina is my primary focus. I’m not about to apologize to Nikolai for that.
“What’s been staring me in the face?”
“They don’t care about running the business side of things and good name of the family into the ground as long as they get the seat on the Council, Tyoma. All they want is a license to run this family however they want.”
Polina and Denis may be scheming, but I struggle to take them seriously as a threat. If they did order this hit on me… That changes things. My family is poisonous, but they’ve never tried to kill me so obviously before.
Vanya’s game has injected a level of desperation into the Petrovs that is putting us all in danger.
And now it’s affecting Nina too.
I swallow as I return to her. I don’t want to be the one to tell her about Lily.
She’s still huddled under the drinks table, looking confused and still tipsy.
She looks up at me, dazed.
“You’re bleeding,” she says, tracing her hand over a place on my cheek. Her fingers come away red, where the glass of the chandelier sliced into my face, but it’s not me I’m worried about.
I check her for injuries before I help her to her feet and let her see the scene in the center of the ballroom. They didn’t get Nina. I let myself breathe a sigh of relief. If she’d been hit, while they looked for me, I would never forgive myself.
“Nina…” I begin. “Lily has been shot.”
Her hand flies to her mouth and tears spring into her eyes. She tears across the ballroom and pushes through the crowd to get to her best friend’s side.
She holds Lily’s hand and waits with her until the medics get there, sobbing but continuing to talk to her. She says it’s in case Lily can hear her, so that she has something comforting to listen to.
When the ambulance arrives, I place my arm around Nina’s shoulders. I have to physically drag her away from Lily’s side as they head out to the street. It’s not safe for her to be alone.
“Nina.” I wrap my arm around her waist and pull her away from the stretcher as they carry it out of the ballroom. “We need to get out of here. Whoever did this might try again.”
Nina nods, looking out of it, tears streaking down her face and ruining her makeup. She stares after the stretcher. “Daniel will be at Middlefield to help her.”
I push down my instinctive growl at the way she talks about him, like he’s a safe place. I nod. “He will. It will be okay.”
She starts to shake, staring at Lily as she’s loaded onto a stretcher.
I cup her face and pull it towards me. “She will be okay. I’m serious. I’ve seen worse gunshot wounds. They’re saying she hit her head when she fell, and that’s why she’s so unresponsive. Not the blood loss.”
She nods slowly, her eyes so wide and trusting on mine. For once, I feel like Nina believes what I’m saying.
Nina lets me lead her away, my guards flanking us. “Let’s get Ava from the daycare?”
“And then go home,” she says.
I can’t stand the thought of letting Nina and Ava go home alone. Not after someone just tried to shoot me, after seeing me dancing with her.
“You shouldn’t be alone right now, Nina. You’ll be safer at my place.”
Her brows raise. Her face is pale, her freckles stark across her cheeks.
“I haven’t been there since…” She trails off, deep in thought.
Since what? I want to demand, but Nina already looks like she’s about to faint.
I shrug off my suit jacket and wrap it over her shoulders. She snuggles into it, pulling the collar up and inhaling deeply. The sight of her wrapped in my jacket is enough to satisfy the demands of the possessive beast inside me, for now.
Then she fixes me with those soft brown eyes and nods her head. “You’re right,” she admits, her voice quiet and faint. “Your place will be safer.”
Thank God.
I was prepared to argue with her, I was even prepared to take her against her will, kicking and screaming, like I had to in the parking garage.
But instead, she’s thinking of her own safety. For once.
“For Ava,” she specifies, and that’s when it hits me.
Everything Nina is doing, every risk-averse, protective instinct that she already had as a young woman recovering from her abusive family, it’s all been amplified because of Ava. Because now she has someone to protect from the world, the way that no one did for her.
“Of course. For Ava,” I reply, and Nina gives me that wistful look again. Her amber eyes flare with something like hope, before it dies down, and she lets me lead her quietly into the car.
When Ava crawls onto her lap, excited about the journey to a new place, Nina finally seems to relax a little. She lets me loop an arm around her shoulders in the backseat of the car, as we ride home.
Even as I hold her, safe, in my arms, and make arrangements for my guest room to be guarded with the Estate’s best security guards, I question whether I’m putting her in more danger simply by wanting her.
“Your spitting image.”
I jump at the intrusion, but I recognize the voice. I should stand and offer her my chair out of respect, but after the night I’ve had, I can only bring myself to raise my glass.
I wish it was whiskey, but I turned away from alcohol when Nina left the first time. After tonight I half-wonder if I am bad for her. If I’m only going to bring more pain into her life.
“What is?”
Vanya appears from the dark doorway, stepping into the light of the desk lamp where I’m slumped in front of a spreadsheet.
“The child.”
I choke out a mirthless laugh and slam back my glass of sparkling water.
This is the study where I first met her. Where I saw my future in that constellation on her left cheek.
“Ava is not mine.”
I enunciate each word slowly and clearly, even though every syllable sends a needling pain into my chest.
Vanya just shakes her head at me as though I’m being obtuse. “Anyone with eyes would know it.”
She rummages in the desk drawers for a second before finding the photo album she’s looking for.
I don’t have many family photos as a child, because Polina was too busy scheming to get her hands on power to care whether I was walking or talking, but there are a few of me with Vanya.
In this one, I’m dressed in overalls, my blonde hair fluffy and my eyes wide.
I look at the camera with curiosity and a head tilt that immediately brings back my play session with Ava the other day.
She had exactly the same expression on her face when she saw me standing next to Nina outside the preschool.
But all children look like that.
“Go back to sleep, Babushka. You’re dreaming.”
Vanya takes the photo from me and strokes her thumb over the paper. “You were such a curious, intelligent little boy. Did you see her eyes?”
“Of course, I saw her eyes. They’re… Unusual.”
“Unusual like yours. Blue with that one patch of amber, which is the exact same color as the Nina’s.”
All I see when I look at Ava is Nina. Her nose, her dimples, her freckles. That one different patch in her eyes didn’t stand out to me as unusual, but I know what Vanya is getting at.
“You think it’s a form of heterochromia.”
“It’s a genetic condition. Runs in the family. And it can be partial. People used to say it was the mark of the devil.” Vanya taps her cane against the leg of my chair. “You’re not a stupid boy, Tyoma. You can put two and two together.”
I loosen my tie and lean back, looking at the ceiling.
The conversation seem absurd. It’s wishful thinking from Vanya — she wants the best for me, she wishes that everything was as neat as it would be if Ava was mine.
If Ava was mine, I would marry Nina in a heartbeat, take Vanya’s place on the Council, and there would be no questions or disapproval.
It’s almost four in the morning. I’m exhausted and shaken from the attack at the gala. Babushka is getting carried away, making up stories so she doesn’t have to distort the purity of the family, or whatever Valentin was concerned about the other day.
As much as I wish Ava were mine, that Nina hadn’t slept with another man, it’s not the truth. I have to accept that we were apart, and things happened during that time.
I tense my knuckles around my glass. There are things that I couldn’t control, no matter how much I would have liked to.
“She would have told me,” I finally say.
Vanya shakes her head and tuts her tongue.
“Not if you hurt her badly enough, Tyoma.”