Chapter 6 - Anatoli
After everything was official, I had to put Masha back in handcuffs.
She was lucky she didn’t ride to her new home in the trunk with the way she was acting.
Not that I could blame her. She must have been angrier than she’d ever been in her life, and I was loving every second of it.
Now that she was mine and under my complete control, I was positively walking on air.
For the first time in months, I felt like myself again, on top of everything.
I probably shouldn’t have been quite so giddy since I should have been mourning my only brother, but to say we’d never been close was an understatement.
If Konstantin were actually looking up at me, he was lucky I hadn’t danced at the news of his demise.
I might be ruthless, and I had surely crossed some lines, but my brother was a menace. The world was better off without him.
Masha muttered something under her breath as she clinked her cuffs behind her back.
“Uncomfortable?” I asked pleasantly. “If I put them on in the front, tell me you wouldn’t have your arms wrapped around my neck by now.” And not in a good way, either. My Masha was a fighter.
“Just wait,” she hissed.
I could tell she was itching to ask how much longer by the way she pressed her lips together. Lips that were still smeared with red lipstick. I shook my head.
“The disguise was a good one, but too unlike you. Do you really think Denis is accustomed to beautiful women like you offering to buy him a coffee? Let alone some ditzy tart in a red dress at eight in the morning.”
Her cheeks grew as red as her lips as she struggled not to say anything more, but the criticism might as well have been a blow.
“Perfectionism is a bitch,” I said, unable to hold back a grin.
This was better than I could have imagined. The only thing that could have put me in a better mood would have been seeing her in a white dress and walking down an aisle with her hapless family watching. This wasn't just to punish her, but the whole Fokin clan.
Despite her antsiness, it didn’t take too long to get to the secluded mansion I’d acquired.
It was the first time I had seen it in person, but I trusted that it was set up the way I wanted.
The modern structure had been designed by an artist who had recently found that the economy wasn’t allowing many people to drop thousands on a painting anymore, and was forced to sell it fast. It was made of the same color stone as the lonely hills that surrounded it, making its sleek lines almost blend into the surroundings, except for the light of the moon winking off the many windows.
The drive leading from the road was barely noticeable, but it was smooth, dotted with Mojave and fan palms. A few more harsh desert plants I didn’t recognize were scattered around the front, and in the dark, they were almost eerie.
I wasn’t used to this kind of scenery. Forests were more to my liking, or even the wild overgrown jungles of Mexico, but this had a certain charm that was already growing on me, and the location was perfect.
The only way to find the place was to know it was there, and there were no signs leading up to it.
It was surrounded by nothing but miles of empty desert, so if by some rare mischance, Masha got free, she’d be dead of thirst in a few days.
By the look on her face when I stopped the car, I didn’t need to tell her that. She was surprisingly quiet and docile as I led her into the house and flipped on a light. Everything was as the artist had left it.
“If these paintings are any indication of the last owner’s talent, I can see why he went bankrupt,” I said, shrugging out of my jacket and hanging it up.
She clinked her handcuffs to remind me they were still there. “I like them,” she said defiantly.
“Well then, they’ll stay where they are, princess,” I said, both sarcastically and magnanimously, just to see the look on her face.
It didn’t disappoint. Her meanest scowl couldn’t mar her delicate beauty. In fact, it enhanced it somehow, made her look less like a porcelain doll. I snickered at that thought. The kind of doll that was possessed by a demon, perhaps.
“This is a beautiful home you’ve taken me to,” she said, much too sweetly. She rattled her cuffs again. “I’m just surprised you didn’t carry me over the threshold.”
“If you’re disappointed, we can go out again,” I said, finding I didn’t mind the idea.
She glared at me and turned, holding her arms away from her. “These are cutting into my skin.”
She dared to show impatience? She was lucky I didn’t leave her in the shack for a few days before bringing her here. But she would have expected that. My aim was to shake her equilibrium, not give her what she expected.
Without a word, I unlocked the cuffs and took them off, keeping a firm grip on her arms before sliding my fingertips over the red marks on her wrists. As soon as I let her go, she whirled around and was all over me.
And not in a good way.
She was a damn good fighter, and it was difficult to put up a defense without throwing any punches myself. Before I could restrain those flailing arms of hers, she managed to grab a rather large decorative paperweight from the table in the entry hall and smashed it against my face.
I heard my nose crack and felt a gush of blood.
“Enough,” I roared, encircling her in my arms and holding her in a vice grip.
As blood dripped onto one of my best shirts, I lifted her off the floor and carried her with her legs dangling and kicking my shins.
“Stop it now or find out what happens,” I said.
The tone of my voice would have stopped anyone else in their tracks. Masha kept kicking. I squeezed her until she was gasping for breath and finally went still by the time we were up the stairs and in front of the room I had prepared to hold her.
Shoving the door open, I flung her onto the waiting bed. She coughed, trying to get the air back in her lungs. Just as she was about to lunge at me again, I stepped outside and slammed her in, locking the door.
“You’ll get very hungry in there if you don’t learn to act civilized,” I called.
No answer. Good, maybe she was learning.
Swearing under my breath, I found a first aid kit in the bathroom of my suite down the hall.
Grimacing, I wrenched my nose back into place and stuffed it with tissue before taping it firmly across the bridge.
It wasn’t the first time I’d had it broken, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but it was still fucking painful and annoying.
Even now that she was mine, she was still making me bleed.
Before I started on the business that had been piling up while I planned all this, I headed down to the kitchen, then outside, where I found one of the guards strolling back and forth along a stone wall surrounding the pool area.
I’d have to arrange for house staff, but it might take some time to find people who would be accustomed to such unique circumstances.
“Take her some food in about an hour,” I told the guard.
The order had nothing to do with the fact that she hadn’t eaten anything since I abducted her early that morning. It was only to keep her on her toes and guessing what came next.
The pool looked inviting, large and kidney-shaped, surrounded by potted plants to make it seem like an oasis in the otherwise austere surroundings.
Leaning down, I swept my hand through the crystal water, but if the pool was heated, it wasn’t turned on, and the temperatures plummeted alarmingly fast at night in the desert.
Shaking the chilly water off my fingertips, I discarded the idea of a quick dip to clear my head.
I may have been born and raised in Russia, but I had lived in California long enough to appreciate the temperate climate.
I had become accustomed to the steamy weather in Mexico during my stay, and lost the polar bear ability to plunge into icy water.
Finding my office at the back of the ground floor, I rearranged a few things before settling down to work. I was avoiding checking my messages and emails, certain my uncles had been bombarding me ever since I put my full attention to this new operation.
Masha was mine now, and I wanted her to simmer for a bit.
There was time to deal with everything I had inherited now that Konstantin was out of the picture.
A year or two ago, I would have been thrilled to have what was rightfully mine returned to me.
But despite what Uncle Leonid had said to me on the phone about my American experiment being a bust, and although it had stung, he was wrong.
There were highs and lows in every business.
In life itself. I had found myself on soaring heights, with money flowing like water and people eager to do my bidding.
At the moment, I still had the money from my Russian holdings, but my people were in the wind.
It was going to be a long and arduous process finding new men I could trust, but giving up wasn’t in my blood.
Fighting was. Winning was. A loss only remained a loss if I stayed down, and that wasn’t going to happen. First, I’d deal with Masha and get the Fokins under control, then regain my place here in California.
Thinking about Masha was too much of a distraction.
Even with my resolve to let her worry and wonder about my next moves, I longed to go see her.
To taunt her? Perhaps. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t get those whiskey colored eyes out of my mind, whether they were flashing with anger or fear.
As long as they were flashing at me, since she belonged to me now, fully mine to tease and taunt and torture at my whims.
“Just not now,” I said with a sigh.
Turning on my laptop, I read the barrage of messages from my panicking uncles.
I was already aware of this new, international organization calling itself the Collective.
They’d been on my radar since they tried to give my people in Volgograd a run for their money a month ago.
It hadn’t been too much trouble to deal with them, but it seemed they were gaining in power, consolidating smaller organizations to add to their ranks.
So now they were trying to scoop up what was left of my family while they were in the power vacuum created by Konstantin’s death.
And Leonid didn’t seem to think this was a bad idea.
It was true that there was safety in numbers, but I wasn’t sure that the Collective could withstand so many different factions trying to work together.
There’d be infighting over too many different ideals and too many people thinking they should be the one in charge.
Still, with nothing else to do besides keeping myself from playing with my shiny new toy, I settled in to do some further research on the Collective.