The Pakhan’s Secret Babies (Forbidden Kings #9)

Chapter 1

ELENA

The thing about masquerades is that everyone becomes a liar the moment they walk through the door.

Not the dangerous kind. The permitted kind.

The kind where you’re allowed, for one night, to be someone slightly different from who you’ve spent your whole life becoming.

A little braver. A little less careful. A little less aware of all the reasons why you should keep your eyes down and your feelings buried where no one can find them.

I finished my last task of the evening forty minutes ago.

Confirmed the catering timeline with the head of the kitchen staff.

Verified the security rotation with Kostya, who looked at me the way he always does—like I’m a minor inconvenience with a clipboard—and then did exactly what I told him anyway.

Then, I ensured the floral arrangements on the east terrace had been repositioned per Mr. Petrov’s specifications.

Mr. Petrov.

Even in my own head, I call him that.

I found a guest bathroom on the second floor that I was reasonably sure no one would need in the next ten minutes, changed out of my black work blazer and into the dress I’d folded into my work bag this morning with a feeling I wasn’t ready to name.

Dark emerald, fitted through the waist. The dress made Mara clap her hands together when I tried it on in the store three weeks ago, made her say that’s the one, Elena, stop arguing with me.

I hadn’t planned to wear it. Right up until the moment I put it on, I hadn’t planned to wear it.

The mask is a full Venetian style, ivory and gold, sweeping up past my temples and curving along my cheekbones; it swallows the upper half of my face entirely. I found it in a little shop in the Village three weeks ago and bought it without thinking too hard about why.

But the mask is only part of it.

My hair is the real disguise.

At the office, it lives in a bun. It has lived in a bun every single day for two years. I’m not sure Roman Petrov has ever looked at me and registered that I have hair at all, let alone that it falls to the middle of my back when I let it down, thick and blonde.

Tonight it is loose. All of it. Mara curled it for me this afternoon, and it sits around my shoulders in waves I don’t normally let anyone see. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror before coming back downstairs and barely recognized myself.

That’s the point.

Do one reckless thing, Mara had texted me at seven fifteen. One. I’m not asking for much.

I was supposed to leave after the kitchen sign-off. Go home, get some sleep, and be back Monday morning. That was the sensible thing, and I have always been sensible.

The dress has been in my bag since Thursday. I’m not entirely sure what I thought I would do with it.

I went back downstairs.

The ballroom of Roman’s Upper East Side estate is the kind of room that makes you understand, immediately and without ambiguity, the distance between your life and someone else’s.

I have been in this room before. I’ve overseen its setup, coordinated its staff, and managed its logistics on two separate occasions.

I know the layout better than most of the guests currently standing in it.

But I have never stood in it like this.

Champagne in hand, mask on, no clipboard, no earpiece, no reason to be anywhere or speak to anyone I don’t want to speak to.

The chandeliers throw amber light across three hundred people in formal wear and elaborate masks, and the noise is a low, expensive roar.

I recognize faces even through the masks—two years of managing the correspondence of my billionaire boss means I know his world by its cheekbones and its posture and the way certain men stand in rooms like they own them.

I stay near the edges because of my old habits. I’m watching the room the way I always watch rooms when I hear it.

“Oh wow.” The voice belongs to a woman standing three feet to my left, beautiful in the sharp way that takes resources to maintain.

Red gown, dark hair, mask tilted up like she could not be bothered.

She’s looking directly at me. Not at my face.

Lower. Her eyes move over me slowly. “Did someone forget to check the mirror tonight?”

The woman beside her follows her gaze and smiles into her champagne.

“That dress.” She says it the way you say something you want to make sure lands. Loud enough for the people nearest to us to catch it. “Honey, I have nothing against curves, but there’s a difference between curves and just not knowing when to stop.”

The heat starts at the back of my neck and works forward.

I know this variety of cruelty. It doesn’t need to raise its voice.

It has been practiced so long that it comes out like an observation, easy and certain, like my body in this dress in this room is simply a fact worth commenting on for the benefit of everyone nearby.

I do not move. I will not move.

“I genuinely cannot imagine looking in the mirror before leaving the house and thinking yes, this is the one.” She tips her glass slightly toward me. “But I suppose confidence comes in all sizes.”

They both laugh, and then the other woman says, “You’d think the host would have standards for his guest list.”

That one lands. Not because she’s right. Because she means it to.

I’m still deciding whether to turn and look at her directly—just look, which is sometimes enough—when I hear a different voice entirely.

“I wasn’t aware the guest list was your concern.”

Everything in the immediate vicinity goes quiet.

Not silent. The ballroom is still roaring. But the small pocket of air around us seems to contract, and I turn, and Roman Petrov is standing there.

He’s in a black tuxedo and a dark mask that covers the upper half of his face and does absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that this is a man who has never once in his life been in a room and not been the most significant person in it.

Silver hair swept back. The type of posture that is not a performance, just the natural result of being a man who has never had to make himself smaller.

He is not looking at the woman in red. He is not looking at me either, not directly, but the angle of his body has shifted to place itself between us.

It is so slight.

The woman in red recovers fast. She smiles, and it doesn’t reach anything above her mouth. “Roman. I didn’t realize—”

“Enjoy the rest of your evening.”

He says it pleasantly. It is not a pleasant sentence. She understands this, and so do her companions, and within thirty seconds, all three of them have redistributed themselves to another part of the room.

The space they leave behind is very quiet.

I’m aware that my heart is doing something medically inadvisable.

I have spent two years learning to manage the proximity of this man, the specific gravity of standing close enough to him to note the detail.

The gray at his temples. The faint lines at the corners of his eyes.

The way he occupies space like he was made for it.

He turns and looks at me now. His eyes are dark behind the mask. He takes me in once, and I remind myself that he does not know who I am. Behind this mask, in this dress, with my hair loose and no clipboard in my hand, I am nobody he has ever met.

“Are you alright?”

His voice. I have heard his voice every working day for two years. Across a desk, through a phone, directing, deciding, concluding. But there’s no agenda in it right now. No efficiency. He’s just asking.

“Fine,” I say. “Thank you.”

He doesn’t move.

“You know her?” he asks.

“No.”

He nods once, like that confirms something. “She has opinions she wasn’t asked for. It’s a habit.”

I almost smile. “You know her?”

“She’s a guest.” The pause after it is almost imperceptible. “Nothing more.”

Up close, in the amber light, the silver in his hair catches.

He is fifty-one years old, and there is not a single thing about him that suggests apology for it.

He’s not performing vigor or agelessness or any of the anxious masculinity that makes certain men his age exhausting to be around.

He simply is what he is, and what he is takes up the room without trying.

I have been in love with this man—or something that functions embarrassingly like love, or the very detailed blueprint of it—for the better part of two years.

I know exactly how irrational this is. I have cataloged the irrationality at length, usually at two in the morning when sleep has made my defenses unreliable.

He is a billionaire. He is my employer. He is twenty-eight years older than me. He runs an organization that I understand, in the vague and unexamined way that keeps me employed and functional, does not confine itself to the legitimate business interests listed on the Petrov Industries letterhead.

None of this has ever been enough to stop the feeling. It has only ever been enough to stop me from acting on it.

Tonight, though, he doesn’t know I am his secretary.

Tonight, he is just a man at a party who stepped in when he didn’t have to, and I am just a woman in a pretty dress, and the distance between those two things is much smaller than it usually is.

“Lena,” I say without hesitation.

It’s not a lie. My mother called me Lena from the day I was born until she passed. It is my name. It just doesn’t exist in any office, on any contract, in any part of the life I built after her.

He looks at me for a moment before he answers. Like the name is something he’s turning over, weighing.

“Roman,” he says.

I know. I have known every iteration of this man for two years.

I know how he takes his coffee, how he runs his meetings, and what his silence sounds like when he’s made a decision versus when he’s still calculating.

I know the exact timbre of his voice when he’s displeased and the specific stillness that settles over him when he’s truly angry, which is different and considerably more alarming than when he merely seems it.

I know all of this, and he knows nothing about me, and the imbalance of it should feel wrong.

It doesn’t.

He hands me a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, and when he tilts his head toward the French doors leading to the terrace, I follow him without a single reasonable thought in my head.

The city is spread out below us, and the party noise softens behind the glass, and I think, standing there with the night air on my skin and Roman Petrov two feet away from me, that Mara is never going to let me live this down.