Chapter 4 #2
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After a delicious dinner, with the entertainment courtesy of our niece and her fantastic pitching arm when it comes to the food on her plate, Mara and Lizbet take Luna upstairs for a much-needed bath.
Lukas, Konstantin and I clean up dinner and Luna’s mess before moving out to the outdoor patio with a round of whiskey.
Konstantin clears his throat after clinking his glass to mine.
“I wanted to ask you about something.”
“Shoot.”
He makes a face, glancing at Lukas. “You’re not gonna like it…”
Fuck .
I know what he’s going to ask me about. And he’s right, I fucking hate it.
“The Svetlana situation?”
He nods. “Look, I wouldn’t pry, except—”
“Except for the fact that her fucking vendetta has the potential to fuck all of us over?”
Lukas and Konstantin glance at each other again unhappily before nodding.
“Pretty much,” Lukas growls quietly. “Look, I know you fucking hate her—”
“It’s all good,” I shrug. “We’ve come to an agreement on assets, and she’ll drop the rest of her goddamn crusade.”
Svetlana, otherwise known as “the devil-cunt herself”, is Vadim’s sister.
My nemesis.
My hatred.
My pain.
She’s the reason I’m the way I am. The one who broke me when I was thirteen.
Vadim never had much love for his sister. But he trusted her enough to send me to live with her here in New York when I was in my early teens and he was traveling a lot for Antin Reznikov. And he liked her well enough to leave her a sizable amount in his will when he passed.
A sizable amount that I promptly did everything I could to cheat her out of. Not because I needed the extra money. But because fuck her , that’s why.
Because we’re talking about a woman who destroyed me when I was barely more than a child. She didn’t have an ounce of respect or love for the man I called father, and she took out her rage at her brother on me.
But since then, Svetlana has lawyered the fuck up.
And she wants back what I took from her.
The scary thing is, she’s actually got a chance at getting it.
She’s managed to hire one of the most fuck-you estate law firms in the world—not sure how, since she’s basically broke at this point—to come after me.
And because they can prove malfeasance on my part, they’re trying to leverage that to get not just what I denied her in the will, but a lot more of my assets.
Assets like Ironclad Capital. More specifically, the ninety percent controlling interest Ironclad Capital has in Koikov Bank in Russia.
Koikov Bank is where and how Konstantin and I, Lukas’ family, the Volkov Bratva, and the Tsavakov organization clean their dirty money. If my aunt were to get her hands on Koikov, it would be catastrophic.
Luckily, after a few months of legal battles to the near-death, we’ve worked out a deal.
Devil Cunt will forever back the fuck off from my company in exchange for the one thing of Vadim’s she’s always coveted.
One little thing—which seems like a bad deal for her, but what do I care—and this whole fucking thing is over.
It’s a simple deal, the easiest one I’ve ever made in my life. Except it became very much less simple and easy last night, when Eilish Kildare smashed that one thing that Svet wants so much into about forty pieces on my office floor.
The egg. Svetlana wants the fucking Imperial Shield Fabergé egg.
So, yeah…that’s how that’s going.
Konstantin’s eyes go up. “Drop the crusade? Seriously?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
“Just like that? She’s dropping all of her bullshit? In exchange for what?”
“Just something of Vadim’s she always wanted. It’s all good.”
It’s not good at all. In fact, it’s the very, very opposite of good. Because when she finds out the egg is off the table…so to speak…this shit is going to go nuclear.
I need to figure out how to stop that.
Konstantin shakes his head in admiration. “Well fuck, man. This is why I’m not at all worried about screwing off for a year. See? You’ve got this handled.”
Yeah, totally handled.
Right.
Lukas shakes his head. “I’ve only met Svetlana once, but Jesus fucking Christ. I can’t imagine what it was like growing up with her around, never mind living with her for all those years.”
No, you can’t .
Nobody can.
No one can, or should , imagine the horror show I went through for almost four years.
Before I found out who I really was and suddenly was on my way to Oxford Hills Academy on Konstantin’s dime for my last year of high school—a year I spent purging the nightmare of my teen years by throwing myself into normalcy. Or, at least, trying to.
I went to student parties. Met girls. Made friends. I played on the school’s rugby team, for fuck’s sake.
But there’s not enough “normal” in the world to cover the scars and traumas of some pasts.
Konstantin rips me from my spiraling thoughts as he raises his glass.
“Well, fuck Svetlana. To Vadim. To a father I would gladly have killed for.”
“Me too,” Lukas growls quietly with a levity I understand. While he’s now the adoptive son of the incredibly loving Viktor Komarov, head of the Kashenko Bratva that Lukas himself will one day lead, Lukas was an orphan on the streets of Montenegro before that.
Actually, if there’s anyone who can understand the hell I went thought with Svetlana, there’s a very good chance it’s Lukas. The maze of scars on his arms—arms he usually keeps covered—are a testament to that.
The three of us clink our glasses together as I nod.
“To you, Dad,” I say quietly as we all drink.
Then I shake off the melancholy and grin at the other two.
“And to other fathers. To you, Lukas,” I grin, nodding at him.
“And to my brother, who’s about to become a father twice over and buried in diapers. ”
Lukas snickers as he claps Konstantin on the back. “I can’t even imagine. One is a fucking gauntlet. Two? Holy shit .”
“Yeah, fuck genetics,” Konstantin mutters. “ You knock up a twin and you get one baby. I do it, and I get a two-for-one deal.”
I laugh as I pat him on the shoulder. “Yeah, but you know what?”
He lifts a brow at me.
“You’re going to be amazing at it. You know that, right?”
He grins wryly at me. “Not really. But if you say so, I’ll believe you against my better judgement.”
We all take another drink before Konstantin sighs. “Well, getting back to the business side of things, thanks for taking care of that Svetlana shit. Glad to hear we can all breathe a little easier concerning Koikov.”
The smile stays on my face. Behind it, blackness swirls as I try to keep my gut from churning.
Even now, I’m not thinking about the evil bitch trying to destroy everything I have, after already destroying so much of me.
I should be. I should be figuring out ways to circumvent the massive security Svetlana’s got protecting her in that huge, tacky mansion she has across the river in New Jersey so I can kill her with my bare hands and be done with this fucking nightmare.
But I’m not. I’m not thinking of Svet at all.
I’m thinking of a certain blonde haired, green-eyed Irish princess.
The goody-two-shoes little ray of sunshine with an inky black secret.
A woman I should hate—for what her family did to mine. For Vadim. For the vengeance that she stole out from under me, and the shitstorm that’s about to rain down on my head because she broke that fucking egg.
Well, fuck. Maybe I do hate her. But maybe it’s possible to hate someone even when you desire them with every fucking fiber of your being.
Maybe it’s possible to spend a year stalking someone, and learning their every secret, and destroying every possible possibility of a relationship they might have—telling yourself it’s her punishment but knowing it’s really because you cannot and will not stand to see another man touch her.
Therein lies my problem concerning Eilish Kildare.
I hate her.
And I want her.
And now that I have her, I’m honestly not sure which of those desires will win.
But tomorrow morning, we’re going to find out together.