18. Emily
18
EMILY
The plane jostles me awake when we land, and I wake up more refreshed than I’ve ever been on a plane. I turn to my side, half expecting to find Konstantin in bed with me.
But to my disappointment, he’s already gone.
Once the plane comes to a stop, the door to the suite opens. My disappointment balloons when the driver of the car pokes his head in.
He blinks, like he’s surprised to see me. “We’ve landed,” he says.
“I’ve noticed.”
“Come.” He inclines his head.
I don’t budge. “What’s your name?”
“Konstantin is waiting.”
“Let him wait. I’m Emily. Who are you?”
He hesitates as he peers over his shoulder, back toward the main part of the jet.
I roll my eyes. “I know you understand me. And I’m not leaving until either you tell me your name, or Konstantin comes to get me himself.”
“Call me Gerasim.” He sighs. “Now will you come?”
“Gera—what?” I can’t pronounce that. “Do you work for Konstantin?”
Sighing, he leans against the doorway. “Don’t make me drag you down the aisle.”
Very interesting choice of words. Now I’m thinking about this wedding again.
“Let me guess. Are you also part of this ridiculous plot forcing me to marry him?”
“Okay, you’ve been warned.” He grabs my upper arm. His fingers are rough, textured by numerous scars. “Up!”
“I can walk,” I snap, wrenching my arm out of his grip.
Straightening my wrinkled outfit, I follow him out of the bedroom and into the main cabin.
Konstantin is waiting by the exit. Sunlight glows through the rows of windows. Whether it’s sunset or sunrise, I can’t tell. But it doesn’t matter. In the light, his tan skin looks ethereal. I want to hate him, but the combination of exhaustion and disorientation makes it impossible for me to ignore just how damn yummy he looks.
“Good morning, Kitty Cat.”
Well, that answers that question.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Come and see.” He ducks through the door and down the steps.
Gerasim blocks my retreat—as if I want to stay on this plane. I hurry out of the jet, sucking in the fresh air as I go. The sunlight stabs at my eyes and I raise my hand to shield them from the brightness. On impulse, I reach for my phone to check the time and find nothing.
Konstantin must’ve taken that while I slept.
When my eyes adjust to my new surroundings, I look around and find that we’re in the middle of an airstrip with just a single small control tower in the distance. The ground is painted with white lines. Not far away sits a pale green helicopter. The fringe of the field is shrubs and blue sky, nothing distinctive to tell me where I am.
“Where are we?”
“A few miles outside of Dubrovnik,” Konstantin answers.
I dig through my mental maps with rapidly rising panic. “And where is that?”
“Croatia,” he says. “You asked me where my real home is. Well, here we are.”
Gripping the jet’s stairs to keep my balance, I let this information sink in as I wrack my brain for an answer on just exactly where the hell either of those places are.
Dubrovnik. Croatia
They sound vaguely familiar, but for the life of me, I can’t reason out why.
All I can focus is on the fact that he took me to another damn country!
“No one here will help you escape,” he says. “I don’t recommend that you try.”
“Why would I try to escape?” I ask as indifferently as I can. “You said if I play my part, you’ll let me go home with whatever I wanted. You promised.”
“I did.” Konstantin stares at me, and I swear he’s trying to read my mind. I’m secretly relieved that he can’t, because all I can think about is the kiss we shared just before I fell asleep. “Get in the helicopter. It will take us the rest of the way.”
Gerasim joins us on the pavement. “Need me to go with you, Kostya?”
I blink. “Kostya? I thought your name was Konstantin?”
Gerasim tightens his jaw, acting like he’s given something away he didn’t mean to. I tuck this tidbit away for later.
“No.” Konstantin raises his voice. “I need you to send word to Alla Antonovna about my engagement.” His hand circles my wrist, and my heart skips a beat at the contact. “Tell her that I’ve fulfilled all of the requirements for her to release the inheritance to me.”
“Understood.”
Engagement. The word hangs heavy in the air, and all of a sudden, I can feel the weight of our arrangement on my shoulders.
“Slow down!”
“Aren’t you eager to change into some clean clothes and have some food after the flight?”
“You think you can win me over with a meal?”
“It worked in Italy.” He smirks.
“Please, you didn’t win anything.”
“Is that why you didn’t stay?”
I stop trying to pull away and nearly lose my footing. He’s watching me over his shoulder with his dark eyebrows arched—checking my reaction. I can’t hide my surprise before he sees it.
“It really bothered you that I left,” I whisper. “Didn’t it?”
He flips around, rips the helicopter door open, and brings us both inside. I topple into a cramped chair with a wince. He says something in a different language to the man in the pilot’s seat. It sounds like the same language he used on the balcony just before we parted ways in Italy.
The big blades overhead begin to spin, and the noise drowns out any chance for conversation. I don’t mind. Konstantin is all business right now. His attention is focused out towards the window, his fist clenched tight.
It actually upset him that I wasn’t in his house when he came back. On the one hand, my heart is doing a little dance that I’m struggling to halt, because it means that on some level, he did care about me.
But on the other hand …
Croatia …
The name sounds vaguely Eastern European. That’s all I can come up with. But it sounds so familiar.
I rack my brain for every morsel of information I can get but I’m coming up empty. The answer seems to hover on the tip of my tongue. Huffing, I decide to table that thought for later and choose to turn my attention outward towards the scenery.
The helicopter starts making its way from the airstrip and over a city. The red clay rooftops remind me so much of the Amalfi Coast. Just like that, I’m reminded of the texts that Nadia sent me. About how there was a shooting outside of Zebra Club and how it burned down.
I stare back at Konstantin’s head. Is he connected to that somehow?
He must be , I tell myself. He’s a mob boss, remember?
I turn my attention back to the rooftops. Is Nadia on her way back to America by now? Or is she still in the Amalfi Coast?
Does she even know that I’ve been taken?
The city below us passes by in a blur, and that’s when I see something that looks familiar. An ancient castle rising up on a slope by the sea. And then that’s when it hits me.
Dubrovnik! That’s the city they filmed Game of Thrones in!
Funny, the castle looks so much smaller from up high. But the more important thing that pops into my mind is the tidbit that there’s been a lot of tourism into Dubrovnik thanks to Game of Thrones .
Which means …
A terrifyingly tantalizing thought enters into my mind. If I can just get to Dubrovnik and find an American tour group. Maybe I can …
And then what? The same little voice that’s been bugging me this entire time pipes up. He’ll just come find you again. You can’t escape him.
I start chewing my lip again.
“Something on your mind, Kitty Cat?”
Oh shit, have I been staring at him this entire time?
“Nothing,” I reply. “Just getting used to being here.”
Soon, the city disappears behind us as we crest over a massive mountain. I look out the windows and see what we’re flying toward. Beyond a wide expanse of green hills, lying low in a valley, is a massive lake. Its placid surface has a lavender hue that mirrors the beautiful sky up above. Olive and cypress trees circle the water in man-made geometric shapes.
But what’s really got my jaw dropping is the castle.
It sprawls out in the center of the lake like a dragon on a pile of treasure. The spires reach to the heavens—I count twelve of them along the stone base. It’s hard to judge from up here, but I’m sure it’s several acres wide.
We begin to dip toward it. My head has gone fuzzy from disbelief. “Is that where you live?”
“It is.”
My eyes bulge at him. “Are you a prince as well as a mob boss?”
Throwing back his head, he begins to laugh with his full chest. He doesn’t stop until the helicopter is beginning its final descent onto the flat roof of the castle.
“No, I’m not a prince.”
“I’ve never met a mob boss with a castle before.”
His sparkling smile fades and he considers me closely as the helicopter comes to a stop.
“Have you met many mob bosses in your life?”
“No.” I’m forced to admit.
He pops the door open, ducking low as the still-spinning blades whip the wind overhead. I follow him, clutching my hands to my skull as visions of getting decapitated assault me. He doesn’t slow down, and I have to take two steps for every one of his.
On one edge of the roof is a tower made from speckled stone. Built into the massive structure is a rounded wooden door.
Konstantin waits for me beside it, but he’s in a hurry—he grabs my hand impatiently to pull me into the tower.
“Will you relax?” I argue. “I can’t run away even if I want to!”
He says nothing, and continues to drag me down the flight of stairs. They circle downward in the darkened space, the hanging lamps giving enough visibility when the diamond-shaped windows don’t. We go left, then right, and I’m struggling to keep track of my sense of direction.
Opening the door at the end of a wide hall, he throws me inside, shutting us in. I’m about to give him a piece of my mind when I see through a massive window over the lake I saw from the helicopter.
Holy shit.
From here, the view is even more awe-inspiring than from up in the air. Swans skirt over the water, leaving ripples in their wake. The olive trees on the rim cast long shadows that turn the blue water black.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asks.
“Yeah, I’ll give you a five-star review on Airbnb when I leave.” Shaking myself to my senses, I glare at him. “Amazing views, super scenic location. But the owner is a control freak who should be in jail.”
“I don’t remember you being this sarcastic.”
“I wasn’t pissed off at you in Italy!”
He sighs softly before leveling a hard look at me. “I’ll do my best to keep you as comfortable as I can. As for food, I remember you said you weren’t picky?”
I bristle and dig my nails into my palms. “I wish your ethics were as powerful as your memory.”
He ignores my jab. “There are clean clothes in the wardrobe.”
“Oh, you prepared for this kidnapping, then?”
His face darkens. “I told you to stop calling it that.”
Boy, he really hates that word. I’ll keep that in mind. “Just calling a spade a spade, Kostya .”
If I thought his face darkened when I kept saying the word kidnapping, his expression is absolutely murderous at me calling him that. But I can’t back down now.
And besides. What’s he going to do? Kill me?
The knowledge that he’s forcing me to marry him—no matter how twisted of a proposal it is—has given me the small assurance that he’s not the one holding all the power.
He needs me more than he’s willing to admit.
“Are you going to be this difficult for the entire wedding?”
“So what if I do?” I just my chin at him. “Are you going to drag me down to a torture chamber in this castle and string me up until I do what you want?”
“Only if that’s what it takes, Kitty Cat.” A shadow passes over his face, and a cruel smile twists on his lips before it disappears.
Tiny flutters creep up my ribs to play with my heart, and desire squeezes between my legs again at the images his words conjure up in my mind.
Oh my.