Chapter 2
NINA
I’m still shaking when I get home to my father’s huge, empty mansion. This place was once a Victorian robber baron’s residence. A century and a half later, not much has changed. These walls have seen generations of bloodshed and sorrow, yet they still soar elegantly above our tawdry human concerns.
“Late again, Nina?” A man’s footsteps are punctuated by his disapproving tone. He speaks in Russian. I snova Nina?
“I was working.” I set my umbrella in the holster and hang my coat inside the closet. I hate the way he ambushes me the instant I come through the door.
“You must stop painting childish monsters.”
“They sell, Papa.”
“Only because your clients overpay for crap as a favor to me,” he snaps. “You could paint anything and they would buy it.”
I flinch. He’s right. Any talent my teachers saw in me as a child, or at the prestigious art school he briefly permitted me to attend—where I met Kinsley—is worth nothing without his wealthy friends buying my work at embarrassingly over-inflated prices.
It doesn’t matter what I create. The art isn’t the point.
It’s all part of Daddy’s little money laundering scheme.
Chains of complex transactions designed to conceal the true origins of the money he gets from trafficking women and dealing weapons to global crime syndicates.
Officially, Melor Kotov is in the import-export business. Specifically, he traffics in three things: drugs, women, and stolen art. My work is just a cute little flourish on top of a dark and ugly reality.
Speaking the truth would only get me killed. So I try to tell the world what my life is like in cryptic pictures made of acrylic and canvas.
Divested of my outwear, I square off with my father. He may be a short man with the attitude to match, but I am even shorter. Barely five-foot-two.
When I was a child, I witnessed this man murder my mother with his bare hands.
He never bothered to remarry, though I’m sure he fucks around as much as he wants.
He sent me to an all-girls boarding school until I graduated at eighteen.
Safe. Secure. Scared into silence. I couldn’t make friends knowing that if I did, I risked dragging them into the dangerous world that holds me in its thrall.
Kinsley is my only friend, and yet every day, I lie to her.
“Does it matter what I paint, Papa? They all end up in attics and storage units, never to be seen again.” I close my eyes and in my mind’s eye, I dip my brush into the black paint, adding an extra layer of depth to the faceless man who haunts my dreams.
Three years ago, I first glimpsed a tall, brutally built man covered in tattoos staring—no, glaring at me from a distance. I’m used to my father’s guards. I don’t like them, but I’ve grown up being watched every moment of my life.
He was different.
He moved like a predator.
Large build. Tattoos. That’s all I remember, except for the intensity of his stare.
I have felt it more frequently in the years since.
He’s never attempted to speak to me, nor I to him.
That night, when I was on my first—and only—date, I glimpsed a Volkov emblem tattooed on his chest. His shirt was unbuttoned to an unseemly degree, considering the venue.
He looked like a wolf that had invaded a dog show.
Which is fitting. Volkov means wolf in Russian.
“Tonight is your twenty-first birthday,” my father says, pacing closer. “It is time.”
“For what?” I steady myself with a deep breath. I should have run. I shouldn’t have come home.
“Your wedding.”
I admit I didn’t see that coming.
“My groom declined his invitation,” I say with an odd sense of relief.
Rafail Volkov is the leader of the strongest bratva faction in North America.
Despite my own father’s best efforts to move into their territory, they rule the East Coast with an iron fist. I’ve never met the man.
I’ve only heard stories. He ignored Melor’s offer and married another woman instead.
At first, I was relieved, if humiliated.
It’s not as though I was looking forward to marrying a complete stranger.
But my father took his rejection as an insult, and he took it out on me.
Rafail’s disinterest in me proved that I wasn’t even good enough to attract a strong husband to sire the heir Melor so desperately wants.
He hasn’t brought up the subject in months.
Now, I realize that whatever my father has planned for me is far worse than any of my nightmares. After more than a year of waiting with such anxiety that I can hardly breathe, he’s finally come to inform me of my punishment for being born a girl, useful for only one thing.
“Rafail Volkov is a weak fool, Nina. I need a stronger man than him to sire my heir. Since I do not have a son, I must get one through you.” He all but spits the last word.
“You will celebrate your birthday with a wedding night. I will choose the strongest man to be your husband. You will marry him whether you like it or not.”
A prizefighting contest for my hand in marriage? I can hardly believe my own ears. It’s barbaric, but perfectly in line with who Melor Kotov is.
“I don’t have a dress.” With trembling fingers, I trace the buttons marching down the front of my blouse.
I know this tone. If he doesn’t see instant obedience, there will be pain.
All these years, I have been forced to keep my tongue lest I get a beating for voicing my opinion.
Papa knows precisely where to strike to cause the greatest agony with the least visible outward damage.
A single thoughtless outburst when I was fourteen ended with a bruised kidney and me vomiting off and on for days.
“You won’t need a gown,” he says. “You are no virgin. You don’t deserve to wear white.”
I cut him a startled glance. Oh no. This is going to be far worse than a mere prize fight.
A menacing smile stretches his lips. A protest dies on mine—But I am a virgin, when would I have found time to sleep with someone when I am constantly watched?
I wish my features weren’t so similar to his.
The same ice floe-hued eyes that betray no hint of warmth even when we smile.
Same nose, though his has been broken more than once.
Only the shape of our lips and chin are different.
Mine are fuller and more delicate, respectively.
His gaze falls to them now, a reminder of my mother and his most brutal crime. His smile fades into a scowl.
“Tonight you will be on the auction block, barynya. Just like all the other whores.” Barynya—a condescending term sometimes used to describe haughty women in his native country.
Who made them whores, Papa? God knows those girls didn’t choose the life.
They were sold by fathers and boyfriends to repay debts they never incurred.
My father gives his men the first pick of those unlucky women before he sends them to be trafficked until their bodies wear out. There is no escape.
This humiliation is to be my chastisement, then. For the crime of failing to capture the romantic interest of his rival, a man I’ve never even met, I will be sold to the highest bidder. Bile rises in my throat.
“Papa…don’t do this.” I plead in a hoarse whisper. I dart a glance out the window where sunset already paints the Baltimore skyline in shades of teal and persimmon. My next painting will be those colors. Melancholy.
No. My next painting will be blood-red. Smears of color as if I’m running so fast no one can catch me.
You should have run while you could.
Perhaps I still can.
“You have two hours to prepare. Eat. Get your hair fixed.” He doesn’t even stay long enough to finish speaking, turning his back to me and throwing the words over his shoulder.
Call the police, a little voice screams inside me. Tell them the truth. Turn him in. Testify against him. Your mama deserves justice.
I’d be dead before the sun rises again, but at least I’ll have taken down part of a crime syndicate in the process. Saved some girls from a horrible fate.
I can’t anyway. My phone is monitored. All contacting the authorities would accomplish is getting myself a beating—to death this time. But the spark of rebellion is there, deep inside me, waiting for a gust of oxygen to flare into a blaze. Now is the moment.
I inhale deeply and blow out a breath. That spark bursts into flame. I thrust my feet back into my shoes, put on my coat, loop my purse over my shoulder, and slam the door of my Mini Cooper. Twenty seconds later, I send my golden Mini racing through the streets of Baltimore like a madwoman.