Chapter 9 Nina
NINA
So, that’s what sex feels like.
What the hell is wrong with me that I liked it?
Andrei bought me like a cow at a market. I never had any expectations of respect, especially after the way he betrayed me by turning me over to my father after I tried to bribe him with a blow job. Clearly, my first effort wasn’t enough to convince him to let me go, and now I am married to him.
Legally binding in every way. There won’t be any annulling this marriage. Not with thirty or more witnesses to my deflowering.
I stumble backstage, away from the congratulatory cheers, and rip off the blindfold. Wetness drips down my inner thighs. You could get pregnant. A queasy feeling settles into the pit of my stomach.
“You should fix your hair,” one of the women who seems to be attending to matters backstage says to me.
She points me to a shelf with brushes, hairspray, and random bottles of products I don’t recognize.
I shake my head and run my free hand through my long locks.
The white silk blindfold dangles loosely from my other hand.
Pain crackles up my ribs. I’m sore in places deep inside me, but that sensation is far less bothersome than the still-healing ribs.
A squeaking hinge and the heavy thud of a man’s footfall indicate the swing doors have parted behind me.
I don’t bother to try and hide my body. What is the point when so many strangers have already witnessed the most intimate parts of me?
I’m grateful my father didn’t stay to watch.
That would have been too much of a humiliation.
I turn slowly to find Andrei, now dressed in his jeans but without his shirt on, coming through the swing doors into the back room.
“No men,” the attendant shouts, pointing him back toward the stage where the other woman is unlocking the wheels on the bed to roll it away. “You cannot be here.”
“I go where my wife is,” Andrei says, and ignores the woman’s protests.
My gaze drops to the tattoos covering his chest. I knew they covered his wrists and parts of his hands, and crawled up his neck, but I didn’t realize they covered his entire torso, too.
He strides to me and grabs my chin, his eyes narrowing into a glare.
My pulse scrambles like a startled rabbit’s.
“Come here.” He gestures to the long mirror. “When did this happen?”
I had forgotten about the bruises around my eyes. My split lip healed enough not to be noticeable while I was locked in my bedroom, but the twin black eyes Melor gave me will take some time yet to fade completely.
“When you took me back to my father.” I don’t flinch away from telling the truth. Andrei doesn’t flinch away from hearing it, either.
“I am sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know he would beat you.”
“I told you he would. You didn’t believe me.”
Andrei’s hand drops to his side. His gaze cuts away from mine. “You are his daughter.”
“I am a woman and therefore worthless in his eyes.”
“But not mine,” my husband says. He tugs his shirt on, covering the tattoos. “Melor will die. I will be the one to kill him. Not on our wedding night. First, I will take you to safety. Do you have anything else to wear?”
I point at the black coat hanging from an otherwise empty bar, surrounded by a tangle of metal hangers.
Wordlessly, he drapes the black fabric around my shoulders and then, to my surprise, he scoops me into his arms and carries me out of the back room.
I find comfort in leaning my head against his shoulder.
Safety has been such a rarity in my life.
I feel part of me relaxing into the feeling—until Melor finds us outside in the hall.
Then I turn my face into Andrei’s shoulder to avoid looking at him.
I hate my father. I despised and feared him before, but the events of the past week have turned my hatred into pure loathing. At least it’s something to feel other than numbness.
Andrei’s clothes have a masculine spicy scent mingled with laundry soap and the warm notes of a scented shaving cream. Despite his warmth, a shiver runs through me.
“You will bring your bride to my house, where you will both live from now on,” Melor says.
“My wife will never set foot in that house again,” Andrei says. I can picture my father’s scowl. Almost no one ever contradicts him to his face, but the man holding me is unafraid of him.
“Not if you want your son to inherit the leadership of the Kotov faction.”
“Perhaps my daughter will be the one to take over,” Andrei says casually.
A smile tugs at my lips. I’m shocked but enjoying the way he casually baits my father.
“I have paid the bride price you wanted. I have married Nina before witnesses, and we have consummated the marriage. She is mine now. Not yours. And I will take her with me.” He pushes past Melor, brushing my much-shorter father aside like an annoying fly.
I peek out from my hiding spot to see my father’s features twist with fury.
He does not tolerate insults from anyone, and Andrei just showed him he is not intimidated.
“You will pay for that,” I tell my husband quietly as he deposits me in the passenger seat of a sedan. Unusual choice of vehicle for a bratva. He knows how to hide in plain sight.
“For what?”
“Insulting my father.”
“If he doesn’t wish to be insulted, he should stop making ridiculous demands.” Andrei buckles my seatbelt and brushes a kiss to my forehead. “He has no leg to stand on. I will not cower before a man I could crush with one hand while wearing that blindfold.”
I huff, not quite a chuckle and definitely not laughter, but a soft sound from that general category, and stare down at the white blindfold I’m still clutching as if it’s a lifeline.
“Melor didn’t rise to the head of the Kotov faction by strength alone, Andrei.
He is cunning and violent. Watch your back.
I am not keen to become a bratva widow.”
“You got married?” Kinsley all but screeches into my ear. I wince and hold my brand-new mobile phone a few inches away from my ear. “You moved to Brooklyn on a whim? What about the gallery? What about your studio?”
“That’s part of what I’m calling about.” The worst part of living a double life as a mafia princess and a normal American young woman is the way I have to lie to my only friend.
I can’t tell her what Melor did to me or why moving out of his house has been an incredible relief, even if I’m not entirely sure what to make of my new husband. Or my new life.
He stalked me for years. But in the two days since he brought me to our new home in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, Andrei has treated me like a queen.
He had been living in a bachelor’s pad of some sort, which I have never stepped foot in, but he had already secured a gorgeous three-story limestone house with a private terrace and parking.
It’s far more modest than the grand Victorian house I grew up in. I adored it on sight.
For the first time in my life, I felt like I was coming home.
The original 19th-century flourishes like pocket doors and stained-glass windows are charming, as are the medallions on the ceilings and the built-in wooden cabinets.
Technically, it’s a two-family structure with an apartment on the top level that gets wonderful light through large windows with an ocean view.
The bratva have operated in this part of Brooklyn for decades.
Andrei pulled some connections to get the house for us quickly.
His pakhan’s wife, Hailey, is in real estate—probably in the sense that I am a celebrated painter.
“Tell me all about him!” Kinsley squeals.
“Who?”
“Your husband?” she answers with a question. I can hear the suspicion in her voice. “Where did you meet him, what does he do for a living, how did he convince you to elope with him, why you never said anything about him. I want the whole story.”
Well, his name is Andrei Volkov, he’s sixteen years older than me, he’s been stalking me for years, and he’s an enforcer for the Russian mob.
Obviously, I can’t say any of that. I trust that my shiny new phone isn’t tapped by the FBI, but you never really know for sure these days.
“I met him at a gallery show. You saw him. Tall, dark-haired, tattoos.”
“That describes a shocking number of Russian men who collect art,” Kinsley giggles.
I know she isn’t stupid. Willfully blind, yes.
Dumb, no. I think admitting she’s been running a gallery that operates as a money-laundering front would hurt her pride as a genuine connoisseur of art, and so she ignores every single warning sign.
This one, however, is almost impossible to ignore.
I’m tired of lying to her.
“Well, he helped me when my car broke down”—technically true, the Goldbug was totaled—“and then he brought me back to my father’s house.
Melor liked Andrei right away”—the truth only stretches so far before it becomes an outright lie—“and we decided to elope. We both want children,” I blurt out.
“It made sense to have me move to Brooklyn where he has his”—oh god, what kind of business could Andrei plausibly be in?
“Private gym franchise. You know, before the baby arrives.”
It almost makes sense. Andrei’s built, definitely works out, and that could explain the cuts on his hands.
He might get them while punching things, or accidentally drop a weight, or be fixing something in his gym.
Now I just have to put up a website for a fake private training facility and voilà, we have a cover story.
My imagination really does get the better of me sometimes.
“You’re pregnant?!” Kinsley squeaks. If her voice goes any higher she’s going to sound like Minnie Mouse.
“Not yet. We’re planning ahead.” Way ahead. I brush my hair back and examine the fading greenish-yellow bruises around my eyes. They’re barely visible beneath the concealer I used this morning to cover them up. I look tired. I am tired. Too much has happened in the past week and a half.
I ran away from home in a panic, crashed my car, got kidnapped, got beaten, got married, lost my virginity in front of an audience, and moved four hours away to a city I barely know.
“You’re moving really fast,” Kinsley says, and I cringe at the bewilderment and hurt in her voice. “Are you sure about this?”
I’m sure I don’t have much of a choice. “Completely,” I say with bright confidence I don’t actually feel. It’s true that when I was changing for bed last night, wondering apprehensively if Andrei was going to try and sleep with me again, he saw the bruises on my ribs and growled “Who did this?”
I told him it was Melor and reminded him that I had tried to tell him what would happen if Andrei took me home. His expression turned into a thundercloud. I was afraid he would hurt me, but all he did was disappear again. I haven’t seen him since.
Should I run?
Where would I go without my money and my fake ID? With no way to start over? I couldn’t rent a hotel room without that damn identity card. Couldn’t apply for a job, couldn’t rent an apartment—that piece of plastic was the key to starting a new life.
There’s no use dwelling on the loss.
“Listen, I will need to come and pack up my supplies from the studio,” I say to Kinsley.
“Yes! We’ll get lunch with your new man. Maybe we can talk about opening a gallery in New York? I know the expensive real estate makes it a more difficult financial proposition than Baltimore, but I have a plan for how we could expand GSG…”
I let her prattle on for a few minutes. Kinsley has a lot of good ideas.
If her family hadn’t gone down in an epic scandal of greed and corruption, she might have become a CEO instead of slaving away in genteel poverty as a gallery manager.
I promise to bring the idea to my father—another lie, for I never plan to speak to that man again after what he did to me.
Honestly, I’m grateful to have a new start here in Brooklyn, away from his faction of hyenas.
If only I had some idea of how to, you know, actually start.
Staring at the sea makes me feel a bit calmer. I’ve done a lot of that since Andrei dumped me here and went off to do whatever it is he does all day.
“Great. I’ll start packing your most recent work and your favorite supplies for the move, then,” says Kinsley, upbeat and helpful to a fault.
“Thank you. I promise we’ll get lunch with Andrei soon.
” How many lies can I tell in the span of one phone conversation?
Too many, that’s for certain. I feel like I wouldn’t know the truth if it bit me on the nose.
I don’t like this about myself, but I’ve been living a lie for so long that I can hardly tell what the truth is anymore.
Heavy male footsteps on the stairs are my only warning that my husband has returned home.
I say a hasty goodbye to Kinsley and hang up, sitting sideways on the cream sofa in the upper apartment I’ve sort of adopted as my own space.
Andrei’s dark head appears first, then his blunt features and broad shoulders, tapered waist, muscular jeans-clad ass, until finally the entire man is looming in the center of my bright sitting area like a human thundercloud.
“How are you feeling?” he says gently.
“Better. The medicine helped.” I didn’t ask where he got it from. I found the note on my bedside table and took the prescribed amount. My ribcage feels less like it’s made of broken glass.
“You’re still here,” he says, sitting on the other end of the sofa. “I thought you might try to run.”
“Go where?” I scoff. “With what money? I have nothing.”
His eyes search my face. “Good. I want you to stay with me.”
I drop my gaze to my lap. I’m still so conflicted about him.
He stalked me. He was as gentle and good to me as possible in that moment on the stage, yet he was the one who sent me back to be beaten, and he literally bought me from my own father.
It’s sick. It’s twisted. I shouldn’t feel this warm fuzzy feeling whenever he’s near—but I do.
I can’t deny it. He cups my chin with one huge, callused hand, and brings my gaze up to meet his.
“Anghel, if you were to bolt now you would undermine me in the eyes of your father’s men. I don’t give a rat’s ass what Melor thinks of me, but I need his men to know I can lead in ways that he cannot.”
He speaks the language of the bratva. I don’t. I was raised around that world yet Melor kept me isolated and made me feel inferior. Incapable. I will never completely understand the brotherhood’s rather medieval codes of honor.
Andrei lives and breathes it.
He just might be the dark knight I didn’t know I needed.
Impulsively, I lean forward to kiss him. His quiet grunt of surprise sparks inside me. I crawl into his lap, straddling his thighs. He cups the back of my skull with one massive hand and returns my kiss deeply. Nothing tentative about it. His chest is a wall of muscle beneath my hands.
Despite everything that’s transpired, I want this. Him.