8. Mila
MILA
It didn’t matter how many mornings passed, when I first woke, I still paused in bed and waited for something to clue me in to a threat. For a signal that something had changed again.
I had my own bed. My own room. Shelter that I didn’t have to share with anyone else or worry about someone pushing me out of. Guards patrolled the Volkov properties, insinuating the obvious facts that both pissed me off and comforted me.
No one was leaving. Especially not me, and that didn’t bode well for my plans of freedom that I would only get through escape.
No one was coming in, either. Especially not any threats or trespassers. That went a long way toward giving me a false sense of security.
I wasn’t going to bed with the assumption that someone in the Cartel would come to my tent or hovel and rape me. I didn’t have to stress about animals or looters swiping my blanket or clothes.
Here as Lev Volkov’s slave, I was clothed, fed, and sheltered. I couldn’t understand why I was being treated like someone of a guest status versus a thing to stick out of sight.
What I did understand was that I was being put to the test. All of last week, I hadn’t been tasked with an assignment.
No smuggling runs to accompany anyone on.
No orders to make the men food and serve it in the compound.
No instructions to retrieve money from gangsters in the city.
Instead, it was clear that Lev wanted to evaluate all that I was capable of.
How fast I could run, climb, or escape a scenario out in the desert.
How long I could endure the challenge of holding weights to mimic a heavy bag, hiding well to go undetected, or picking the best way to go in a maze with a timer.
If I could compare the experience to anything else, it was like a field day ordeal. A boot camp of some kind.
All the assessments felt like exams I couldn’t fail, but afterward, when I would see how well I could hold up among the other Bratva soldiers, I was rewarded with the realization that I could. That I was good enough—if not better—at managing the duress of being a Bratva employee.
Lev, along with his brother and cousins, all of whom I’d been introduced to over that first week, tried to integrate me not as a thing to own and dispose of, but as a person they might rely on for specific services.
They wanted to know where I’d been before, but not in any way that made me suspect they were using me as a source of intel.
They wanted to know who I’d worked for, but not to the degree that I felt like they had singled me out for what I knew.
No matter what they asked me, I walked a fine line between cooperating because I had to, being owned by them, and also keeping my mouth shut because that was all I could do sometimes to keep any semblance of power or control.
Now, as he drove me into the city to put me up to another test, another exercise of seeing how well I could perform under pressure, I wondered if he was trying to prepare me to be his assistant.
That was how often I was with him. Glued to his side. Expected as a sidekick.
“Ready?” he asked after he parked. He killed the engine in front of a tall warehouse and turned to face me.
The slow smirk on his lips taunted me, but I knew I’d get better at forgetting those stupid ideas.
Those lies that he could be attracted to me and want me not as his slave in the field and on the streets, but in his bed.
Since that first day, he hadn’t touched me, hadn’t made a single move on me. That was how I knew he was only taunting me and leading me on to think that he desired me. That was why I knew I had to keep my wits and never lower my guard for a ploy of seduction from someone like him.
“Ready for what?” I asked.
That was often how it went. He’d ask if I was ready and I’d throw it right back in his face that I had yet to be informed of what I needed to be ready for.
Still, as he gave me that smug almost-smile and beckoned for me to get out of the car with him, I knew he wasn’t teasing. He wasn’t playing games with me. If he was, he probably would’ve gotten bored with them—or me—by now.
Instead, as I followed him into the warehouse, I realized that he seemed this serious about treating me like a real employee. Not a thing at the bottom of the ladder as a slave, but an honest-to-God employee like the rest of the Bratva members.
A Bratva soldier approached us. He nodded once at Lev. “It’s arranged.”
“Good.” He dismissed him and faced me. “An envelope has been left in a safe here.” He strode in front of me, holding his hand up to vaguely gesture at the empty industrial building.
An open central space showed several levels above us, hallways as a perimeter on the upper floors where people could look down into the foyer.
“Find it,” he instructed, “and bring it to me within five minutes.”
Another scavenger hunt. I’d never admit how much I enjoyed them.
“That’s it?” I asked.
He arched one brow, seeming to take my reply as a cocky statement, like I was saying that wasn’t hard enough. I meant it as a question, if he’d give me any other details about this test.
I took off, searching the building for a safe or anything that might resemble it.
It wasn’t only the urgency to please Lev, as my master and owner.
It was the thrill of the hunt that drove me, too.
If he wanted to see what I was worthy of and how fast or stealthy I could be, that was far better than actually being on smuggling runs and treated like crap, like the Cartels did.
I ran through the building, I looked in all the abandoned rooms, and I scanned all the walls and shelving units that I came across. All the while, he walked behind me, from a distance, not giving me a clue but trailing along to see how much progress I'd made.
Before I could dash down another hallway, he grabbed me and pushed me off to the side.
His arms locked around me as he tackled me, and we tumbled into a harsh fall together.
I held my breath, surprised at the sudden hit and drop, but it didn’t escape my notice that he tried to cushion my fall.
His hands braced the back of my neck as he prevented me from smacking it.
I blew out a hard breath and peered up at him, lying partly under him off to the side.
“The floor,” he said, slightly out of breath as well. He released me slowly, and as I sat up, I saw how my foot had sunken into a weathered floorboard.
I could have crashed through. Clear down to the next floor down. Or more.
It would’ve been impossible for me to anticipate it, but he must have sensed danger.
And he wanted to… protect me.
I wasn’t expendable to him. I wasn’t something he’d bought that he could replace.
Blinking up at him and disoriented with this push to feel something like gratitude toward him, I was forced to accept this strange safety he insisted on. His controlling nature didn’t leave anything to chance. And he didn’t want to chance anything with me.
Because the time was ticking, I pushed at him to let me up, then proceeded to run along the edge of the hallway, watching my steps more closely.
I found the envelope and handed it over to him, proud to have passed yet another test.
He accepted it and nodded once. “Not bad. Two minutes to go.”
I raised my brows and shrugged. “Not fast enough for you?”
He looked me over. “I’d tell you if I wanted something faster or for you to work harder.”
I tensed, groaning in my mind at how he could mean that in another way.
Not happening. That is so not happening.
We left the warehouse, and I sensed that his watchfulness wasn’t only professional with me. It couldn’t be, because in the week since I’d been here, I had yet to see him treat any other guard, soldier, or member of the Bratva with the personalized interest like he had with me.
That still doesn’t mean anything’s happening.
I shook my head as he drove us away, toward Adrik’s house.
This annoying desire needed to fade away already.
Because the longer I let myself be deluded that Lev actually had been interested in me, in me, not the prospect of having another slave to serve his family, the more I would be distracted from understanding what role or jobs I would have here.
The more I’d wish for freedom and to not have to ever question my purpose or worth.
When we reached Adrik’s house, the large mansion that he shared with his wife and father, I felt like I was too inferior to set foot inside the building.
It was so large. Ornate. State of the art.
Like a grand palace. With my background of being shuffled from one Cartel compound to another, it seemed like heaven.
Although I was only here to trail behind Lev, this unspoken expectation that I was “his” thing, it was different this time. I met Elena and Carina, both of the Mafia wives so content and clearly expecting. They were only breezing by and Carina had asked who I was in passing.
“This is Mila,” Lev replied.
Nothing more. Nothing less. He didn’t say that I was Mila, his slave. He didn’t suggest that I was Mila, a woman he wanted to touch and seduce.
I was just here. Without a role or clear expectation.
Seeing Elena and Carina in this men’s world of power changed my perspective just a little more after they passed through the house and Lev explained.
“Elena is our bookkeeper,” Lev said.
Adrik huffed. “She was our bookkeeper. Now she oversees all the financial staff.”
“And Carina is married to Maksim,” Lev added. “She’s a strategist who once lived with the Garcia Cartel.”
I nodded once, just to show them that I understood.
I didn’t need to be told any of this. I wasn’t familiar with fitting in and having any right to know anything about who was whom.
For a slave like me, I was just one more body to move and they were all out of reach and untouchable to me as the leaders.
But maybe this Bratva is different. Maybe I need to stop thinking these Volkovs are just another variety of crime families like the Cartels.
If they “hired” women and could honestly appreciate their contributions and skills, there was a good chance that Lev really had spared me from the same old hell of my life as a contracted smuggling runner.
Nothing would coax me to lower my guard and assume I was safe here.
That I could be happy and content with this stretch of being owned.
But as I considered how I’d been treated so far, even with the open-ended way that Lev introduced me, as just Mila and without a reference to how I was a slave, I was more determined to balance between cooperation and obedience on one hand versus autonomy and the dream to be free on the other hand.