Chapter 25
NATALYA
So. Kat tried to fake a pregnancy to keep Anton. That is… valuable information.
With Anton downstairs, I’m left alone with my thoughts. I can’t help but consider how things must have happened with Kat. Did he believe her at first? Was he happy about it? Were they planning their future when one of her friends let him in on her lie?
Or did he disbelieve her all along? He’d made it clear that her lie wasn’t the first nor the only thing that led to their breakup. Did he hear that she was pregnant and immediately send his spies to find out if it was true or not?
And the most important question to all of that is will he do that to me once I tell him about this pregnancy?
Why do I torture myself like this? We just had great sex. I was just dozing in his arms and feeling like all was right with the world and with us. I think I feel real, actual love for the first time… and here I am doubting everything once again.
He said he loved me back. It was in the heat of passion, but I believe him. I want to believe him. If he loves me, then he’ll love this baby. That’s how it’s supposed to go, anyway.
I sit up in bed, pulling my knees to my chest. My mother died in childbirth and my father blames me for it. Hates me for it. If something should happen to me and Anton is left to raise this baby on his own, I would never want to doom someone else to the same fate as me.
I guess I won’t know anything for sure until the moment I tell him. I throw the covers off and get out of bed. It’s better to get it over with. Maybe sitting in the kitchen, talking over bowls of ice cream, it’ll go down easier…
I’m pulling my panties up when I hear a noise somewhere downstairs. Sounds like something was dropped. He must have dropped a bowl or something.
I put on my T-shirt and start hunting around for my jeans when I hear a louder clatter. It startles me as it echoes loudly from the other side of the door.
What the hell is going on down there? I’d better check on him.
I open the door and there’s a man standing there, dressed all in black and wearing a mask over the lower half of his face.
Panic grabs me and I try to shut the door. He pushes it open and the force throws me backward. I stumble and nearly fall over as another man comes in, his face covered too. The first one looks me up and down, a menacing smile in his eyes.
He glances at his partner and through the mask I hear him say in Russian, “Grab those pants.”
He goes to grab my jeans off the floor and the first one lunges at me. I scream, scratching and kicking at him. He lowers his head and lifts me up off my feet and throws me over his shoulder.
“Let’s go,” I hear him say.
I’m being carried out of the room and in the opposite direction of the staircase.
They get all the way to the other side of the hall and suddenly, my captor is leaning down and pushing me out of a window.
The last thing I see before I’m grabbed from the other side is Anton as he reaches the landing.
The second man fireman carries me down a ladder and I hear shouting above me. Anton calling out to me. I scream his name and kick my legs, which makes the man holding me teeter a little on the ladder. He grips me tighter with his arm and speeds up climbing down.
It’s seconds later and we’re on the ground.
I’m carried to a nearby car that’s parked on the lawn on the side of the house and thrown into the backseat.
The guy slams the door closed and it locks almost simultaneously.
He hits the top of the car and we’re off.
The car speeds off toward the lot in front of the house, then to the lane leading out.
I manage to sit up long enough to see us barreling toward the open gates of the property.
“Where are you taking me?” I scream. The driver doesn’t answer me so I throw myself at him, clawing at the fabric of his ski mask from the backseat.
The car swerves, but he keeps control of the car with one hand and grabs my wrists with the other and pushes me back.
I go to jump at him again, but I hear the familiar click of a gun.
He half turns to me, the barrel of a gun pointed at me. “Sit back and shut the fuck up if you want to get out of this alive.”
I listen to him, terrified. Who are these people? Where am I going?
I start to recognize the part of the city where I grew up about thirty minutes into the drive and it becomes clear. This was my father.
Of all the ways I thought he might react to finding out that I was living with Anton, I certainly didn’t expect a full on kidnapping.
I ride in the backseat of the car, watching familiar streets pass us by, and all I can think about is how he just couldn’t let me go.
I know that my leaving wasn’t the offense.
He wanted that. Sleeping with a colleague was where I went wrong.
Anton is probably going crazy with worry. When I get home, I’ll have to find a way to call him…
Shit. My phone is still in Anton’s safe. Not that I’d have it anyway. They stole me out of the bedroom in only my T-shirt and panties. Speaking of which, I’m cold. I try tucking my legs up under me on the seat in an effort to get some body heat going, but it’s not helping.
I start to see my old neighborhood. Old acres of land and mansions separated only by hedges… and there’s my father’s house. The car turns onto the property and slows down as we get to the circle driveway in front.
The car comes to a stop and another car pulls up next to him. As the occupants get out, I realize that I recognize one of them. The one that told the other to grab my pants has taken off his mask. He’s tall and lanky and his dark hair is short and slicked back.
But the dark eyes I know. Those eyes belong to Arseni.
Of course my cousin is in on this. He’s been under my father’s thumb since we were seventeen years old. He goes to the backseat of the car and grabs my blue jeans, then walks over to the car I’m in.
The driver lets the window down and Arseni throws the jeans at me. “Put them on.”
I’ve got a good mind to call him out. He was always such a little twerp. Playing with matches and stealing his mother’s good knives… He was a nightmare when we were children.
Now, he’s just one more member of my father’s Bratva. I put on the jeans while he watches. Once they’re on and buttoned up securely, he nods to the driver to unlock my door and he lets me out.
He grabs my arm and I yank it away. “I can walk fine, thank you.”
He lets me walk while he and the rest of his goons surround me. I guess just in case I run. I’m barefoot. I don’t know how far they think I could get if I did run.
We step into the foyer. The familiar smell of the house greets me. My father’s cologne, the cleaning stuff the maid uses on the floors, and the faint smell of food. My stomach growls. I haven’t eaten since breakfast…
I hear footfalls and a second later, my father walks into the foyer from the kitchen. He smiles at me and holds his arms out. “Natalya,” he says. “You’re home. Finally.”
He walks up to me and kisses my cheek. I flinch at his touch.
“I hope you had a nice vacation,” he said. “Come on. I’ve made us lunch.”
He turns to his men and waves them away. “Clean up, get rid of those cars and clothes…” he mutters at them in Russian.
We walk into the kitchen and there’s a sandwich platter on the island counter. “Help yourself,” he says.
My father has never “made” me lunch. In fact, he’s never cooked a thing in his life.
This is no doubt the work of one of his people.
He walks around the island to the cabinets and pulls out two plates.
“I’ve just restocked the fridge. So, if you’d like something to drink, I’ve got soda, water, juice…
” He pauses and looks over his shoulder at me.
“I even have wine if that’s what you’d like. ”
I don’t know what the hell this is so I say nothing. My father has rarely been this nice to me and anytime it’s happened, it was around other people to keep up appearances.
He sets the plates out, sliding one toward me, then he goes to the refrigerator and pulls out two cans of soda. “I didn’t know what you would like. It’s been a minute since I’ve even seen you drink anything fizzy.”
He turns and sets the cans down by the plates. “Sit,” he says.
I sit down and watch as he puts sandwiches on both plates. “What is this?” I ask. He takes a bite from his sandwich as he stands on the other side.
“Ham and Cheese,” he says. “You don’t like ham anymore? I thought you loved it.”
“Not since I was eight,” I say. “And that’s not what I mean. Why are you being so nice to me?”
He smiles at me, then wipes his face with a napkin. “Natalya, you’re my daughter. Of course I’m going to be nice to you. Especially now since you’re finally home.”
I frown at him. It’s like I’m in the Twilight Zone. “Two months ago, you kicked me out for coming home late and less than thirty or forty minutes ago, you had your men kidnap me—”
“Kidnap is such a strong word,” he says coldly. “I sent my men to go get you and bring you back here. And here you are.”
We stare at one another for a couple of seconds before he motions toward the sandwiches. “Eat. Please. It might be a while before you get anything else.”
I don’t know what the hell that means… but I reluctantly take a sandwich just the same. “So you brought me back,” I say to him after I take a bite. “Why? What do you gain by dragging me back here when you never wanted me here in the first place?”
He scoffs and opens his soda can. It hisses angrily as he pops the top.
“When I found out that you and Anton Romanov had been together, I reacted as any father might react in my position. My twenty-three-year-old daughter was sleeping with a man most certainly close to being in his fifties. And that man was another Pakhan. He’s part of a brotherhood.
Every way you turn this, he knew better than to ever touch you. ”
The blue in his eyes turns icy as he speaks. It almost feels like the temperature in the room has dropped.
“I could have shown up at his door and put a bullet in his head and no one would have blamed me for it. His men probably wouldn’t even seek vengeance for it. He was fucking my daughter, after all.”
“So, why didn’t you just do that, then?” I ask him. “Personally, I would have loved to have seen you try.”
He snickers. “I’m sure you would at that. I didn’t kill him on sight because I still needed him. And if you hadn’t inserted yourself into my plans, I might finally be done with him and the Amur.”
I blink at him. The Amur? “What are you talking about? Anton never did anything to you—”
He slams his hand on the counter. “You don’t know anything about what he has or hasn’t done,” he yells. “You’re just a spoiled Bratva princess who I should have thrown away in the trash after your mother died.”
I freeze in terror. He leans into me.
“This is Bratva business, Natalya,” he says. “I told you over and over again that it’s nothing to do with you. Now, because I was so distracted by your decision to fuck Anton Romanov, my plans to wipe out the Amur and Astrakhan almost passed me by.”
Through my fear, I try to understand what he’s ranting about. “I haven’t been involved in any of that,” I tell him. “I don’t even know—”
“They were at war!” he yells again. “They would have obliterated each other and all I would have had to do is pick up the pieces of their empires. And then out of the blue, they call it all off. A truce! How exactly could that have happened, Natalya?”
He looks at me as if I know the answer. I don’t. I just stare wide-eyed at him, waiting for him to strike out at me. He stares at me for a few seconds, then picks up his soda and takes a drink, setting it down hard on the counter.
“For every rotten thing that you turned out to be,” he says, “you have your mother’s looks.
Your mother was so beautiful that she could stop a man on a dime with a just a hair flip or the right look over her shoulder.
And the sex.” He laughed bitterly. “I’ve never known a woman who could fuck like her.
If she had asked me to burn all this to the ground, I would have done it.
The power of her pussy was just that potent. ”
I’m so repulsed that I find myself slowly sliding away from him. I don’t know how far I would get if I tried to run. He told his men to get rid of the cars and their clothes. Maybe they’re all gone and there’s no one else on the premises.
He points one fat finger at me and says, “That’s how you bewitched him. You fucked the Bol’shoy Lev of Astrakhan into submission and he called off his war against Nikolai.”
“He’s his own man,” I say in futile defense. “I can’t influence—” He slams his hand on the counter and I yelp in surprise.
“I don’t want to hear your bullshit lies,” he says. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter. Tomorrow morning when he finds the pretty head of his lover sitting on his doorstep with a note of regard from Nikolai, the war will be back on.”
Oh, God… He means to kill me. I have to—
He strikes out at me like a viper, grabbing me by the neck and pulling me toward him. “I’m finally going to do what I should have done after you killed your mother,” he snarls at me. “And for the first time in your miserable life, you’re going to be of some use to me.”
He pushes me and I fall backward, hitting the kitchen floor hard. He stalks around the counter island and grabs me by the hair, dragging me out of the kitchen.
He half drags, half carries me up the stairs until we reach one of the bedrooms. It’s already ajar, so he pushes it all the way open and practically throws me inside, then slams the door shut. I hear the locks engage right after.
I’m on the floor in this empty room with nothing but the light from a single window. I can tell by the wallpaper that this used to be my room, but… but not anymore. All the furniture has been taken out. There’s nothing in here anymore but the carpet on the floor.
I fall back down onto the carpet… and I just start crying.