3
We always knew that it would come to this. My family is the wealthiest and strongest Russian contingent in the United States. Xander Amory heads up the Sicilians. He has loaded his chips on the side of war, and I’m not a man who shies away from the front line.
I swallow the Negroni in my glass and signal for another.
I was five years old when I saw my first corpse. FIVE YEARS OLD.
I heard raised voices coming from my father’s study.
The anger in their tones wasn’t what dragged me barefoot from my bedroom; in my father’s line of business, tempers often frayed at the edges, and deals got destroyed by a wrong word or an imagined slight, or a bullet in the back of someone’s fucking skull.
No, it was the cold menacing threat behind them, and the ominous silence pervading the rest of the house.
I crept downstairs, my heart thumping inside my chest. I thought my father or one of his men might hear it, but no one was standing guard outside the door to his study.
My toes sank into the thick pile carpet on the stairs in anticipation of what I might find when I reached the bottom.
But nothing, literally nothing, could’ve prepared me for the sight of my father firing a bullet into the skull of his right-hand man.
My stomach lurched sickeningly at the same time as my body seemed to turn to ice.
But I must’ve groaned like a ghost or squealed like a pig because my father turned his head and looked at me, the murder weapon still in his hand.
Then he calmly rose from his seat, stowed the gun inside a drawer, and closed the door behind him as he came to me at the bottom of the stairs.
“Come, moi syn.” He placed his warm hands on my shoulders, turned me around, and guided me back to my room. When I was tucked up in bed with the comforter pulled up to my chin, he said, “Never allow love to cloud your judgement, Leonid, because heads turn for far lesser things.”
I nodded. I had no idea what he was talking about, but suddenly, with the firing of that single bullet, the man who had been my role model, my comfort blanket, my shelter when the rest of the world was raining, had taken on a ghastly appearance.
My papa was gone, and in his place was a man whose footsteps I was destined to fill.
That night, I fell asleep with the image of my uncle, a man I’d known my entire short life, sprawled on the floor of my father’s study with cold, vacant fisheyes and blood trickling from a hole in his head.
In the casino, I gauge the time by the fuzziness slowly wrapping itself around my brain from the Negroni.
This coupled with the increasingly charged atmosphere from the casino bowl below has never let me down yet.
The evening is still relatively young when Tamara enters the private lounge, collects her favorite tipple, Applejack and soda, and joins me at the table in the corner by the balcony.
“We have secured the asset, Pakhan.” She sips her drink and watches me coolly from beneath raven-black bangs.
Tamara and Ivana are identical twins, but few people realize it at first glance.
Tamara’s curls, wide smile, and smoky eyes give her a soft appearance and an almost childlike quality that most people are instantly drawn to.
Especially men. Ivana on the other hand wears her hair cut short and spiky, the tips dyed lurid green, the strange look accentuated by the elongated green flicks at the corners of her eyes and the battered Doc Martens that I’ve never seen her without.
I rescued them twenty years ago when they were just little kids.
They’d been trafficked from abroad, arrived on American soil in a filthy container that stank of piss and shit, several of the adults with them already dead.
My father had been tipped off that the cargo was entering our port along with another shipment that we were expecting, both of which had been made known to the police commissioner.
They were just a couple of scared little girls with wide green eyes and grubby faces, and the sight of them made me feel nauseous.
What kind of sick bastard would abduct kids and sell them into the sex trade?
My father said that they were probably sold by their own parents, and that was the fingertip that pushed me over the edge.
While my father handled the shipment we’d been expecting, I relocated the girls to our safe house and saw to it that the sick fucker who shipped them here would never touch a woman again.
My mother cleaned them up, fed them, gave them clothes to wear and moved them into a guest room in our home. She cared for them, but I was the one they looked to as their savior. Their superhero. Some kind of fucking demi-god in a gold loincloth and wielding a jewel-encrusted sword.
They still do, even though they know the real me.
Sergei would kill to protect me. But Ivana and Tamara would kill themselves if they believed that it would keep me alive.
“Where is it?” I swallow my drink in one mouthful.
“En route to your home.” She watches me coolly. “Do you want me to see that it is settled?”
“Where is Ivana?”
“At the safe house. She had to lose another man.”
Fuck! The body count is rising. This asset had better be worth its weight in gold or I might be forced to go in harder and lower.
“No, ask Ivana to arrange a little welcome party.”
No point going in soft with the new asset; she needs to know that we mean business, or she’ll get too comfortable, and we’ll have nothing left to barter with.
Tamara inclines her head. “As you wish.”
She is under no illusions that I wish her sister to be welcoming when our new guest arrives.
They shared a womb. They know each other’s thoughts without speaking the words out loud.
She might not like the way her sister operates, but she understands that they are both simply doing what needs to be done to survive.
Her glass is empty, but she doesn’t move.
“What is it?”
“Your father has requested that you dine with him tonight.”
“Has he now?” I sit back in my seat and signal the bartender to fix me another drink.
“Are you not going?” Tamara blinks her pretty green eyes at me.
As if I could ever refuse? She said it herself; my father requests my presence at his home tonight. Attendance isn’t optional.
The bartender places our drinks in front of us and removes the empty glasses.
When he is out of earshot, I face Tamara. “I’m going. Perhaps dinner with my parents is exactly what I need before I greet the new asset personally.”
I do not have to run my business decisions by my father before I carry them out, but he still has his finger on the pulse of every mafia family in the city.
He will know the losses we have incurred at the hands of Xander Amory, and he will expect me to retaliate …
with interest. This evening’s meal will not be a warning for me to back off but rather a reminder that I need to marry and produce an heir.
“And you’re coming with me.” I clink my glass against hers and down it in one.
Gianna
Dim lights. Walls a nondescript color that might once have been white. Dark blackout curtains.
I push myself into a sitting position, my breathing growing shallow as my head reels, and bile rises in my throat.
“Don’t be sick. Don’t be sick. Don’t be sick,” I whisper to myself, but it’s a close call.
My head is pounding, my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth, and my throat clicks when I swallow.
I feel like I polished off an entire bottle of Tequila on my own, which Mika would never have allowed.
Then I remember…
I left Mika and Cartier behind in Montenegro.
It starts coming back to me in frantic flashes of light. The aircraft. Andy. Silly card games and little cans of gin and tonic. It was lighthearted, fun, a way of passing the time until it wasn’t. It all turned dark when I tried to stand up and leave my seat.
An image of Andy’s cheeky grin and geeky awkwardness pops into my head, and I lean over the side of the bed and retch. Nothing comes out, but my head feels like it’s going to explode.
He fucking drugged me.
The suitcase splitting open, his girlfriend telling him to strap it together, the Swedish fish candy… It was all just a smokescreen, and I fell for the oldest trick in the book.
I force myself back into a sitting position and drag my legs over the side of the bed, slowly, supporting my head with one hand as if that will stop it from toppling off my shoulders and rolling away.
I survey my surroundings. It’s a small room.
I’m on a single bed that isn’t completely uncomfortable, but there are no other furnishings. A basement maybe?
I have no idea if I’m in Chicago or another part of the country, but I need to get out of here before whoever abducted me comes back. Because if they don’t kill me—which is extremely feasible given my family name—my father will for insisting that I travel alone.
“Stupid,” I mutter to myself, my voice hoarse. “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.”
Gripping the side of the bed, I force myself to stand up. My legs feel like Jell-o, and the room rocks as if I’m still on the aircraft, but I stand there, swaying unsteadily and wait for the motion in my head and stomach to subside.
There’s a door. I make my way slowly across the room and wait there, straining my ears for any sounds outside the room.
But all I can hear is the blood gushing through my veins, and the dull thud-thud-thud of my heartbeat.
Holding my breath, I reach for the knob and turn it, panic clawing its way around my insides when I realize that the door is locked.
“Help!” Survival instinct kicks in, and I rest my cheek against the solid door, praying that someone might be walking past and hear me. “Let me out!”
When no one comes, I start pounding on the door with my fists, yelling until my voice cracks and almost disappears.