Chapter 20
alina
NICOLAI
Strangling my brother in a room full of hundreds of our mutual friends would almost certainly result in my incarceration. I would have to wait for the next time he bummed a ride on my plane for the proper privacy to throw his body into the sea.
I stood over on the side of the ballroom as Kostya waltzed with my Lexi, saying something to her with a smug bullshit expression on his face.
Lexi’s expression didn’t change, and she said something that appeared to be one syllable, like “Yikes.”
I was praying my little angel could hold her own. I suspected she could.
As I stood on the sidelines, trying not to look alone and pathetic, a tap on my shoulder surprised me.
I don’t know why I should’ve been surprised. Many of my closest friends were in that crowded ballroom. Though most of them would’ve either just started talking at me or jabbed me in the ribs, not tapped me discreetly on the shoulder.
As I turned, a pretty blond woman wearing a strapless blush-pink dress was smiling at me, but I didn’t think I knew her.
Recognition soured in my stomach at the older man standing next to her, because that was Demyan fucking Volkov glaring there.
His hand rested possessively on her bare shoulder. “You should get to know my daughter, Alina. She has saved this dance for you.”
How in the motherfucking hell had Volkov gotten in here? The daughter, I could see. Any one of the men of our generation wearing lust-fogged glasses could have brought her along as a plus-one or an impromptu date.
But him? This was a personal event, not one of the official state wedding festivities that would draw an intergenerational crowd. This party was supposed to be for John’s and Anna’s friends, not older relatives or business contacts, and I hoped for their sake that Demyan Volkov was neither.
“It is nice to meet you, Alina.” I straightened to talk to the old Russian crime boss. “She is lovely. However, I am just waiting for my wife to finish dancing with my brother. Nice to see you both.”
I turned my back on them.
A more insistent tap, nearly violent, jarred my shoulder. Demyan Volkov said, “You don’t want to cause a scene. Dance with Alina. If I have to tell you again, bad things happen. I don’t ever want to have to tell you twice.”
Alina had clasped her hands very tightly in front of herself. Her voice was low and measured. “Please, Nicolai. It will only take a moment. He really is insisting.”
The quiver in the poor girl’s voice sounded frightened.
My dumbass baby brother did seem to be taking forever to waltz with my wife, and my standing here on the sidelines obsessing about wrapping my elbow around his neck in a chokehold was not passing the time more quickly.
I jutted one elbow toward her. “Would you join me on the dance floor?”
Alina slipped her hand under mine, and we walked the very few paces to stand near the back of the ballroom’s parquet floor.
I took her hand and assumed the waltzing position, careful to keep her braced well away from my body. I didn’t like this, and we didn’t need to make a spectacle of it.
She followed me easily into the waltz, turning with me as I led.
“Yes, well, Alina. It’s very nice to meet you, I’m sure.” As we moved, I minimized every step. I wasn’t making myself look sullen. I just had absolutely no enthusiasm for this encounter and wished it to end as soon as possible.
“I am so sorry for what my father is doing to you,” Alina started. “I assure you, I am as unwilling a participant as you are.”
I looked down at her, trying to gauge her sincerity. “Is that so?”
“He gets these crazy political machinations in his head. I tried to tell him that human beings don’t work like that.
He can’t just shuffle us across the board like his little pawns.
And yet, he grabs onto these ideas like a rat terrier, and once he sinks his needle-like little teeth into them, it’s impossible to get him to let them go. ”
The tension in her neck and shoulders appeared to be frustration, but I was not easily fooled.
People had tried to manipulate me my whole life, from trying to convince me that my father’s assassination was a mere firearms accident on a crowded street in Stockholm, Sweden, to trying to get me to invest my family’s wealth in every con known to man.
By the time I got to Harvard, I wrote papers on swindling not from literature references but from core memories.
She fretted, “I feel like I’m standing on the other end of a rope, yelling, ‘Drop it! Drop it!’ but he’s growling at me with the arrogance of a tiny dog who’s never been swatted with a rolled-up newspaper.”
The thought of Demyan Volkov taking the form of a snarling Chihuahua was funny enough to disarm me a little, which actually set me on my guard even more. “Your father does seem tenacious.”
“You have no idea what it was like growing up with my father who had a new plan to use me for every phase of my life.”
“Yes, I wasn’t subjected to that particular problem.”
“Anyway, now he’s decided on you and me getting married, and the real problem is, he’s been planning this for years.”
I would have to give my uncle Michel the third degree as to when Volkov first began to approach him. “Is that right?”
Yes, I was absolutely letting Alina Volkov tell me what I wanted to know. I was straight-up holding an interrogation while waltzing at a white-tie cotillion.
But it was working. All I had to do was let her tell me.
“I don’t know why he thinks that my marrying you would somehow help his business.
” Alina practically spat the last word, so she might indeed understand the sordid business her father conducted.
“He craves validation. It’s not enough to be accepted by the other people who run businesses like his.
He wants to be welcomed into high society. ”
I just had to last until this song ended, and the orchestra was playing the final verse. “We’re not a very welcoming bunch.”
“Yeah, I noticed. But seriously, I need to make it look like I’m making headway with you.”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something to tell him,” I said, keeping my tone pleasant. God, I wanted out of this dance and this night.
“Nicolai, he told me to make progress with you, or things could get ugly.”
“Things are already ugly. Your father’s goons confronted some of my security personnel last night. We were lucky no one on either side died.”
The last strains of the waltz died, and people applauded as I began to step back from Alina Volkov with relief.
I began to raise my hand to her back to shepherd her toward her father.
“No. I have to—If my dad doesn’t see some progress with us, he’s going to—fuck it!”
Alina Volkov grabbed me by the back of my neck.
She’d had the element of surprise. Otherwise, I would’ve just kept standing straight and let her dangle from my neck by one arm, twisting in the cold breeze from the air conditioning.
But we’d been dancing. Though I’d been leading, I’d been responding to her cues to change direction or to moderate my step-length.
With her arm around my neck, her weight dragged me down, and I bent. She pressed her mouth upon mine.
I jerked upward, breaking her grip. “No.”
“Look, I’m sorry, but I just needed to—”
I dropped my arms away from her and wiped my mouth off on my jacket cuff, but she stepped forward with scared-wide eyes.
“I’m sorry. I just needed to do that to show my father I was making progress in landing you.
Now my dad will let us off for the remainder of the night, and I won’t have to hear about it.
Please. Just dance with me for another minute or so.
The next song is already starting. Please! ”
People were really staring now, but surely they were also seeing my posture leaning backward and the tightness of my jaw. “Don’t try that again. And after this waltz, don’t speak to me ever again.”
“Damn, now I’ve ruined everything. He’s going to be so mad at me.
” Her blue eyes’ quick dart to their corners suggested she was checking for ears that should not hear what she was saying.
“He wants recognition from the people who have always looked down on us. I don’t know whether he has a fatal case of imposter syndrome and needs some antidepressants, but I do know what he is craving can’t be bought.
Yet, he is trying to buy himself a son-in-law who will allow him into places he currently can’t. ”
Queasiness rolled in my stomach, and I regretted indulging in every bite of the large piece of fatty prime rib set in front of me for supper. “And he decided I was for sale.”
“He knows you are, or you were, until you suddenly showed up with a wife.”
Calling me for sale sounded like I was one of her father’s pawns. I was not. I’d been scrupulously careful my whole life not to become anyone’s pawn. “I was not for sale before, and I have married my wife in the Russian Orthodox faith. There is no retreating from this.”
“Look, I’ve already told you that this is not my idea.
I really wish that I’d run away and married some bodyguard or nouveau riche chav from school when I was seventeen because that would’ve solved all my problems, but I didn’t.
And he is not going to let this go. Did you see that video he sent you? ”
The horrific torture-murder video from that morning was indeed from Volkov, then. “I have my own security staff.”
“I’m telling you, right now, they are not enough. They are nowhere near enough.”
“That video wasn’t from your father’s operation, though. It is known that the video was filmed by Russian state security services, not a minor bratva hiding in the underworld.”
“My dad recruits middle management from Russian state security services. He may not have had the influence to do that two years ago, but he does now. He hired those guys. Like, those guys. He has video footage of your wife. I think her name is Alexandra, yes?”
I wasn’t going to give Alina any information that she may or may not have confirmed already. “Is that so?”