Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 68102 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 341(@200wpm)___ 272(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68102 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 341(@200wpm)___ 272(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
“Blackmail?”
Sofia nodded.
“What the hell could he have on you that he could use as blackmail?” he asked.
She glanced away. “I’m not the angel you think I am.”
Sacha snorted. “I know you’re no angel, Sofia.”
She frowned. “You do?”
“I do. You have your faults, like all of us. I also know that you try to do your best by everyone else. Especially me. Sometimes to the detriment of your own safety and health. What blackmail?”
She ran her gaze around the room, looking for any sign of cameras.
“The room is safe.”
She nodded. “Oleg applied for a job eight months ago at Solynshko, but I didn’t get a good feeling from him, so I didn’t hire him. He kept trying to flirt with me, but I didn’t like how he stared at me. Like I was a piece of meat or something. And he tried to play on my sympathies by saying he had recently emigrated here and didn’t know many people.”
She clenched her hands into fists. “A month later, he returned to the restaurant, but he was different. There was a smug look about him. He was even sleazier than before, when I didn’t think that was possible. He wanted to talk to me, but I sent him away. Or I thought I had. He kept coming back. Finally, I decided to meet with him. That’s when he showed me the video.”
“What video?” he asked with a slight frown.
“One of you shooting Danill.”
Danill had worked for Sacha. Until the day that Sacha found him hurting one of the women who worked for him.
She knew what had happened to Danill, even if she didn’t know the details.
“I swear it looked like a real video. I didn’t realize he’d just made it up. How did he even know you shot Boris?” she asked.
“Wait. There was a video?”
“A fake one. But I didn’t learn that until last night when Oleg boasted how he’d brought me to heel with a fake video. He told me that if I didn’t pretend to date him and give him a job, he would release the video to the cops. And that if anything happened to him, he had a failsafe ready. Someone else would release the video.”
Sacha started to swear. “That fucking bastard. Sofia, you should have come to me anyway.”
“I was trying to protect you!”
“That’s not your job!” he told her fiercely.
A sob tried to work its way up her throat. “I thought about it. I figured you would work out what to do . . . but that wasn’t the only secret he had. He had another one . . . of mine.”
Aleksandr narrowed his eyes. “There’s something else you’re not telling me?”
“It’s about . . . about the accident.” She wiped at her eyes. “The night I hurt my back and Dmitri died.”
“What about it?”
“Dmitri wasn’t driving the car.”
Sacha frowned. “You were?”
“No,” she whispered.
“Someone else was?”
“Yes. And that someone else . . . you have to understand, Sacha. I thought I loved him. I was young and stupid and—”
“Just tell me,” he said, cutting her off.
“I was dating this guy in college. He, well, he swept me off my feet. He was charming and kind. I had never met anyone like him before.”
She’d never had a chance to. She’d rarely been allowed off the estate when her father was alive. And she’d had to do a lot of begging to get Sacha to agree to college. The only way he’d let her go was if she agreed to a guard. So Dmitri had gone with her.
“Dmitri never told me about a boyfriend.”
“Mike bribed him,” she whispered. “For a start, we kept things secret. We messaged lots, and he asked who the scary Russian dude following me around was and if he needed to get rid of him. I told him that my family was overprotective, so I had a guard.”
“Bribed him? Dmitri betrayed me for money?”
A shiver ran through her at the pure fury in his voice. Sofia got it. She hadn’t even been aware that Mike had been bribing Dmitri until right at the end. She’d thought he was being loyal to her rather than Sacha.
Stupid Sofia.
“I didn’t know about it until the night of the accident when Mike told me. He told me a lot of things that night—like how he had been sent to get close to me. That nothing we had was real. I thought he loved me and he was just spying on me for his family. What an idiot I was.”
“What? Sofia, who the fuck was this guy?” he asked.
“His real name was Rafe Ramirez. Apparently, his brother was the one who sent him to get close to me and find out if I knew anything about your business. I’m not sure who his brother was. He said he was leaving and going home because I was clearly ignorant of everything regarding the Bratva. He’d searched my apartment, my emails, my texts, everything he could get his hands on, and all he had discovered was that I was boring. I loved him, yet he thought I was boring.”