Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 56572 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 283(@200wpm)___ 226(@250wpm)___ 189(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 56572 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 283(@200wpm)___ 226(@250wpm)___ 189(@300wpm)
“Good news?” I ask.
“I … think so,” he says after a pause.
“You don’t want to get my hopes up,” I say, looking into his eyes.
He laughs deeply. When he moves his hand, clearly meaning to brush the hair from his face, I reach up and do it instead. He smirks, takes my hand, and then tells me, “Oleg wants to take the Bratva from your father. With my father gone, yours is losing support. Soon, it could be time.”
I swallow. “Time for what?”
“Time for me to do the right thing,” he says fiercely. “Time for me to make this right. No father should ever hurt his children. Trust me, it’s not like that’s all Nikolai is guilty of.”
A cold chord pulses through me. “What do you mean?”
“The trafficking,” Mikhail says. “Kidnapping innocent women. Forcing them to become wage slaves in a depraved profession.”
“I hate it,” I whisper. “I hate all of it—the life he’s built, the things he does and says.”
But … I try to swallow the word. Tears threaten to spring to my eyes and slide down my cheeks, yet I fight them away.
“I know,” Mikhail says. “He’s still your dad. This was never going to be easy. The second you told me what he did to you, he forfeited his life. This has to be the way. You can’t ask me to stop now.”
“I never said I was going to ask you to stop,” I say, disentangling myself from him and walking to the window. “I just wish …” I hesitate, then go on when he walks up behind me, gently wrapping his arms around my body. Part of me wants to fight him, but I can’t. The deep desire constantly gripping me won’t let me fight. “I wish I could code a new life. One where the man I …” Love? Is that the right word? Or am I just nuts? “… care about doesn’t have to kill my dad.”
“Me too,” Mikhail says, “but we can’t spend time wishing the world was different. All we can do is deal with the problem in front of us. I wish you had a good dad. I wish you had a real family, but we have each other. Maybe we could start a new family.”
Lia’s sketch punches into my mind, the woman holding the baby. A smile touches my lips, and I am confused and relieved that Mikhail can’t see my face. “We can’t talk about things like that. It’s too soon. There’s too much that could go wrong.”
“But you’d want to talk about it … if things were different?”
“What are we talking about?” I counter, knowing I’m just dancing away from the question. I can’t let myself sink into dreams of the future, into escaping Dad, Drake being safe, and the world not being so poisoned and wrong.
“You know what,” he says.
I don’t reply because I can’t be the one to start this conversation. It’s been, what, a couple of days? Time has blurred and performed some acrobatics, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually been a long time.
“I’m talking about you and me,” he whispers, gently kissing my neck, but I can feel how not gentle he wants to be from the way he kisses; I can hear it in his breath. “I’m talking about the fact that, to make this plan work, a Sokolov and a Petrov still need to get married.”
A distant voice tells me this panic comes from having something I desperately want. I didn’t realize how badly I wanted to be with Mikhail. I didn’t truly realize anyway until he dared give me genuine hope. I’ve lived so long pushing down any idea that I could have a happy life.
Turning in his embrace, I say, “I don’t want to do anything just because we have to.”
“We don’t have to do anything,” he snaps, but he can’t hide the hurt in his eyes. I’m guessing this isn’t the answer he wanted to hear. It’s also not the answer I wanted to give.
“I just want my brother to be safe.”
“He’ll be safe, and he’ll be an uncle, too.”
“Mikhail,” I whisper, my voice cracking, tears trying to spring to my eyes again.
I wipe angrily at my face, so sick of all the crying, all the useless pain.
“I promise,” he says fiercely, leaning down, looking me straight in the eye through a wild lock of his hair. “I’m going to make this happen, but I need your permission.” When I say nothing, he goes on, “Your father deserves to die. Not just for the evil, disgusting, unspeakable things he’s done to other people, but for every bad thing he ever said to you, every violent thing he did. I need to know that when I take his life, you won’t hate me for it.”
“I hate him,” I snap.
“Ania hated our dad, but she loved him too. She misses him. People are more complicated than code, my tech temptation.”