He fell back a step, overcome with an eerie sense that Kat belonged here—that what had always been missing from his home was now standing beside him.
“Whatever you wish.”
CHAPTER10
Nadia opened her eyes when a familiar voice called her name.
“My Nadia, wake up.”
The words spoken were in Russian, repeating the same thing.
“Papa?” She blinked through the blurriness and rolled to her side, wondering if she was still caught in a dream.
“That’s right,” he said, his voice husky. “I have prayed for your safety.”
She sat up, her head pounding. The last thing she remembered was a car smashing into her ride and a loud explosion of metal and glass—a sound she could still hear repeating in her head like a record skipping.
“I made you shift once,” he said. “Do it again if you’re not all the way healed.”
“No… I…” Nadia sat up and dizzily looked at her surroundings.It all seems surreal,she thought.
For the first time in two decades, she laid eyes on her father—a man she had laid to rest in her heart long ago in order to cope. He appeared exactly the same, only frail, as if he’d been underfed. Coarse grey hairs mixed in with the black, and his beard was much too long. Even his voice sounded as if he hadn’t used it in a long time. Her heart clenched when she saw his raggedy clothes.
“Papa.” Nadia crawled across the concrete floor and fell into his arms, weeping uncontrollably.
“Shhh, my princess,” he said, his thick accent soothing her like sweet honey. A voice she had heard in her dreams so many times. “Nadia, what have you done to your hair?”
She sat up, looking down at her blond locks. “You don’t like it?”
He shrugged as fathers often do. “You were always beautiful to me. Why are you here?”
“Me? Why areyouhere? Where are we?”
He thumped the back of his head against the cinder block wall behind him. “I’ve been here many years—too many to count. I don’t even know when it’s day or night except when I’m fed, which isn’t often when he’s out of town and his men don’t come by. There is a long history between Vladimir and me.”
She lifted the chain around his feet, following the links that bolted into the wall. “But why would he do this? He’s had you here this whole time?”
“There’s something he wants that I won’t give him, so he keeps me here out of spite, hoping one day he’ll break me. Buthowdid he know aboutyou?”
She shook her head, not understanding.
“He did not know I had children. I convinced him I had no one, and he foolishly believed me.”
Nadia realized she wasn’t bound in any way. Her eyes darted around the room in search of something to break his chains. “I have to free you.”
“Nyet. I want you to lie down and pretend you are weak and afraid. When he comes back, I’m going to wrap this chain around his neck, and you’re going to escape. He’s a Mage, but I can hold him back long enough for you to get out and lock us inside. Then you take his car and drive as far away as you can.”
“I can’t leave you here!” Tears slipped past her lashes, and she gripped a handful of his shirt.
Her father cursed in Russian and then calmed himself, asking a question that distracted her. “How is my Kat?”
“She’s still a bounty hunter.”
Alex smiled, and even beneath that wild beard she could see it. “That pleases me. Did you know when she first told me what she did, I made the mistake of calling her a huntress?” He laughed, his eyes sparkling with memories. “She said a profession shouldn’t come with gender tags and she could do the job just as well as any man. Kat always wanted to be a hunter like her father. And how is my princess Nadia?”
“I’m not working in that museum anymore. I’m a businesswoman, connecting buyers and sellers of valuable art,” she said with a sniff.
“Always my smart girl,” he said, patting her cheek lovingly.
