“Where you would have met her, huh?” Volkov demanded. “Walking on a beach? Would you even talk to a girl you had met on a beach at sunrise?”
The vodka was spinning my head. “My security would never allow it.”
“Yes, that is right. So instead, you meet at a supper with her next week in Paris. You will like my daughter. You will be engaged in two months and marry her in September. You will grow to love her, and she, you. We Russians are a passionate people. You will see.”
I stood. The floor slipped out from under my feet, so I steadied myself with my fingertips on the table. “My affections are engaged elsewhere.”
God, I sounded like Jane fucking Austen, but I’d learned to speak English by reading Jane Austen and the rest of the Western canon, so sometimes I sounded like Jane fucking Austen.
Konstantin gaped at me.
Uncle Michel rolled his eyes in disbelief.
Volkov asked, “You are already married? Was itRussianOrthodox rite?”
“Of course,” I lied. There was no one in my life. There hadn’t been anyone more than a night’s fuck for several years. At least two years. Just casual women friends-with-benefits.
And I liked it that way.
No one got hurt that way.
“Get rid of her,” Volkov said. “Or him. Them. Whatever. Or keep them but be quiet about it. Like I said, I don’t care if you keep a mistress and a boyfriend in every city in the world. I have pretty girl here and there, myself. But you not make my daughter cry, or you will see who you are dealing with.”
“Stop,”I announced so loudly that Ryan and Magnus, who were sitting in the next booth beside us, looked up from their drinks at me. Their eyebrows lifted.
I kept talking even though the vodka was spinning my brain and the floor was a maelstrom under my feet.“Stop it.I will not marry your daughter. I am notfor sale.”
“We are allfor sale,Nicolai,” Volkov said, slowly looking up to where I stood over him. “We only haggling over price.”
My uncle Michel leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table like a plebeian. “Listen to him. Hear him out.”
“I amnotfor sale. Not for anyprice.”
Uncle Michel said, his voice pitched low, “Nicolai, people are staring.”
I stopped, turned my head.
Silence had overtaken the bar around us.
Even the music had been dialed down because everyone in my social circle was staring at us.
At least there would be no videos leaked to social media to embarrass me for years to come, not at a Sanctuary club.
Only whispers.
I turned back to the table, waving my hand behind my head to dispel the attention and announcing, “It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
As I sat and stared straight at Demyan Volkov, glaring directly into his stone-gray eyes, bar chatter trickled back like water refilling a dry stream after a rain.
Volkov poured more vodka into the clustered shot glasses, never breaking angry eye contact.
None of us said a goddamn word for minutes until the bar was ignoring us again.
Volkov’s low voice carried under the crowd nattering around us. “The deal has already been struck. I have already made business arrangements based on agreement with Michel Pictet, and they are very important business arrangements. You will marry her.”
“I apologize for my uncle overstepping and promising something he had no right to promise and cannot deliver.” Vodka sloshed in my stomach and blood. I was drunk, so my hands didn’t shake. The burning anger cleared my vision and my mind, but it made me reckless. “I am leaving.”
“No, you will sit. We will make this deal.”
