I have no time before Nico’s hands clamp down on my shoulders, and his lips brush my left cheek, and then my right, in the perfect display of Italian hospitality.
Slava goes rigid beside me, and Nico meets his eyes. There’s no mistaking the dare in his gaze:Come on, Romanov. Do it.
“My father is waiting.” Nico tilts his head into the yacht and starts walking. “He is very eager to speak with you both.”
The emphasis onverysends a steady drip of dreadful ice into my veins. I look back at Slava as the dread intensifies. But there’s no backing off now.
My feet begin to move without my permission. Every step sends the dread snaking deeper into my heart, and every breath feels like another warning to run, run,run!
Behind me, I feel Slava’s hand resting on my waist, and I can’t tell if he’s trying to comfort me or steady himself. Slowly, I reach back and take his hand in mine. He gives it a squeeze, but his warmth can’t breach the ice around my heart this time.
Nico leads us through a sliding door and the noise dims. We pass through a salon dripping with crystal and leather, past a dining room with a full-size dining table, down a narrow corridor lined with oil paintings of Mediterranean coastlines, and through a bedroom with a four-poster bed.
Finally, we emerge onto the aft deck. It’s private and shrouded away from the laughter and music of the party elsewhere.
And there he is.
A fat man in his seventies sits in a massive hot tub. There’s a cigar clamped between his yellow teeth, and rolls of tanned flesh spill over the hot tub’s edge. When he shifts his position, his sagging jowls flap around like a bulldog, and I can’t help but notice the general air of decay barely held at bay by expensive grooming.
Four armed guards stand at attention around the deck’s perimeter. They don’t look at us. They don’t need to. Their guns are doing all the talking right now.
“Father,” Nico announces. “Our guests have arrived.”
“Don Leo.” Slava greets him curtly.
“So they have,” Don Leo grunts. “Welcome to my birthday party.”
Don Leo’s eyes find me first. They travel down my body the same way a man might look at a prized racehorse. It starts at my face, lingering on my chest, and then slides down to my hips. Hechortles every once in a while, not bothering to be subtle about it as he rapes me with his eyes.
I want to run. I want to dive overboard and swim until my arms give out and Long Island Sound swallows me whole.
Then his eyes pause on my necklace.
His eyes flare just a hair too wide, and his gaze darts to Slava. For a heartbeat, I see a pure, festering rage before it disappears underneath an oily smile.
“Beautiful piece,” he says, gesturing at my throat with his cigar before waving us towards him. “Come. Come. Get in. We’re friends here, after all.”
Slava tenses ever so slightly behind me.No we’re not.
But we have no choice. I move toward the hot tub’s edge, fully prepared to step in wearing my sundress. Let the fabric get ruined. I’ll sacrifice a hundred dresses if that’s what it takes.
“Ah-ah,ragazza.” Don Leo wags a fat finger at me. “No clothes in my tub. House rules, I’m afraid.”
The way he speaks makes me want to vomit.
“Her clothes stay on,” Slava speaks up.
Don Leo narrows his eyes and takes a long pull from his cigar. “Says you?”
“Says me.”
“Well,” Don Leo sighs. “If Slava Romanov says so, then we ought to do it. Right boys? Wouldn’t want him to lose his temper and put more of us in the fucking ground.”
A ring of cold laughter rises from the guards, and one of them turns the gun in his hand.
“But,” he continues. “You come to me on my seventieth birthday party, after my own son came to fetch you for a private meeting with me, and you show up empty-handed. No gifts, no well-wishes, not even a fucking happy birthday.”
“Must’ve slipped our mind,” Slava growls.
