Anya
I press my back against the wall outside Diomid's office and hold my breath.
The voices carry through the heavy oak door, my brother's low, measured tone and the tinny speaker of his phone on the desk. He always puts it on speaker when he's pacing. He always paces when he's losing.
"The Baron is not a flexible man," the voice on the other end says. I don't recognize it, one of Diomid's contacts in Europe, maybe. Someone who knows the territory. Someone who's supposed to be helping. "He has made his terms clear. Access through his corridor comes at a price, and that price is your sister."
"My sister is not currency." Diomid's voice is tight. Controlled. But I know my brother. That control is a wire pulled taut and one wrong word from snapping. "There are other arrangements we can make. Money. Product. Territory on our end. There are plenty of lucrative options."
"The options are irrelevant. He doesn’t want them. He wants Anya."
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
I close my eyes. My palms are flat against the wall, the wood paneling is cool under my fingers, grounding me while the rest of the world tilts sideways. This isn't new information. I've knownfor weeks that the Baron, Grigori Kuznetsov, seventy-three years old, three dead wives, an empire built on blood and old money, has taken an interest in me. Diomid told me himself, sat me down and said,I will handle this.
He told me to stay in the house. To trust him.
And I do trust him. My brother would cut off his own hand before he let someone hurt me. But trust and results are not the same thing, and right now, standing outside this door, I'm hearing my brother run out of cards to play. How long am I going to be held captive in my own home just to be given to a man like the Baron, where my fate would be worse than imprisonment.
"Give me more time," Diomid says.
"You've had time. The Baron expects an answer by the end of the week."
End of the week. Four days. Four days until I become the fourth wife of a man old enough to be my grandfather, a man whose previous wives had a habit of falling down stairs and walking into doors and overdosing on medications they didn't take.
I push off the wall.
My hands are shaking but my legs are steady, and that's what matters right now. That my legs work, that the front door is thirty steps away and no one is watching it because Diomid didn't post guards. He didn't think he needed to. I'm his little sister, and I've always done as I'm told.
Not today.
I take the stairs quickly and quietly, my socked feet silent on the hardwood. My shoes are by the front door, a practical pair ankle boots, the ones I can drive in. My coat is on the hook. My keys are in the left pocket, right where I dropped them three days ago when Diomid told me to stay put.
Three days of pacing my bedroom. Three days of pretending to read, pretending to eat, pretending I'm not quietly losing my mind while my brother tries to outmaneuver a man who has been outmaneuvering people since before either of us were born.
I shove my feet into my boots, grab my coat, and open the front door.
The cold hits me like a slap. Late afternoon, gray sky, the kind of damp chill that crawls under your clothes and settles in your bones. I don't care. I pull my coat on as I walk, fishing the keys out and clicking the fob. My car, a white Audi that Diomid bought me for my twenty-first birthday, chirps from the driveway.
I'm behind the wheel and pulling out before I let myself think about what I'm doing.
Because if I think about it, I'll stop. I'll turn around. I'll go back inside and sit on my bed and wait for Diomid to come upstairs with that look on his face, the one that saysI'm sorry, Anya, I tried, and I will become the fourth Mrs. Kuznetsova, and maybe I'll last longer than the others, or maybe I won't.
The Orlov estate is forty minutes from ours. I know the route because my mother used to drive it. Every other Sunday, rain or shine, Marina Agapova would load me into the car and take me to visit Saoirse Orlova, and the two of them would drink tea in the conservatory while I played in the garden with Iris.
I was eight when my mother was diagnosed. Ten when she died. The visits stopped, and Diomid, fifteen and suddenly the man of the house, with our father already three years in the ground, didn't have time for social calls. The connection between the Agapovs and the Orlovs thinned to a thread.
But it didn't break.
Saoirse sent flowers when Momma died. She sent a card every year on the anniversary. When I turned eighteen, a gift arrived. A sapphire bracelet with a note that said,Your mother would be so proud of the woman you've become. My door is always open. — Saoirse.
I'm banking everything on that door still being open.
The estate appears through the trees like it always did, stone and ivy and old money, the kind of house that looks like it grew out of the ground rather than being built on it. The gates are open, which is either luck or a sign that security is lighter than I expected. I pull up the long drive and park near the front steps, and for a moment I just sit there with the engine running and my hands on the wheel.
This is insane.
I am about to walk into the home of one of the most powerful Bratva families in the world and ask the matriarch if I can marry one of her sons.
