“What hook? What did you do?”
Boris smiles. “What your father always does. Removed the problem.”
Luca. My mind goes white for a second, nothing but his name and a fear so sharp it leaves me lightheaded.
“Where is he?”
“With your father.” He says it like he’s telling me the weather. Partly cloudy, chance of rain, your lover is in the hands of a man who had his last Andretti problem shot in the head. “I’d be more worried about yourself right now, Natalia. Your father is not happy. And when Anton Kozlov isn’t happy...” He trails off and gestures vaguely at the photographs of my dead mother spread across the desk.
I jerk backward, my hip catching the heavy wood of the desk.Run.The instinct flares hot and vicious in my blood. But the doorway is already gone. Boris fills the frame, a mountain of muscle cutting off my only escape.
“Sit down.”
“Get out of my way.”
“Sit. Down.” There’s no humor left in him now.
“Your father had plans for you.” He jerks his chin toward the door. “Restrepo’s people are already on their way. So you can stop thinking this ends with you running anywhere.”
He comes closer, near enough that I can smell the cigarettes on him, stale and clinging to his clothes.
“You’re going to your room. You’re going to stay there until it’s time to leave. And don’t worry. You’ll see your boyfriend soon enough. Assuming your father leaves enough of him to recognize.”
The world narrows to his voice and the pounding of my own heart.
His gaze drags over my face, slow and contemptuous. “Your mother was stupid enough to forget her place. Don’t make the same mistake.”
The words hit below my ribs, sharp enough to steal the breath from my lungs. I want to scream. I want to claw his eyes out. I want to crumble right here on my father’s expensive carpet and never get up.
Instead, I run.
I make it two steps before his hand closes around my upper arm and yanks me backward so hard my shoulder screams. I twist against his grip, but it’s like fighting a wall. He’s got ninety pounds on me, easy, and he uses all of it, dragging me out of the office and into the hallway with my feet barely touching the floor.
“Let go of me!”
He doesn’t answer. I fight him the whole way down the hall. I dig my heels into the carpet, grab uselessly at the trim, twist and shove and hit where I can reach, but it’s like trying to move a wall with my bare hands. He curses once when I catch his wrist with my nails. That’s the only victory I get.
By the time he shoves me into my room, my hair is half fallen down, my arm is throbbing, and I’m breathing in ragged bursts.
He throws me hard enough that I stumble against the bedpost and have to grab it to stay upright.
The door slams. The lock clicks from the outside. Boris’s footsteps thud down the hall.
I stand there for a long time, staring at the wood grain.
Then I sink to the floor.
One second I’m upright and rigid and trying to hold myself together with will alone, and the next I’m folded in on myself beside the bed, arms wrapped around my middle like I can keep all of it from spilling out.
My mother tried to leave.
She didn’t die in childbirth. She lived. She held me. She made plans. She wanted us to run.
And my father had her murdered for it.
A sob breaks loose before I can stop it. Then another.
I have carried the guilt of her death for my entire life. Every birthday that felt like a funeral. Every time my father looked right through me. Every time I apologized for existing, silently, in the back of my own mind. All of it built on a lie he told me before I was old enough to question it.
