Page 22 of Bought By Sin

I raised my brows and shrugged. “Not fast enough for you?”

He looked me over. “I’d tell you if I wanted something faster or for you to work harder.”

I tensed, groaning in my mind at how he could mean that in another way.

Not happening. That is so not happening.

We left the warehouse, and I sensed that his watchfulness wasn’t only professional with me. It couldn’t be, because in the week since I’d been here, I had yet to see him treat any other guard, soldier, or member of the Bratva with the personalized interest like he had with me.

That still doesn’t mean anything’s happening.

I shook my head as he drove us away, toward Adrik’s house.

This annoying desire needed to fade away already. Because the longer I let myself be deluded that Lev actually had been interested in me, in me, not the prospect of having another slave to serve his family, the more I would be distracted from understanding what role or jobs I would have here. The more I’d wish for freedom and to not have to ever question my purpose or worth.

When we reached Adrik’s house, the large mansion that he shared with his wife and father, I felt like I was too inferior to set foot inside the building. It was so large. Ornate. State of the art. Like a grand palace. With my background of being shuffled from one Cartel compound to another, it seemed like heaven.

Although I was only here to trail behind Lev, this unspoken expectation that I was “his” thing, it was different this time. I met Elena and Carina, both of the Mafia wives so content and clearly expecting. They were only breezing by and Carina had asked who I was in passing.

“This is Mila,” Lev replied.

Nothing more. Nothing less. He didn’t say that I was Mila, his slave. He didn’t suggest that I was Mila, a woman he wanted to touch and seduce.

I was just here. Without a role or clear expectation.

Seeing Elena and Carina in this men’s world of power changed my perspective just a little more after they passed through the house and Lev explained.

“Elena is our bookkeeper,” Lev said.

Adrik huffed. “She was our bookkeeper. Now she oversees all the financial staff.”

“And Carina is married to Maksim,” Lev added. “She’s a strategist who once lived with the Garcia Cartel.”

I nodded once, just to show them that I understood. I didn’t need to be told any of this. I wasn’t familiar with fitting in and having any right to know anything about who was whom. For a slave like me, I was just one more body to move and they were all out of reach and untouchable to me as the leaders.

But maybe this Bratva is different. Maybe I need to stop thinking these Volkovs are just another variety of crime families like the Cartels.

If they “hired” women and could honestly appreciate their contributions and skills, there was a good chance that Lev really had spared me from the same old hell of my life as a contracted smuggling runner.

Nothing would coax me to lower my guard and assume I was safe here. That I could be happy and content with this stretch of being owned. But as I considered how I’d been treated so far, even with the open-ended way that Lev introduced me, as just Mila and without a reference to how I was a slave, I was more determined to balance between cooperation and obedience on one hand versus autonomy and the dream to be free on the other hand.

9

LEV

“I’m not sure there’s anything she can’t do,” Roman admitted gruffly after he led several recruits on a minor infiltration scenario. His gaze was on Mila as she exited the van she’d been riding in.

Like all the other tests and trials I’d had her put through since I ‘bought’ her, she excelled once again. Aloof and walking apart from the others, she wore that same mask of indifference, that same blank expression so as not to give away a hint of what she was thinking or feeling.

I was used to someone with layers like that. My brother was like her in that regard, not letting anyone in or close and walling off people with ease. Mila had an instinct to shut others out.

“Yeah?” I asked him, watching as he did, while the five members who’d gone on that infiltration run returned.

“She pulled one of the men back from being spotted by the Konstantins. And she managed to get a recording of the conversation their deliverers had.” He raised his brows as he glanced at me. “She’s good at sneaking into and out of any fucking scenario. And she doesn’t hesitate to take risks to get a job done.”

Just so long as she doesn’t take too many risks…

Viktor had gone with the crew on this mission to get some intel from the Konstantins, a smaller faction of another Bratva in the Las Vegas area. Rumor was that they could have links to Gregori, and we wanted to start investigating the matter. Viktor was free to lead this task, a minor exercise of obtaining some recordings from the men most likely to know something, if they did at all.