Page 38 of Bratva Sacrifice

Chapter Nineteen

Alexei

Katya is three mojitos deep and soaking wet when at last she comes back inside in the evening, testing out a new door with her thumbprint and slipping into the house through a lounge. She doesn’t care that she drips water all over my floors, that her feet slide on the marble tile. Her wet shirt clings to her skin. Her wet hair is plastered to her back.

She is less pissed than she was, but still she crackles with a don’t-touch-me aura as she steps onto the carpet. She knows she has been observed all afternoon. I have caught a few perfect glimpses of her resentful stare into directly into the security cameras whenever she sensed them following her movements.

She ate the lunch that was brought to her by the poolside, though she scoffed again at her plastic silverware. She wasn’t rude to the staff she encountered. She only ignored them.

By the way her mouth pulls into a scowl as she catches sight of me, I can see that she expected me to find her at some point or another. But she has served herself a great quantity of rum, and she is reckless, less inhibited than she would be otherwise.

“Don’t you have mobstering to do elsewhere?” she asks tartly as she takes a seat on a leather couch with a wet plop.

Christ. Katya and her smart mouth. Mobstering.

“No, koshechka,” I tell her, since she is chattier than usual. “My mobstering is done for today.” The couch she sits on is going to be permanently water-stained, but replacing it will be someone else’s problem. “Did you enjoy your swim?”

“It beat being stuck inside all day.” She turns—away from me, naturally—and lifts her legs to drape them across the couch. Her soaked blue jeans ruin another seat.

“I will take you out,” I tell her, “when I can trust you to be a good girl for me.”

“I’ll pass,” she sniffs. I can’t see her face, but I know she is tilting her little nose up in derision.

“You like my house so much you do not want to leave it?” I chuckle at the brief glare she shoots me over her shoulder. “You enjoy taunting me, Kayta. You cannot expect that I don’t enjoy the same. Are you hungry?”

“Even if I was, I’m not in the mood for company.” She pauses. Adds, “And I want real silverware.”

“Da. As soon as I am satisfied you will not cut my throat in my sleep, you can have real silverware.”

With a scathing sound, she tosses her wet hair. “And I want my own room. Just until I find a way out of this hellhole.”

“Hellhole.” I snicker. “Katya, you spent three hours in the pool making yourself mojitos. To you, this is hell?”

A wild gesticulation of her hands an over-exaggerated manner which suggests that probably she put more rum in her mojitos than the recipe recommends. “It is when I don’t want to be here! And stop fucking spying on me, you creep.”

“Nyet. I like watching you dive.” And drink. And hold her breath as she kicks through the water. And surface with a gasp. And float on her back. “Maybe you need some bathing suits, yes?”

A scathing snort. “Oh, I can have bathing suits, then?”

“You can have many things, koshechka. What do you want?”

“I want to go home.”

“Nyet. Try again.”

An infuriated growl rises in her throat, vicious and full of wrath. She gives another aggravated gesture, her fingers twitching as if she is imagining them around my neck. “I want to go home and live my own life! I want to use my goddamned degree, Alexei!”

Of course she wants to use her degree. She earned this privilege with years of hard work. I have seen her transcripts, the impressively high marks she earned with her efforts. “This is something we discuss in future, koshechka,” I tell her. For her to teach at a public school—this will never be possible. But a small one, a private one…provided it is properly secured, perhaps this is something that can be accomplished, though the logistics of such a thing will be tricky, even for me.

“I’m not discussing my career choices with you,” she snips resentfully. “I’m not discussing anything with you!”

But she is. Probably she doesn’t mean to. Likely she does not want to. But she has had too much rum, and it conquers her aloofness, though it does not dull the bright burn of her anger. Now it comes spilling out unrestrained.

She vaults to her feet, leaving the wet impression of her body on the leather couch. “Why would I want anything to do with you?” she asks, and there is a note of strained incredulity in her voice. “You killed my brother!”

“You waste your grief on this,” I tell her. “You give your loyalty to men who do not deserve this from you, men who would never have offered you the same.” She knows this already; I can see it in the hard swallow that rolls down her throat. But still she denies this knowledge, as if she can make it untrue only on hope alone. As if she can will this circumstance to be something other than what it is. She hopes, in the desperation of one bereft of love for so long, that she can change this somehow. That perhaps in time, the family that has so long denied her will embrace her instead. She yearns foolishly for this futile thing.

That soft heart must be from her mother, because it is certain she did not get it from her papa. It is a shame that Katya has lost her so young, that there was no one else who cared for her enough to fill that void in her heart.