Yuri shook his head. It didn’t help that I could see a lot of Katya in him. The eyes, although hers were a much lighter shade of blue, the shape of their jaws, their noses.
Did they both get hard-ons trying to step on my toes.
“Of course there was, isn’t Triev a rich joke.” He leaned back in his chair, wearing an amused look.
“Does anything on my face suggest that?”
Yuri regarded me coolly, and he took off that infuriating smile. “Triev has been a thorn in my side for a year now. They’re new to the city, trying to break ground and lay foundations. It was only a matter of time before they became your problem too.”
“Forty million,” I said, clasping my hands in front of me, “I just lost forty million because of a fucking building project.”
And that was not counting the connections I would have made with some of the more…discreet things on that ship.
“It doesn’t make me happy to tell you that you’ll lose more. The first bite is always the smallest one. He’s tasted and when he comes back, it’s to take a much bigger bite. Take it from me.”
I regarded him. The aged lines of his face. The crisp blonde hair.
That I hadn’t noticed the Petrenkos were having trouble with the Trievs as well was almost like a testament to how well Yuri must have handled it.
Persuasion must be doing him much good indeed, but I was a Sorvino. We preferred coercion. I leaned forward and placed my clasped hands on Yuri’s desk.
“I intend to get my money back.”
Yuri cracked another half-smile. “Naturally.”
“Plus, damages,” Dom added, opening yet another can of beer.
Chapter 6 - Katya
My head was high in the elevator as I headed to my father’s office. I’d already told him about the plan falling apart, and he hadn’t said much.
He’d just fixed a meeting with me for three.
My hair was in a severe bun piled on top of my head while I was in a classic plaid suit. I wish I’d succeeded. I’d have come with my biggest smile because it would have been hardcore evidence that I was made to take over after him. That I could be that stone-cold leader, taking the family higher and keeping it from the vultures.
Deep breaths. Nothing in the world terrified me. Not heights, not guns, not fucking knives. Never in my life had I admitted it out loud, but my single fear was my father. He was strong, powerful, and loving. He’d freaking pampered me as a kid.
He was the best father in the world, and I was afraid that I couldn’t measure up as his only child.
I was the only one my mother had managed to give birth to before she passed. I was all he had for a successor, and I never wanted to hear it from him, to even see the flicker of that look pass by his face. The look that said I wasn’t fit to take the business on after him.
Both my hands gripped the handle of the basket I was carrying tighter. It was after lunch, and I was sure he hadn’t eaten.
Even though I behaved as if we lived together, my father didn’t live too far from Blue Range. He had a room in our house, but since I’d been old enough to legally live on my own, he’d spent what little free time he had in that apartment.
Our house was now just a place he visited and occasionally spent the night.
I understood.
There were too many reminders of my mother, and I knew how much he’d loved her.
Besides, I was not the type to keep a roommate for long. In college, I only had a roommate for the first week of the first semester of my freshman year.
I started for my father’s office, nodding to Sasha, the secretary. The door opened, and I stopped in my tracks, narrowing my eyes out of instinct.
“What are you doing here?” I sounded slightly breathless and narrowed my eyes further. Something always happened to me when this man was close by.
Alessandro Sorvino gave me a stern look that made a shiver run down my spine. From head to toe, very slowly, taking in the basket in my hands. “I came on business.”