“He is a… figurehead.”
“You’re contradicting yourself,” she says warily. I tighten my grip on her hands.
“He sent me to the best schools, and from there, I went to Oxford. The official line was he was honoring my father’s wishes. You see, crime is a family business, stretching back to Soviet-era Moscow. But my father bucked the trend. He fell in love with a Finnish girl and moved there, turning his back on what he knew. He taught at a university because he thought it would be a place of no use to his family. There was very little profitable corruption to be had in my father’s line of work. But then my parents died, and I was sent for. It was Sergei who actually came for me.”
She pulls a face. It makes me chuckle, my soft breath brushing her skin causing some outsized effect. A wash of goose bumps dapples her arms, her nipples hardening beneath the silk. It defies belief that I could be talking of Sergei and also getting hard. Maybe I’ll tell him. Maybe he’ll have a fit.
“He looked like a gargoyle come to life to my young eyes.” I clear my throat, ridding it of its huskiness.
“He looked like a troll this evening,” she muses. “We had words.” Her gaze flicks to me and away again. “A difference of opinion,” she adds, brushing off the altercation.
“I know.” I tilt my head, hiding a tiny smile. There isn’t much I don’t find out. Not these days. “But he’s been good to me. Protected me, even when he didn’t agree with my plans.”
“Was your uncle unkind to you?”
I can see myself, white-blond hair and knees like knots in my pale, skinny legs. Sergei driving me to school. Calling me during the term, insisting I speak in Russian to him.
I shake my head. “Konstantin was manipulative. The line he sold was that he was providing me with the best education money could buy—the best experiences. That it was all for my benefit, and in honor of his brother, but those were lies. I was told to ingratiate myself with those boys at boarding school. Learn their ways, mimic them. Cultivate friendships so they could turn to me when life’s troubles hit. I was to turn to my uncle so he could—”
“Blackmail them.”
“It’s no worse than what I do.” I glance at the bank of monitors, but her eyes don’t follow. “I just go about it a different way because, the truth is, I couldn’t make people like me. I didn’t have a talent for bullshit.”
“You never were one for social niceties,” she whispers, “but I liked you anyway.”
She loved me anyway.
“I was neither common nor decent,” I murmur in an echo of another time. Her smile turns bittersweet. “When school vacations came around, I was often left there as punishment for not being invited to my schoolmate’s country homes or on their ski trips. Don’t look so sad, milaya. At least I wasn’t forced to spend the time with him.” I laugh.
“I know that feeling.” Her expression falters, perhaps lost in her own memories.
“Konstantin insisted this was my responsibility. What I owed him. One time when I was perhaps fifteen, I found cocaine in my cases when I returned to school for the new year.”
“How to win friends and influence?”
“Getting them addicted was just a bonus.”
“Oh, my goodness.” A mother’s pity emanates from her eyes and her heart. I wonder how long it will last.
“Then I met Alexander.”
“And he latched onto the idea of him,” she assumes.
“I was older. I could tell him to fuck off in four languages, and I did. Frequently. But then I met you.” I can’t hold her gaze, so instead, I rub my thumb over her grandmother’s ring and the simple gold band, my gaze transfixed. I’m not the man she thought I was, but there is no other place, no other man. Not now. “Konstantin was the reason I couldn’t have you. Not publicly. To involve you in my life was to put you at risk.”
“But I have no influence,” she begins haltingly. “How could I possibly have been of interest to him?”
“You had a duke for a brother. That was enough. I’m sure he thought he’d get to him through you. Facilitate his acceptance into the circles I failed to get him into. He imagined he’d have access to the country’s decision-makers. Politicians, perhaps influence in the House of Lords. He’d curry favor. Manipulate, blackmail. For a soviet, tying his name to blue blood certainly excited him. But gaining influence was his ultimate goal.”
“He wanted me for you?”
“He wanted control. But I maintained there was no connection between us. You were nothing to me as far as he was concerned.”
“That’s why we never went out together, why you moved house. Not because of Sandy.”