I couldn’t breathe.
Vasilije Markovic was defending me against my own father, and his words burrowed into my cold heart when I didn’t want them to. Foreign emotion fluttered in my center, and the friction heated me from the inside out.
My father’s attention snapped to me and his eyes churned like a violent sea. He’d paid for me to go to college, after my stepmother forced him to, and when I’d changed my major to music, he’d been furious. He pulled me out of school and told me I would clean houses with the Russian women he could no longer turn a profit with at the whorehouse. That ‘career’ would make more money, he’d said, than my music.
So, I’d presented the deal to my father. I plant the surveillance devices in a Markovic home, and in return, I could re-enroll next semester at Randhurst University, continuing to pursue my music degree. I was willing to make sacrifices to get what I wanted, and life was too short not to go after my dream. You never knew when it would end. Tomorrow you could perish in a house fire on my father’s orders, or your plane could fall from the sky.
My father let out a joyless laugh. “You fucked her one time, and it sounds like she already has you by the short hairs. Be careful, Vasilije.” He held his glass of wine by the bell and swirled the liquid inside. “Russian women are dangerous.”
Vasilije had been right. My father had no idea what he was talking about.
?
As I scrubbed my hands under the faucet in the restaurant’s bathroom, I stared at myself in the mirror. It was like looking at an actress in stage makeup playing the role of Oksana Kuznetsov. She looked and sounded like me, but wasn’t.
I pulled to a stop when I exited the restroom. My father lurked, waiting for me in the dark back hallway.
“I’m impressed,” he said in Russian. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
We were out of view of the table, but I kept my voice low. “We shouldn’t speak to each other. If anyone sees—”
“I want the devices in Goran’s house.”
My blood slowed. “What?”
“Vasilije isn’t involved enough.”
“No. That wasn’t our deal, and how the hell would I do that?”
He looked at me like I was stupid. “You seduce him. Look at how fast you turned Vasilije. The boy is in love with you.”
I wanted to laugh. It had only been four days, and Vasilije didn’t do love. But I didn’t have time to explain any of this. “How am I supposed to seduce Goran? I’ve never met him until tonight, and Vasilije will kill me if I try.”
Not to mention, I didn’t want to seduce Goran. He was the same age as my father. Both the Markovic men scared the hell out of me, but Vasilije . . . the fear I felt around him was different. Tolerable. The unsettling connection between us grew stronger the longer he kept me around.
“It’ll be easy.” My father’s expression was cold and deadly. “Now that Vasilije’s staked his claim, Goran’s going to try to take you away from him.”
My heartbeat sped up. “What makes you say that?”
“It’s what I’d do. Vasilije is all talk. He needs to learn his place in the family.”
My father didn’t know what I did, and I choked back the desire to warn him not to underestimate Vasilije. It was much better for me if he continued on, blindly unaware of the dangerous people circling around him.
“Our deal was for Vasilije, and you told the table full of men in there that you’re a man of your word.”
His jaw set. “You changed the deal first. Don’t be surprised if Goran makes a play for you before then.” He pushed past me, flinging a hand on the door to the men’s room, but paused. “Good luck, Oksana. You’ll need it, now that you’ve become a pawn in their game.”
He disappeared inside, and didn’t see the dead smile that widened on my lips. He was forgetting how a pawn who survived crossing the board could be promoted to a queen.
I could go from the weakest player to the strongest one in a single move.
24
Vasilije
Oksana was quiet on the drive back to the house. A lot of shit had been said at the table, and it’d been shocking she kept her mouth shut through it. All because I’d told her to. Fuck, the way she obeyed me made my blood run south, straight beneath my zipper.
Taking her to dinner tonight had been a calculated risk. It hadn’t irritated Sergey or the other Russians, but it had definitely gotten under my uncle’s skin, so I would call it a win. I liked poking the bear and was curious what kind of response it’d provoke out of Goran.