Strangling my brother in a room full of hundreds of our mutual friends would almost certainly result in my incarceration. I would have to wait for the next time he bummed a ride on my plane for the proper privacy to throw his body into the sea.
I stood over on the side of the ballroom as Kostya waltzed with my Lexi, saying something to her with a smug bullshit expression on his face.
Lexi’s expression didn’t change, and she said something that appeared to be one syllable, like “Yikes.”
I was praying my little angel could hold her own. I suspected she could.
As I stood on the sidelines, trying not to look alone and pathetic, a tap on my shoulder surprised me.
I don’t know why I should’ve been surprised. Many of my closest friends were in that crowded ballroom. Though most ofthem would’ve either just started talking at me or jabbed me in the ribs, not tapped me discreetly on the shoulder.
As I turned, a pretty blond woman wearing a strapless blush-pink dress was smiling at me, but I didn’t think I knew her.
Recognition soured in my stomach at the older man standing next to her, because that was Demyan fucking Volkov glaring there.
His hand rested possessively on her bare shoulder. “You should get to know my daughter, Alina. She has saved this dance for you.”
How in the motherfucking hell had Volkov gotten in here? The daughter, I could see. Any one of the men of our generation wearing lust-fogged glasses could have brought her along as a plus-one or an impromptu date.
But him? This was a personal event, not one of the official state wedding festivities that would draw an intergenerational crowd. This party was supposed to be for John’s and Anna’s friends, not older relatives or business contacts, and I hoped for their sake that Demyan Volkov was neither.
“It is nice to meet you, Alina.” I straightened to talk to the old Russian crime boss. “She is lovely. However, I am just waiting formy wifeto finish dancing with my brother. Nice to see you both.”
I turned my back on them.
A more insistent tap, nearly violent, jarred my shoulder. Demyan Volkov said, “You don’t want to cause a scene. Dance with Alina. If I have to tell you again, bad things happen. I don’t ever want to have to tell you twice.”
Alina had clasped her hands very tightly in front of herself. Her voice was low and measured. “Please, Nicolai. It will only take a moment. He really is insisting.”
The quiver in the poor girl’s voice sounded frightened.
My dumbass baby brother did seem to be taking forever to waltz withmywife, and my standing here on the sidelines obsessing about wrapping my elbow around his neck in a chokehold was not passing the time more quickly.
I jutted one elbow toward her. “Would you join me on the dance floor?”
Alina slipped her hand under mine, and we walked the very few paces to stand near the back of the ballroom’s parquet floor.
I took her hand and assumed the waltzing position, careful to keep her braced well away from my body. I didn’t like this, and we didn’t need to make a spectacle of it.
She followed me easily into the waltz, turning with me as I led.
“Yes, well, Alina. It’s very nice to meet you, I’m sure.” As we moved, I minimized every step. I wasn’t making myself look sullen. I just had absolutely no enthusiasm for this encounter and wished it to end as soon as possible.
“I am so sorry for what my father is doing to you,” Alina started. “I assure you, I am as unwilling a participant as you are.”
I looked down at her, trying to gauge her sincerity. “Is that so?”
“He gets these crazy political machinations in his head. I tried to tell him that human beings don’t work like that. He can’t just shuffle us across the board like his little pawns. And yet, he grabs onto these ideas like a rat terrier, and once he sinks his needle-like little teeth into them, it’s impossible to get him to let them go.”
The tension in her neck and shoulders appeared to be frustration, but I was not easily fooled. People had tried to manipulate me my whole life, from trying to convince me that my father’s assassination was a mere firearms accident on a crowded street in Stockholm, Sweden, to trying to get me to invest my family’s wealth in every con known to man. By thetime I got to Harvard, I wrote papers on swindling not from literature references but from core memories.
She fretted, “I feel like I’m standing on the other end of a rope, yelling, ‘Drop it! Drop it!’ but he’s growling at me with the arrogance of a tiny dog who’s never been swatted with a rolled-up newspaper.”
The thought of Demyan Volkov taking the form of a snarling Chihuahua was funny enough to disarm me a little, which actually set me on my guard even more. “Your father does seem tenacious.”
“You have no idea what it was like growing up with my father who had a new plan to use me for every phase of my life.”
“Yes, I wasn’t subjected to that particular problem.”
