Page 111 of Lethal Obsession

I give her a rather shaky smile. “Thank you.”

I don’t bother telling her that it isn’t Alexei’s intentions I’m worried about, but rather those of whoever is trying to kill him.

Or whoever he is trying to kill.

In our world, the two things are usually one and the same.

Lourdes squeezes my hand. “But was it good?” she murmurs, under cover of Taylor.

For a moment I think of Alexei staring down at me, his hands hooked around my legs, his eye blazing into mine. “Oh, yes,” I breathe. “Yes, it was good.”

She tilts her head onto my shoulder. “I’m glad,” she says simply. “You deserve it, ’Felia.”

Her use of the nickname customarily only used by my siblings is oddly touching.

I wait until Lourdes has left to call my brother. It’s early evening, and I’m sitting in my salon with the doors open, watching the Alhambra turn from rust to umber under the fading light. In the end, despite thinking I would tell Lourdes everything, I told her very little.

Talking about Alexei feels like allowing gold to slip through my fingers. I want to hug him close for a while longer, to horde the treasured memories in the privacy of my heart, savoring him for as long as I can.

Mickey’s phone rings for a long time. When he finally picks up, Darya, Papa, and our younger brothers are all making noise in the background.

“That sounds like fun,” I say dryly by way of greeting.

“Fucking mayhem. Let me take the phone outside.” Mickey sounds slightly breathless. “No, Aleksander, you can’t come too,” he says over the mouthpiece. “I’ll be back in a minute. Go and eat your dinner. Seriously,” he says a moment later, as the noise fades, “I love them, but coming home is like walking into a madhouse. I’m driving back to the Malaga penthouse the minute they’re all in bed.”

“It’s a lot,” I say, smiling.

Aleksander is seven. The twins, Vanya and Tosha, are two years behind him, and the baby, Maxim, whom everyone calls Maxie, has just turned three.

“No shit,” Mickey says fervently. “Masha spends half her time at her dance teacher’s house in the village, and I seriously don’t blame her.”

“Poor kid. I’ll have to invite her to come and stay soon.”

“You should definitely do that,” he says. “I’d take her back to Malaga with me, but God forbid she miss a dance class. She’s as fanatical about it as you always were with your piano.”

“Or you with your laptop,” I counter.

He laughs. “Yeah. I guess we’re all a bit intense, in our own way.”

“Different fathers,” I say, “same psycho mother. Inger’s genes had to come out some way or other, I suppose.”

Dark humor is necessary in a family like ours. Mickey’s father, Mikhail, was the one we all called Papa as children. But as it turned out, Inger had fallen pregnant with me before she ever met Mikhail—in a one-night stand with Roman, who back then was just a poor street kid. Inger dropped him like a hot potato when she realized Mikhail was the son of a wealthy pakhan and pinned the pregnancy on Mikhail, who obediently married her. We only discovered the truth several years ago when Mickey ran DNA tests, which proved not only that Roman was my father, but that Masha was the product of another affair, this time with Vilnus Orlov—the man who eventually kidnapped us both.

Despite our tangled family tree, or perhaps because of it, the three of us have always been exceptionally close, especially after Mikhail died.

Inger’s death, which came during our kidnapping, we mourned a lot less.

It’s hard to mourn someone who agreed to have her own children kidnapped, just because she thought she’d get a good payout.

“Do you ever wonder what it would have been like without her?” Mickey asks now. “I mean, I know it’s a weird question. But I think of it sometimes when I see Roman and Darya with the boys. How it would have been if we’d always had them for parents, instead of being dragged up by Inger and Mikhail.”

“I’ve thought about that, yeah.” I stare at the Alhambra, hearing the distant echo of Masha’s screams, seeing her little arms reaching for me in terror the night Mikhail died, when Inger tried to drive away with her. “It sucked having Inger as a mother, and the way she and Mikhail fought was a nightmare. But at least he named Roman as our godfather. And we were still kids, more or less, when Darya came along. I’d say we’ve been lucky, all things considered.”

“True.” For a moment we just sit on opposite ends of the call, our shared years enduring a strange, often frightening childhood sitting companionably between us down the line. “Anyway,” Mickey says eventually, breaking the silence, “you didn’t call for a family therapy session. What’s up?”

“Well,” I hedge. “Funny you should mention family therapy sessions, because after this little chat, you and I might need one.”

“Okay,” he says cautiously. “This doesn’t sound good.”