Page 3 of Hunted Bride

She hangs up the phone and stomps to her closet, stripping off the cardigan and the unflattering dress, throwing them angrily at the couch and missing it. They land on the floor in a heap. Standing in her panties and bra, she shoves hangers aside, pulling out a dress, holding it to her front and then hangs it back up. She does this several times. I can see her already shaky confidence crumbling.

Anger surges in me. How dare they make her feel this way? I can’t kill the Morozovs without plunging the families into a blood feud. But I would. In a heartbeat.

The green one, I text her.

Milena snatches her phone off the dresser and glares at my message. Seconds later, she’s blocked me again.

Adorable that she thinks she can escape me that easily.

2

MILENA

I stand in front of my closet with my heartbeat thrumming in my chest like a frightened hummingbird. I know blocking my stalker won’t do anything to stop him.

Six years this has been going on. Ever since the day I turned eighteen.

He’s been with me my entire adult life, and I have no idea who he is.

I stare blankly at the clothes hanging in my closet. Not a single one of them would serve as a bridesmaid’s dress, even on short notice. I should go to a store and buy something.

There still wouldn’t be time to have it tailored properly.

Nothing off the rack will fit right, anyway. Not on my big boobs and wide hips. I wish I were built more like my sister Alisa. She’s five-foot-seven and weighs 115 pounds, according to websites that track that kind of thing. She certainly isn’t eating dry breakfast cereal straight from the box, but even when I starve myself and spend hours on the exercise bicycle at the gym, I never lose more than a few pounds.

Alisa has her own Wikipedia page. I have a job shelving books at the local public library while I take night classes to finish my master’s degree.

When I was an undergraduate, I had a part-time job at the university library. I loved it. This work is nothing like it, but I keep hoping that it will lead to a more professional position after I graduate. Normal, ordinary people don’t start off at the top of the job food chain, after all.

Could I jump ahead by relying on my family’s connections?

Yeah. Probably. Ask them to give a big donation to an institution that I want to work for on the condition that I get a job out of it. That would be the easiest thing in the world for me to do. But I don’t like being connected to the bratva, even tangentially. I want to earn my way.

That’s probably who my stalker is. Someone in the brotherhood having a little fun while keeping tabs on the Morozov family’s pathetic youngest daughter. Collateral in one of their brutal schemes.

Yet in six years, he’s never tried to blackmail or kidnap me. Only watched me from afar. Weird.

I haul the green dress out of my closet and hold it to my chest. Bastard. How does he know what’s hanging in my closet?

He knows everything about me.

The emerald silk with a cowl neck is the only thing I own that could possibly work as a bridesmaid dress. I can pair it with gold jewelry and a nice pair of heels. No one’s going to be looking at me, anyway. Even if this were my wedding, everyone would be looking at Alisa. She has that kind of magnetic force that draws attention wherever she goes.

I hate that he’s right.

“I’m going to show my tattoos,” I mutter. “Not even going to wear a cardigan.”

They can take the girl out of the book dress, but they can’t take the book tattoos off the girl. So there, Mom and Dad.

When I was nineteen, I got a tiny tattoo of an open book on my inner left arm. At twenty-one, I got another small one on my right arm. The third one is bigger, an outline of a fairy-tale castle with red roses on my shoulder. That’s the one that will stick out the most. My mother hates them. My father barely speaks to me, anyway. When he looks at them, he just shakes his head in disappointment.

They’re terrifying and controlling. Exactly what you’d expect from a criminal couple. Alisa has a lot more backbone than I do, and even she is cowed by them.

I still can’t believe she’s finally going through with her arranged wedding to Maxim Orlov.

I hang the dress back up. My doorbell rings, a buzz that sounds like a screaming cicada. I glance down and realize I’m still wandering around in my bra and panties. I sure gave my stalker an eyeful, but it’s his fault for spying on me in the first place. If he doesn’t want to see my curves, he shouldn’t be so damned nosy. I throw on an old T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants to go open the door.

My sister bursts in.