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Her mother had been thrilled.
Katie had been appalled.
An arranged marriage, to a man she’d never met? She’d done some checking, and things went from bad to worse.
The heir to the throne was a man twice her age with a reputation for women, whiskey, and cruelty. Even the photos she found of him online made her shudder.
She’d gone to her father, asked him to reconsider. He’d told her that this was not about her, it was about family.
What he’d meant was that it was about him.
So she’d gone to her mother, made an attempt to tell her what she’d learned, but Mama, floating on drugs to ease the pain, had clutched her hand and whispered, “My Ekaterina, marrying a prince.”
Katie had leaned close to her mother. “He is an evil man,” she’d whispered.
“He is a wonderful man,” she’d heard her father say, from directly behind her. His voice had been soft but the look he’d given her had been cold and terrifying. “Say anything like that again,” he’d told her when they were alone, “and I will inform your mother’s nurses that you are forbidden to have any contact with her. Do you understand me, Ekaterina?”
She understood, all right.
The next day, he’d handed her over to Zach Castelianos.
Castelianos had been an unknown quantity. This man, this Kazimir Stavitch, was not.
Katie had lied when she’d said he could not be Sardovian. She was an experienced chess player. The fewer good moves you had, the more you avoided signaling them.
She had lived virtually her entire life in the States, but she knew Savitch by reputation.
He was a topic of conversation among the men in her father’s circle.
He was smart. He was emotionless. He had inherited a fortune and he supplemented it with what he stole from the investment fund—a fund he had convinced the king to create for him after he’d used subterfuge to work himself into the king’s inner circle. Before that, he’d gotten his kicks serving as a mercenary in the tribal wars in Afghanistan.
If Zacharias Castelianos was iron, Kazimir Savitch was steel. He was the person with whom she would spend her last days of freedom.
It made her want to weep.
“Well?”
Savitch was watching her, arms folded over his chest, blue eyes narrowed to slits.
“Aren’t you going to tell me how well you’ll behave if I’m kind to you?”
She’d been on the verge of doing something very much like that. Appeal to the tiny shred of decency that might exist somewhere beneath that cold, incredibly masculine, deceptively beautiful exterior in hopes he would at least not treat her in a way that would remind her that she was a prisoner.
Small fictions were all she could hope for now.
As for Savitch being beautiful… She had never seen a man who rated such a description. She’d never thought it possible, but the proof was in front of her.
Savitch was beautiful.
Then again, so were tigers.
Her heart was pounding with fear, but she could not let him know that. If she couldn’t expect him to treat her with kindness, she could at least hope for respect.
Her pride demanded that.
She had to maintain the guise she’d assumed first with Castelianos and again here, when Castelianos had led her into this office.
She would be Ekaterina Rostov. The woman the world expected her to be. Cold. Arrogant. Unfeeling. That was the persona she had assumed for herself when she turned eighteen. It had kept her at a distance from those who lived on the crumbs her father dispensed to them and made her a figure of no interest to those who thrived on gossip. Her father’s implication that she enjoyed media attention had been an out-and-out lie.
