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I lean over, pouring a first round of tea for the men at the table.
“He’s being sent to meet with the elders,” one man says in a concerned voice.
Arkady’s head turns to the side as if refusing to accept what he’d just heard. He leans back in his chair, lacing his fingers together so his arms rest across his wide torso like a car seatbelt. He scratches the patch of skin above his ear as he thinks things over.
“Boris won’t like this,” he finally says. “Tell your contact we need a location. The brothers will be together. We can kill them before Viktor meets the elders.”
“He doesn’t know the location,” the man across the table says.
“I’m sure he can find out. He lives in the same house as them.”
My eyes widen at what Arkady is suggesting.
Is someone inside the Mikhailov Bratva passing secrets to Arkady?
“He still has allies because of his father. Even to this day,” Arkady says as a warning to the rest of his men. “If they find out Konstantin Mikhailov’s son is alive and ready to take over his father’s position, they will file behind him. The Mikhailov Bratva is hard enough to destroy now. If they collect more allies, they’ll bury the rest of the competition.”
A man across from Arkady pounds his fist on the table so hard the mugs bounce, spilling drops of tea on the table. “I don’t care whose fucking son he is, I’ll kill him myself!”
“No!” Arkady shoots back. “We need to be careful about this. It can’t lead back to us.”
I finish wiping droplets of tea from the table. Arkady looks at me, slides his arm across my back and pulls me to him. “And what did you see that night,malishka?” he asks as he pulls me into his lap.
My face turns the shade of beets as he climbs his hand up my thigh. I open my mouth, but before I speak, my father interrupts.
“Arkady,” he growls.
“Quiet, old man. Or I’ll send her on a different sort of mission,” Arkady answers.
I dread what that means. So far, he’s only ever sent me on missions that didn’t require me to have sex with my targets. I posed as a trafficked girl but was never directly ordered to bed someone. And I know that can change.
“We had an agreement,” my father says with a sound of warning in his voice.
Arkady mulls my father’s words over and pushes me off his thigh. “I know, old man, I know.” He lifts his hands, acting like an innocent person. “Off limits.”
My father nods back in satisfaction.
“Tatyana,” my father calls. I get by his side as quickly as I can. He pulls me into the kitchen, yanking my arm to get me out of the dining room.
“What did I tell you about getting close to them?” he asks in an accusatory tone.
Of course he’s blaming me. He blames me for anything he doesn’t like. All I was doing was pouring tea, and he treats me as if I was flirting. He always manipulates situations to make me look like the one who did something wrong.
The older I get, the more he treats me like a sheltered girl. Even though he has me working with the Bratva, going into criminal compounds, casinos and sex clubs disguised as a party girl, he expects me to remain a virgin, as if I could stop a man three times my size from fucking me if he wanted to. My father acts like it’s his sacred mission to guard my virtue, as he calls it.
Never let a man touch you,he says. He’ll usually attach some threat of punishment should Iletmyself be assaulted. Or worse to him yet, lose my virginity. He acts like that’s my only redeeming quality.
My father scoffs at me and throws my arm away from him as if I’m some helpless thing.
“Go home,” he orders. “I’ll close up tonight.”
That’s all he has to say to me. I storm away, yank my coat off the hooks by the back door and grab at the handle before he changes his mind.
“Tatyana,” he says before I leave.
I turn back to him, expecting him to tell me to stay. Instead, he shoots me a threatening look as he growls, “Go straight home.”
* * *
