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‘Investments?’ she queried.
‘Yes.’
‘With a sideline in kidnapping and extortion?’
‘Where did you get extortion from?’
‘I presume you’re getting something in return?’
‘Yes, Princess. In the real world that’s called payment.’
Lykos clenched his jaw shut. He shouldn’t have said that. He might not have a very high opinion of runaway princesses but that didn’t excuse rudeness. He held out the coffee he’d made for her, waiting for her to meet his eye. He shouldn’t have said it, but he wouldn’t be shamed by it. And when she finally met his gaze steadily—going up a notch in his estimation—he wouldn’t forget that Princess Marit of Svardia had absolutely no clue how the real world worked.
‘I take mine—’
‘Milk with two sugars?’
‘How did you—?’
‘Lucky guess,’ he threw over his shoulder as he returned to make his own: black, bone-dry and unsweetened. How had he known? She was soft and pampered, that was how.
‘So, what is the going rate for kidnapping a princess these days?’
‘All your brother’s shares in an oil company.’
A frown marred the smooth plane of Marit’s brow when he turned back to face her. ‘What oil company?’
‘Does it matter?’
She narrowed her eyes, watching him for a beat. ‘It does to you,’ she observed.
His heart thudded and Lykos realised he didn’t like that she’d been able to see that so easily. Like Theron. He shrugged off his discomfort but a small smile pulled at the corner of her lips and his attention snagged on it. By the time his gaze flicked back to her eyes he couldn’t help but feel that she’d done the same thing, as if he’d felt the brush of her eyes on his lips too.
‘Kozlov Industries,’ he answered, anchoring their conversation in something far too boring for a princess. Paradoxically, Marit shifted her skirts a little and proceeded to collapse into the seat in a froth of tulle, her cup held high through the dramatic move, and looked for all the world as if she were ready for a story.
‘What does Kozlov Industries do?’ she asked when he refused to give in to her unspoken command to explain further.
He glared at her, unsure as to why it was of any interest to her.
‘What?’ she asked with faux innocence. ‘I just want to know what I’m worth to you, is that so bad?’
He didn’t like the way she’d phrased that: ‘what I’m worth to you’. The words crawled beneath his skin and slithered through his memories until they churned in his gut.
‘What you arenotworth to me is the giant headache that’s beginning to form.’
‘All you have to do is answer the question,’ she she childishly, ‘and I’ll leave you alone.’
‘I doubt that very much,’ he growled, pressing a finger to his temple and rubbing at the place where, genuinely, a headache was threatening to form. But when he looked back to where she was sitting in the chair like Little Miss Muffet—one of the only nursery rhymes he remembered his mother whispering to him in the dead of night while his father was passed out—his mind emptied of excuses.
He knocked back his espresso, feeling the rich liquid burn his throat, before placing the cup back on the side. ‘Kozlov is a Russian oligarch, with his fingers in far too many pies.’
Lykos thought of the man who he had first crossed paths with three years ago. The Russian thought nothing of buying up the competition and then breaking the company apart, smashing it on the rocks and destroying hundreds and thousands of livelihoods. He was a man without conscience and as such was dangerous. Lykos had known plenty of bad men. Kozlov wasn’t justbad, he enjoyed it, he relished the misery of others.
‘You don’t like him?’
Lykos barked out a bitter laugh. ‘No, Princess. I don’t like him.’
The man was a bully and a snob who had lashed out even harder when he’d realised that Lykos wasn’t as easily toppled by snide rumours or business deals as he’d imagined. Lykos was slowly forcing him into a corner and the man was getting desperate. It had taken Lykos years of painstaking hard work to acquire even a small portion of shares in the man’s company. Shell companies, clandestine meetings with CEOs on the brink of financial collapse who, with their last breath, threw their lot in with Lykos just to take revenge against the shark in the financial waters of the world’s most vital stock exchanges. But Kozlov had finally realised what was happening and had blocked any attempts Lykos could make to further his shareholding in Kozlov Industries. Until he’d discovered the identity of a very surprising shareholder.
