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“See how easy that was? I ask you to do something for me, you do it, we both get what we want. I’d call that a win-win. No?”
She was clutching at her aching arms, suddenly unsure of what exactly he was getting at.
“What do you mean?” she reluctantly asked, worried what the reply would be.
“You always were a smart one,” he said, smirk lingering. “I have a proposition for you.”
“No,” she shook her head, taking a step away from him. “Whatever it is, my answer is no.”
“Ah, but then I’ll go to your father, and I’ll tell him you can’t marry Zeke because you’re bonded to me.”
Her eyes widened.
“I was never bonded to you.”
“You weren’t?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“And who’s going to believe you? Everyone knows you were with me.”
She knew they’d never reached the point of discussing forming a mating bond, but for one breathless second, she thought that perhaps they had, that he’d stayed away all this time only to be able to return and do this to her. He’d always had a knack for spinning everything she said and did into his favor, making her doubt herself. But in the following moment, she had conviction fill her that Nikolai never would have let her go if they’d been bonded. He would have brought her before her father and forced her to keep her promise to him.
“Why the hell wouldn’t you have come forward sooner?” she demanded.
“To give you space,” he said, a mockingly humble note in his voice, as if being the best mate imaginable was all he’d ever desired. “I was waiting at home by the cold fire for you to make up your mind, and then, lo and behold, I find out you’re binding yourself to the son of a rival family.”
“I thought he invited you. Wouldn’t that make him yourfriend? Where’s that loyalty you men are always harping on about?”
He huffed a soft laugh, letting the humility go for the chance to boast.
“Our friendship was nothing more than a convenience,” he stated, his casual air highlighting how much pleasure he took in how little it had meant to him. “For me, it was a way to understand his family’s way of thinking, even though he proved a piss-poor source, if I’m honest. For him, I was another rebellion against his father’s tight leash. Looks like Mikhail is back right where he started, though. But I wouldn’t admit any of this, of course not. I’d say something along the lines of how I had thought to stay away—to honor the alliance—but, oh, I can’t allow my good friend to debase himself in such a way. To form a mating bond with a woman who doesn’t know what she wants and who might, end of the day, come running back to me.”
“You bastard,” she murmured, but her legs were still like jelly, and she couldn’t move an inch, too stunned to offer up a proper protest.
Her mind was racing a mile a minute, trying to find some way of getting him to stop, to get the hell out. She couldn’t see any.
“You know us dragons, Anna. We’re a proud race. And between the three families there’s bad blood already. Imagine you agreeing to your father’s plan only for it to blow up in his face. I reckon you’re only agreeing to it because he sold you some spiel about how it’s for the greater good. It’ll stop this war that’s coming. It won’t, but it will give your father the upper hand. He’ll be joined with the Kumarins against the Kuznetsovs and we’ll be fucked, to put it mildly.
“So, you can either keep your father from losing face by bonding yourself to a Kumarin and also help me with what I’m about to ask you to do; or you can refuse me and watch as I blow up this bonding ceremony, leave your father’s grasp on things under serious scrutiny, shake things up a bit. What do you say?”
“They won’t believe you.”
“You know that it won’t matter,” he said. “I walk in there with this story, and it’ll be enough to pull the truce apart at the seams. It’s that fragile.”
He was right, and he had her exactly where he wanted her. There was no middle ground: either she chose to go ahead with the bonding ceremony, securing the truce and the go-ahead for whatever her father’s plans were moving forward, or the truce was blown to smithereens by Nikolai’s lies. She had to trust that her father knew what he was doing, and that he’d known that the truce was no more than window dressing for what the alliance was obviously all about: winning.
Whatever she was expected to do for Nikolai, she might be able to find a way out of, but if he walked up to her father now, with this lie, and yanked the alliance apart, then it was all over.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked, her legs beginning to feel steadier now that the choice was made.
“It’s a simple thing,” Nikolai said. “I want you to be my eyes and ears and, the second you hear talk of something called the Incendiary, you report back to me.”
“You want me to spy on my own father?” The words felt dry like sand in her mouth.
This was a dangerous game, even for her.
“No, love,” Nikolai said. “I want you to spy on Semyon Kumarin.”
