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“Dima and your father insisted that it would be our little secret, but fuck them now.” He lets out a low chuckle as he straightens up. “Your father offered Valentina up to us as collateral on a new business partnership. The youngest Malikov daughter. The virgin. So she’s mine to do with what I want, do you understand? And when I find her, I am going to show her with my hands and with my cock that she is my fucking property.”
Anger erupts in my gut, flames of rage blast through my extremities.
I close my hands around his neck again, and his eyes widen because he knows with one snap, I could easily make him crumple to the floor like a bag of cement.
“Luka,” Nikolai says, grabbing my shoulder. He tries to pull me away, but I’m not letting this bastard go just yet. “Don’t. He’s a piece of shit. We’ll handle him later. Right now, we have to go after Val. If anyone tipped off Dmitri’s family that she’s missing, Christ only knows what they’ll do when they find her.”
He mumbles this last part so that Dmitri can’t hear it, but I already know what will happen to my sister as punishment for this kind of disappearing act. It would be bad. Very fucking bad,
“Screw you, Nikolai,” Dmitri yells. “Your family isn’t getting away with not paying into this partnership. They’ll pay this debt one way or another, do you hear me? So you’d better find her and get her ass down that aisle because if I find her first, I will–”
“If one hair on her head is touched,” I rasp, my thumb positioned over Dmitri’s carotid artery. I could make him bleed out in a hot fucking second if I wanted to. “I’ll find you and put you through the most painful torture you can imagine. I’ll make you beg for death because it’ll be the only mercy you get.”
I let him go and his hands fly up to his throat. He coughs and sputters, sinking to his knees. He got off easy. I wonder if he even knows it.
Nikolai follows me out of the room and back into the foyer where the rest of the guests congregate. The level of noise around us rises as news of the vanished bride ripples through the crowd.
I shoot a glare at my brother. “Did you know about this sham marriage? Was it one of the other decisions Dad and Dima made while I was rotting in prison?”
He shakes his head. “I had no idea. Nobody told me anything. Not even Val hinted at it. I mean, yeah, I noticed that she’s been unhappy, but every time I asked, she’d just chalk it up to arguments over wedding bullshit. I figured it was just cold feet or some crap like that.”
Pushing through the crowd, I search for Dima and my father. There is a sea of faces in my line of sight, but none of them are the two I’m very close to smashing in.
How in the hell could my father have sold off his youngest daughter? And how could Valentina have kept that from me?
My gut twists as a reminder that she still has no idea I’m about to leave Miami for good.
I grit my teeth.
Because it’s what you do when you’re part of this family. You suck shit up and smile when on the inside, you’re really fantasizing about slitting your brother’s throat for fucking you over so royally. Val was just playing her role as the dutiful daughter, bottling up the anger and disappointment and resentment.
And the other day when she came over, I could have done something to help. I would have killed that fucker to save my sister from a lifetime of hell, the way I want to kill Dima for bringing the same thing to Natasha’s life.
“I missed it,” I mutter, sidestepping wedding guests. “I could have done something to help her.”
“We all missed it,” Nikolai says. “But Dima is so far into Dad’s ear that he’d never listen to anyone else.”
“Maybe we need to cut out Dima’s tongue then, yeah?”
Dmitri is now on my heels, his irate voice reverberating between the walls of the expansive foyer.
“Nik, shut him the fuck up before I punch a hole in his throat.” I push past my brother when I see Dima and Natasha huddled against a white marble column a few feet in front of me. I stalk toward my brother, shoving him backward.
“Was this all part of your plan to take over the goddamn world, Dima? It was your idea to sell our baby sister to that scumbag family?”
He flashes a nasty smirk at me once he recovers from the sudden force of my hands. “Every move I make leads me to that goal, Luka. Every single one. Don’t try to make me feel guilty for making a smart business move for the family.”
“You don’t give a shit about the family. You care about yourself and whatever you can steal from other people.”
He inches closer, his hardened gaze spitting malice. “I’m next in line, Luka. Not you. Wanna know why? Because I make smart moves. You do things that hurt the family and create messes I need to clean up. So yeah, if I needed to dispose of you for a few years while I got things back under control, guess what? Your fault. You drove me to it.”
I catch a glimpse of Natasha’s horrified expression, the blood icing in my veins at the words he just spewed. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You know exactly what it means,” Dima says. “You’re just lucky I didn’t have you killed, although I’m regretting that decision now. Fuck the white knight routine. It’s too little, too late. Natasha’s mine.”
“I will never be yours,” Natasha yells, the high-pitched voices surrounding us almost drowning out her protest.
“You will stand there with your mouth shut,” Dima responds, never moving his eyes from my face. “I’m not speaking to you.” With a pause, his lips lift into a menacing smile. “And don’t think I’m finished with you or the love you’ve been trying desperately to hide, Luka.”
