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It’s a jagged pill that tears at the sides of my throat like tiny thorns as it goes down.
When I first saw Irina, I wondered how she could let this happen, how she could allow her daughter’s life to be ruined for money. Is she really that obtuse?
The disbelief in her expression tells me she most certainly is. Living a happy, diamond-encrusted existence in a bubble made of Chanel and Christian Louboutin.
At least she has the weak excuse of being ignorant. I can attest to that. Before Luka snatched me, I had no idea of my father’s place in this sordid criminal world.
My mother can’t claim the same excuse when she watched me being carried out of the front door of our home kicking and screaming. I may be young and lacking in maternal instincts, but there is something seriously twisted about watching your own flesh and blood be torn from your life as compensation.
“How could Viktor have kept it from me?” She murmurs the rhetorical question to herself as she rocks back and forth, obviously torn between grief and anger.
Did my mother feel the same push and pull when my father made the decision to sell me off? Did she even try to stop him?
“And you,” Irina says after swallowing the heavy dose of reality I just shoved down her throat. “You knew she wanted to run, and you didn’t say anything? You didn’t try to stop her?”
“Do you want to blame this on me now?” I snap. “Because your husband, the one guilty of making the arrangement in the first place, is lying in a refrigerator right now and in no position to be questioned?”
Irina recoils as if I just bitch-slapped her, and I can’t lie. The thought definitely crossed my mind. But maybe my caustic words took this a little too far, especially since she looks like she wants to lunge at me and claw my eyes out of my skull for speaking ill of her despicable husband. This whole scene is so surreal, it’s making my head ready to spin off my neck.
“Listen, I am very sorry that you’re in the position where your youngest daughter ran off because the idea of being forced to marry someone she didn’t love was one she couldn’t accept,” I say, my voice shaking. “But at least she got the chance to break free. I was kidnapped from my home and then held captive in the equivalent of Fort Knox until I was almost raped by some family enemy of yours who could have easily killed me. I had no out. So you know what? Good for Valentina for escaping those horrors. I’m glad I didn’t say anything to anyone. If I had, she’d have a noose slung around her neck right now.”
Heat creeps up the sides of my neck. How am I the one to blame here?
So sick. So, so deranged.
Irina inches closer, her nostrils flared and eyes fiery. For a fleeting second, I think she might try to hit me, but she jumps backward when the double doors open and Luka staggers into the waiting room.
My heart stills when I see him. His tan skin appears sallow, the lines around his eyes deeper than they were when he walked back there.
But his eyes. My God.
I’ve seen hatred and rage flicker in those turbulent blue pools. Hard, guarded, and icy — impossible to read on a normal basis. And now?
The emotions blazing in his tormented gaze make my breath hitch. Regret, remorse, and disappointment seep into his worn face, his body weighted by an imaginary albatross that has seemingly sucked the fight out of him.
His family slowly follows him toward us. When he finally stops in front of Irina, everyone’s faces pinch with grief and panicked anticipation.
“Dima is dead.”
Irina falls into Luka’s arms, sobbing like her heart is being shredded where it sits in her chest. But he doesn’t look at her. His menacing gaze is focused on me alone, his jaw twitching harder as his mother’s cries get louder.
Caught off-guard by his evident fury, I take a few steps away from him, stumbling slightly when one of his brothers rushes past me to help his mother into a chair.
Luka barely blinks as he closes the space between us, rooting me to the spot with his harsh glare.
“There is a way out, Natasha,” he growls, mimicking Valentina’s words to me. “That's what she said, right?”
I swallow hard, my eyes popping open wide.
“Were you thinking of running? Are you still?” His fingers close around my wrists, so tight that my fingertips go numb. “Because there is no escape for you.”
“What does that even mean?” I manage to squeak out, my skin crawling with some crazy mixture of lust and foreboding. “Dima is gone. My arrangement was with him.”
“Now it’s to me. Your family’s debt still needs to be paid.” He leans closer, dipping his head so that our foreheads nearly touch, his nearness generating a flow of electricity that buzzes through me like I just stuck my finger into a live socket. “That means you are mine, Natasha.”
