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“We should get going,” Konstantin says as he looks up from his phone screen and rises from the couch. As usual, he’s oblivious to the need for any sort of greeting. “The traffic will delay us by fifteen and a half minutes.”
I grin up at him. Fifteen and a half, of course. That’s Kostya for you. If he could, he’d quantify and digitize every aspect of our lives, turn everything into zeros and ones. Papa hates that about him, always has, but I think it’s what makes my oldest brother so brilliant. Nikolai and Valery appreciate his abilities too. Unlike our father, who’s still caught up in the nineties’ mentality of might-makes-right, they understand the importance of technology to our future. It will be Konstantin’s dark web ventures and the like that will grow our family’s power and influence in the coming years, not our real estate assets or oil-and-gas fields.
Then again, what do I know? According to my parents, the only way I can contribute to our family’s fortune is by looking pretty and marrying Alexei.
My mood darkens at the thought, and it’s all I can do to keep my smile as Nikolai enters the room and also greets me with a kiss on the cheek. When he pulls back, his lips are curved in one of his signature ovary-slaying smiles. All three of my brothers are strikingly handsome and look enough alike to be triplets, but Nikolai—or Kolya, as I’ve called him since childhood—possesses that certain extra something. Animal magnetism, maybe? Personally, I don’t feel it, but women are drawn to him like sugar ants to bait. Unfortunately for them, he just toys with them for a night or two and then discards them, broken-hearted. On second thought, maybe I should say “fortunately.”
Underneath that beautiful exterior, he’s as dark and intensely obsessive as our father, and I’d pity any woman he truly fixated on.
“My limo is waiting outside,” he says, offering me his arm. “Let’s get our Cinderella to her ball.”
“If only I had the option to meet Prince Charming there,” I mutter under my breath as I slip my arm through the crook of his elbow.
Nikolai hears me anyway. He shoots me a sharp look as he leads me to the door that opens into the elevator foyer. “You know our parents are hoping to announce the engagement tonight, right?”
Some of my nausea returns. “I overheard something to that effect, yes.”
Valery falls into step beside us. “I can talk to them if that’s not what you want. Get them to pump the brakes for now.” His tone is cool, emotionless, but the stare he levels at me is unnervingly penetrating.
My heart leaps with hope. “You can?”
He nods, as if it’s no big deal, and Nikolai says, “I’ll back him up. You’re way too young for marriage. Especially with a Leonov.” He imbues the last word with derision.
“Actually, I’ve already spoken with our father,” Konstantin says from behind us. We all stop and turn to look at him, surprised. He calmly adjusts his glasses, unruffled by the attention. “He’s agreed that the timing of the announcement and everything else that follows should be up to Alina and Alexei from now on. As long as the betrothal agreement remains in place, they can decide how to proceed from here.”
My mouth drops open, and I’m not the only one with that reaction. I have some idea of how Valery would have achieved his goal—he can outwit and out-manipulate anyone, our father included—and I wouldn’t have been surprised if Nikolai, as the favored heir, would’ve exerted a fair amount of influence as well. But Konstantin? How on Earth did he do this? Papa has despised him ever since he was a toddler, when it became clear that he was different from other kids and had zero interest in learning what Papa had to teach him.
“Kostya…” My voice is uneven, the tips of my fingers icy as I curl them against my palms. “Are you sure? Could you have misunderstood, maybe?”
He cocks his head, considering it. “No,” he says after a long moment, during which my emotions oscillate wildly, bouncing between hope and dread. “Father was quite clear. He understood the alternative.”
My breath whooshes out in relief as Valery asks, “What alternative?”
Out of the three of us, he looks the least surprised by this development. It makes me wonder if this was part of his backup plan. Because Valery always has a backup plan. And a backup to the backup plan.
Konstantin pulls out his phone and glances at the screen again. “We have seventy-three seconds of leeway with the current state of traffic. If we don’t get moving, we’ll be late.”
I’m dying to interrogate him further, and I’m sure Nikolai and Valery are too, but he’s right. We have to get going, or we won’t make it to the party on time—a party that I’m suddenly dreading way less.
If Konstantin is telling the truth, and I have no reason to think he’s not, tonight doesn’t have to spell my doom.
My thoughts spin madly as we get into the elevator and descend to the underground parking garage where Nikolai’s limo awaits. I have a million questions for my oldest brother, but I know better than to ask them outside the privacy of our penthouse, where our security team performs daily sweeps for listening devices and such. This is a private elevator, one that goes up only to our penthouse, but still, it’s less secure. Whichever levers Konstantin used to convince Papa to back off are, most likely, things our enemies can use against us. Now that the initial shock is fading, I can think of several ways Konstantin might’ve strong-armed our father into doing what he wants, and they all have to do with what Papa thinks of as Konstantin’s weakness: his all-consuming passion for computers and technology.
With Konstantin’s hacking abilities and intimate knowledge of our family’s business, it’s all too easy to imagine him taking an important factory offline with a few strokes on his keyboard, or freezing our liquid assets in the Cayman Islands. Or making them disappear altogether.
In his own quiet way, Konstantin might be the most dangerous of my three brothers.
Finally, we’re in the limo, and as soon as the partition between us and Nikolai’s driver goes up, I can’t hold back any longer. Turning to Konstantin, I begin, “So, Kostya, how did you—”
“You still need to talk to Alexei,” he says, and I forget all about his Papa-handling methodology as he continues. “Father won’t force the issue, but the Leonovs may insist that the announcement proceeds as planned.”
My chest feels like a balloon that’s just been punctured. The hope that buoyed me a second ago bleeds out, taking with it most of the air in my lungs. I somehow missed that part the first time, where he said that Papa agreed to leave it up to me andAlexei.
Not just me.
I have to gethimon board as well.
All the anxiety I’ve been battling returns, multiplied tenfold, and my temples throb anew.Talk to Alexei. This, more than anything, is the reason I’ve been losing sleep over this party.
