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“I promise not to make a break for it on your watch. Can I go now?”
He finally let go of my hand. “I’ll be around.”
There was a growl in his voice that hadn’t been there before. Sometimes I forgot that underneath his blond teddy-bear look, Yuri could probably be just as vicious as the otherBloody Ones. He did get promoted to brigadier recently, after all. A rank you didn’t get by playing nice and by the rules.
Nothing eventful happened during the hours I spent in English lit, where the professor delved into Gothic literature—which consisted of tales that seemed suspiciously similar to my life right now—and the library where I started working on my thesis. I sat at a two-person table and debated writing a piece about Gothic classics, such asDraculaandFrankenstein, or go a different route likeThe Picture of Dorian Gray. While I considered this, someone suddenly sat down across from me. The first thing I noticed were the tattoos on his hands. I froze for a moment. I knew those pictures on strong-looking fingers. They were like a story in themselves. To a clueless person they were pretty designs; to me they were Bratva sigils.
I looked up and saw two dark-green eyes scrutinizing me. It was a guy in his twenties, though a few years older than my twenty-two years. Raven-black hair fell to just below his ears. A single silver ring pierced his right brow. I didn’t bother with any niceties.
I leaned back in my chair. “What do you want?”
He mirrored my posture. His muscles slightly strained in his dark suit, though he wasn’t as muscled as Kristoff. Both men did have a similar behavior though; on guard yet totally relaxed at the same time, weird as that may sound.
“I have a message for you.”
His Russian accent gave him away. This guy wasn’t from around here. For a second I wondered if this was the man Sokolov had sent after me. The man wanted me dead after all. Well, not me specifically, but Aslanov’s daughter. And even though Kristoff claimed Sokolov couldn’t do this anymore, since I carried Kristoff’s name now, I had still wondered. I didn’t trust Sokolov one bit.
I gave him a bored expression. “Please, do tell.”
His icy eyes didn’t thaw. “Your father wants you to come home.”
I gasped, feeling sucker-punched. That sentence raised an avalanche of questions and indignant thoughts, but I pushed them away. I wasn’t sure where to start.
“My father?” Yeah, let’s start with that.
All my life my mother had refused to speak about him. The only thing I had of him was a grainy photograph. Whenever I broached the subject she teared up, and my mother never, ever cried. In my mind, I had figured he was dead, and she found it too painful to talk about. So, after a while I just let it go.
Then, less than a week ago, I found out that my father was a man named Aslanov. A pakhan, no less. Not only that, but he was Kristoff’s mentor’s mortal enemy.
Apparently, he had murdered all males in Sokolov’s family, including babies in the cradle. My stomach still churned when I remembered that.
So, even though a part of me was dying to get to know my father, another part feared that moment. What if he truly was a monster? What if that had been the reason my mother had left him?
“Aslanov.”
There was something in the man’s voice I couldn’t quite grasp. “And he just suddenly decided that he wants to see me?” It stung that he’d never bothered to reach out to me before. Ever since I’d figured out that my father was alive and kicking, I wondered why he never managed to find me. Unless, of course, my mother had done such a good job of running that he’d never been able to. I wish I knew what had happened between them.
“Your father didn’t know of your existence until recently.”
It didn’t take a genius to figure out who had told . I just didn’t know what Sokolov’s endgame was.
I decided to focus on the man across me first.
“And who exactly are you to Aslanov?” I couldn’t call him ‘father’. It didn’t feel right.
He settled back into his seat. “I’m Ilya. Your father wants you to come home.”
“Yeah, you already said that.” He quirked a brow in question. “What?” I asked. “Do you seriously expect me to go with you? A complete stranger?”
He took a card out of his jacket and pushed it across the table toward me. It was black with white text: one single phone number.
“You can reach me at that number. Don’t wait too long. His enemies will come after you.”
“You mean like Sokolov?”
Ilya looked taken aback for a second.
“Yeah, I know about him.”
