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I shake my head. “We both know I was never asked for consent before being signed up to that arrangement.”
“This isn’t about consent,” he gnarls. “This is aboutfamily.Responsibility. Your father has been responsible for you his whole life.” The words light murderous fires inside me.
You have no fucking idea…
Or do you?
Would you even care, Vitaly?
“You owe him. It’s time you returned the favor. I’m going to make sure you repay your debt to your father.”
“By marrying a woman I feel nothing for? Is that what you want for her?”
“She’ll do as she’s fucking well told, for the good of both families.”
My eyes narrow as he says it. The Bakhtin family is much wealthier than even mine. They don’t need our family for money. Maybe my father and he know too much about each other’s crimes.
Or maybe Vitaly Bakhtin is just like my father—he needs control and will wield it in whatever way grants him the power over others that he craves.
“There are other powerful families in the city you can marry her off to if you care so little about her right to choose.”
Vitaly’s body stiffens. “See, that’s the difference between you and her.Sheunderstands what family means.”
What Vitaly really means is that his daughter is just like him. She’s the walking opposite of Indigo—shrewd, calculated, organized, ambitious, ruthless—and no amount of attempting to reason with her has dampened her desire to marry me. Even when I told her it would cause me damage to be forced into such a situation, I got no hint that she gave a shit.
“Greyson, do you realize how difficult you’re making all of this?!” exclaims Sandra, getting to her feet, pacing backwards and forwards like a leopard trapped in a cage, her fingers shakily drawing a second cigarette to her lips. “We haven’t asked you for much! We’re asking you to do your duty as a son! For us!”
“Or risk your fucking inheritance,” snarls Landon, always so keen to dangle my inheritance over my head.
I shake my head. “I don’t need your money, Father. As you well know.”
The fact that I inherited an estate from my maternal grandparents has long been a source of fury and rancor for my father, especially when he discovered that the trust they put it into until I turned twenty-one was watertight and he could never get his hands on it without my authority, despite multiple legal attempts to.
The financial independence that my grandparents granted me was the only tiny piece of justice they got to ensure, and even then, it only came with their own death. I like to think that that knowledge gave them some semblance of peace despite what was taken from them.
Vitaly’s calloused voice splinters the room, turning my blood to ice. “Who is she?”
“That’s none of your fucking business,” I repeat, aware of the lengths to which this man will go to ensure he gets what he wants.
“That’s where you’rewrong.”
My blood riots through my veins at the thought of him even knowing about her. I ache to grab him by his thick, ruddy throat and launch my fist into his face, beating him to a pulp for the mere ghost of a threat hanging in the air.
But if I do that, he’ll know…
And it will mean that the bloodthirst I’ve felt since I met Indigo will have consumed me—the rage born of my unbidden protectiveness over her, and the rage over things that the candor of her vibrant gaze make difficult to keep burying.
Aware of the intransigence of the positions of these dangerous men, I decide to attempt something which leaves me hollow.
“I’m dating a woman. That’s all. Perhaps if you all left me the fuck alone, I’d get her out of my system and we wouldn’t have to waste our time having conversations like these.”
My mother turns to me swiftly, eyes wild, her bleached blond bob messy as if having been dragged around the room by it—not something that would be new to her based on what I know of my father’s proclivities.
“Is that what you’re doing here?” she asks, the desperation in her voice unsettling, as if she knows she’ll bear some part of the consequences for me daring to defy my father.
In truth, that was once the plan—to get her out of my system. Part of me still holds onto the hope that I can do it, and that I can also free her of the binds holding her to me. And yet every day, I fall deeper into her, until all I want to do is let go and allow this warm current to take me wherever it will.
But right now, I can’t ignore the menacing glint in Vitaly’s eyes, nor the thought that he or my father could do something to hurt or threaten her. It’s unlikely, but the fury in my father’s eyes is not something anyone but a fool could ignore.
