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“Am I right to assume this will put a damper on the plans we have with the Umarova family?” My father’s always been so adamant that he wants me to marry Eset purely because of her brother’s connections. Trying to figure out on my own if this means my father will want to nix the whole arranged marriage offer is confusing. I could see him going both ways, honestly.
“I won’t lie to you. I’m having a hard time trying to decide. There were fourteen girls from the block who were ten years of age.”
“It sounds premeditated like there was a reason for what they were doing. Do you know any more information?” He has to know something.
“I have some information, yes, but I need one of those. It has been a long day,” my father motions to the drink I have in my hand, and I nod, heading over to my bar area. I place my drink down on the bar while I fetch a glass for him, put in three cubes of ice, and then slowly pour some blanco tequila over the ice. I hand him his glass, and he takes it with a sigh of relief. “Ah, I needed this so badly.”
I wait for my father to at least take a couple sips of his drink before I pry again. “What do you know?”
“I know Lom Umarova is with a woman named Emily, who is Amelia’s cousin.” My father happens to be dating Amelia’s mother and has been for many, many years. I see her as nothing more than a desperate leech, searching for importance and using any situation she can to manipulate people. She’s a snake, but my father can’t seem to understand he needs to cut the head off before it bites him.
“There’s something you’re not telling me.” I can hear it in his fucking voice. He knows something, and he’s refraining from saying anything. “I can’t give you my opinion if you aren’t honest with me.”
“Lu told me that when Emily was a teenager, she had a child. Emily came to her for help, to hide the pregnancy and adopt the child out to a family privately. Emily didn’t want to deal with the consequences of being a teen mother in that sort of environment. She’d grown up in a small, conservative town, and from what Lu tells me, Emily knew she wouldn’t be able to get her and her daughter out of town if she had to care for her.” My father stops abruptly, and I raise both of my brows.
“Don’t tell me she gave her own blood to your fucking trafficking ring,” I hiss. There are times when I find it difficult to bite my tongue, and right now is one of those times.
“She did, only I didn’t know it until a few months ago. She lied to me and told me the child was brought to the facility under the same false pretenses all the other children were. I had no idea, and now look at the mess it’s created.”
Lu would go around to desperate, scared mothers and tell them she’d find a good home for their baby. She’d work on getting them to trust her enough to give her their child, and instead of finding a good home, she’d take them to my father’s facility, where the children were subjected to a long list of horrors.
“What are you going to do now? Surely, Emily didn’t know what her daughter was going to be part of, which is why the Umarova family went after her.”
“This is the part that bothers me, son. Theydidn’tjust go after Emily’s child. They took all the children in her age bracket, damaging my business in the process. I could understand them wanting Emily’s daughter back, but why go against me in such a way?”
“You don’t know, do you?” I question my father, and he furrows his brows at me.
“I don’t know what?”
“Ruslan has denounced any sort of trafficking, especially child trafficking. You’re lucky they didn’t take every child you had in the facility.” My father deserves a fate such as that. Maybe if his business was damaged greatly enough, he’d get out of it completely, but unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet.
“Yes, well, I came here to tell you what I discovered and that Ruslan reached out to me. Eset has agreed to meet with you next week in London.” He takes another sip of his tequila and looks right into my eyes.
“You still want me to meet with her?”
My father nods almost immediately. “As much as I’m torn about the situation at hand, you need to meet with Eset. An alliance with the Umarova family would do a lot of good for my claim. It would give us a world full of connections, and those connections would take me seriously. So yes, while they stole what belonged to me, I still need you to meet with Eset. Whatever you do, make sure this marriage deal goes through. Your other options aren’t nearly as witty or beautiful.” I’m sure the other options are beautiful, but I wonder if they have anything between their ears. From what I’ve heard about Eset, she’s a damn force to be reckoned with.
My father gets a call on his phone and answers it. “Yes?”
I finish the rest of my tequila while he talks away, and after only a few minutes, he’s telling me that he needs to get going, how something came up, and he needs to tend to it as soon as possible. We both say our goodbyes, and then he’s on his way out the door.
For a few moments, I debate going into my office and doing my research, but I decide to grab my laptop and take it out onto the veranda with me. With a tequila in one hand and my computer in the other, I sit on the plush white cushion of the wicker chair and open my laptop.
I’m going to be formally meeting Eset next week, which means I need to do some research on her. I know enough about her to get by, but I think if I really invest in looking into her more thoroughly, it’ll only help my cause. I’m not talking about my father’s, but my own. I want to get out of this prison, and Eset is my only way of doing that successfully.
I know she’s brilliant and has very strong opinions, and the stories I’ve heard about her have proven she’s heartless when the occasion calls for it. That’s everything I’m going to need in a partner and, more importantly, in a wife. I need to know her hobbies, what she likes to do, and what her passions are.
I type in her name online, both her old surname and her new surname.
Her old surname comes up with a website, which is an artist’s gallery, so I click on it. Up comes a beautifully crafted website. There’s an “about the artist” section on who Eset is—nothing included about her family or their dealings—and what she likes to use to create her pieces. It states she’s fond of using oil and acrylic paints but prefers to dabble in a bit of everything. On her website, she has multiple paintings, some photography, and even some pottery. Each of them is beautiful and so very different from the rest.
I’m going to be meeting her next week, so I bet if I take her to an art gallery, she will enjoy that very much. I do some digging on the internet and find a few different art galleries, but I’m looking for something that seems like it’s around her caliber. The National Gallery has an exhibition titled “Discover Manet & Eva Gonzalès,” which I think she’d enjoy quite a bit.
I don’t have a doubt in my mind that this meeting with Eset won’t go well. But if I play my cards right, it should go off without a hitch. I just know I need to be careful when it comes to my father. My reaction to finding out about Emily’s daughter probably seemed like I was only frustrated at the headache Lu created for my family, but deep down, I’m furious that my father chooses to dabble in such businesses. It’s sickening, but I need to keep my wits about me.
I don’t think Eset will see me as an ally because of my father, so what I have to do is prove to her that I’m an ally all by myself. It’s more than likely I’ll have to put my neck out on the line and hope she doesn’t betray me by informing my father about what I’ve told her… but I do believe she’ll see me as an ally at some point. I just hope it’s sooner rather than later.
Chapter Four
