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He’s certainly not expecting me, especially unannounced. But this is where Leo does business. And judging from the number of swarthy, gruff looking men in suits with visible Bratva tattoos milling around the bar and lounge area when I walk in, he’s here this evening.
Screw you, Leo. This ends tonight.
I make my way up one of the staircases from the main dining room level to the lounge and bar upstairs, grimacing with every step. I’d always imagined that there might be at leastsomediscomfort after doing what I was planning on doing tonight for the first time. But I’d imagined it would only happen once.
I didn’t plan on a four-round marathon. Just as I didn’tplan onHades Drakos.
I also didn’t plan on the instant addiction. The inability to say no or to tap out. The way he teased, manipulated, and played my body like a master. The craving for more, more,more.
I also didn’t exactly plan on him being hung like a freaking horse.
I grimace again in discomfort as I take the last step up into the lounge area. But even so, a flush creeps up my neck and a warm, sensual feeling pools in my core. Sore or not, that wasgood.
Really, really fucking good. So to speak.
I make my way through the mixed crowd—both regular New Yorkers and the obvious Bratva-connected types—sipping vodka in the upstairs lounge. At the far end, two burly men in suits and wearing earpieces guard the staircase up to the third floor, where Leo holds court in his private office.
The teasing memories of earlier tonight fade as the reality of how I even got to this point presses its foot down on the back of my neck.
Again, this never should have gone this far.
I’d cut Leo out of my life before I was even eighteen. He’d certainly cut Nora and me out of his, which I was more than fine with. And when I decided just under a year ago to move us to New York, it felt like taking an even bigger breath of fresh air. We’d be putting an entire ocean between us and him.
Until he followed us.
Leo has always worked for the Reznikov Bratva—first under Antin Reznikov, when I was small. And then more recently after Antin died, under Konstantin, Antin’s son.
InEngland. Or, at times, in Russia.
I’ve kept tabs on Leo since I was eighteen and took over legal guardianship of my sister. I wanted to know where he was, to make sure that wasn’t anywhere nearus. So I heard about it when he moved to New York right after we did, to start working for Konstantin’s co-king of the Reznikov empire, Gavan Tsarenko, the head of the organization’s presence in the US.
I told myself it was a coincidence. I told myself New York was avastcity, and we could easily never cross paths.
Until Leo very purposefully crossed mine, two months ago, and immediately sank his claws into me again.
Suddenly, Leoneededme. Because even worse, heknew.
He fuckingknewI’d never slept with anyone.
I’d never be able to prove it in court. But I know damn well that he got that particularly personal piece of information from a nurse at my OB-GYN’s office. A nurse who suddenly had the money, at least according to her ecstatic posts on social media, to quit her job and move with her boyfriend to a lavish beach house in Nha Trang, Vietnam.
A nurse who very obviously sold my personal medical details to Leo. And he’s been using that information to torment and threaten me for the last two months.
Because in the fucked-up world of the mafia, and the Bratva, and all of that shit, apparently that’s all a woman is: a tradable commodity whose value is determined by whether or not she’s a virgin.
It’s not like I was ever “holding on to my virtue” or anything like that. Nor am I at all religious, or a prude, or asexual. I mean, Ihavedesires. I get sexually turned on. I’ve just never slept with anyone.
Well, until tonight.
At first, it was that I knew I was too young. Then, I was essentially Nora’s mother, and who the hell has time to date or have a social life when you’re raising a seven-year-old at the age of eighteen?
After that, there was always just something else to take up my time. University, and then law school. And then absolutely throwing myself into work. Myjobwas my boyfriend. And the idea of a one-night stand, or any kind of casual sex just…never appealed to me.
And then there was Hugo.
I was twenty-two and working a hundred hours a week at my first job in London. Hugo was a few years older, and one of the firm’s most promising junior partners. He was nice, and charming, and I agreed to go out with him.
Three dates later, I was thoroughly creeped out and had zero interest in seeing him again.
