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“Your father tried to set me up. Hesentyour mother to seduce me, to set up exactly the same sort of bullshit that you fell into, setting up Marika.” I laugh again, unable to help it. “It’s like a fucking curse! You fucking Vasilev men, using your women to try to undermine me, and it nearly fuckingworkedthis time, because at least you were fucking smart enough not to send a goddamn married woman to seduce me.”
“Theo McNeil,” Nikolai speaks very slowly, his eyes narrowed. “I’m going to need you to say plainly what the fuck you’re talking about, or else I will risk your men shooting me, and tell mine to open fire in this room, so at least I know your fucking corpse has hit this floor by the time mine does.”
There’s steel in his voice that tells me he’s not joking, but I don’t let him see whether or not it affects me. I take a slow sip of my whiskey, making him wait for a moment before I set it aside and lean back against the bar as if there aren’t twenty guns ready to aim in my direction. “Your father wanted my territory, my empire. He wanted me dead, same as you seem to. Your mother was a beautiful woman.” I let out a slow breath. “Close to my age back then, too. I can’t imagine your father was all that generous with her, in—” I wave a hand. “Never mind. I’m sure you don’t want to think about your parents fucking. But she wasn’t as averse to the plan as you might think. So while I’m of the mind your father likely fabricated a lot of those ‘diary entries’ you saw, at least any that detailed us actually going to bed together, I’m also of the mind that some of them might have been real. Your mother wanted to be in my bed. But I told her no, even though at first I wasn’t aware of the plan being hatched.”
“Why the fuck would I believe you?” Nikolai asks evenly, that same steel still in his voice, and I shrug.
“Marika can tell you how I feel about marriage. I know most crime bosses in our world don’t think it means anything. They marry for alliances or lust or power and then screw around on their wives at will, while those wives sit dutifully at home having their children and taking cock from husbands who don’t care about pleasing them with it. But I didn’t want to be that sort of husband. That’s why I held off on marriage for so long. I wanted a wife I liked, at the very least, a wife whose company made me not want to stray. I intended to be faithful. So I waited to marry until I was sure my eyes wouldn’t wander.” My jaw hardens as I glare at Nikolai. “So you can imagine how it felt to find out that my bride had lied to me from the very first night.”
“We’re not talking about Marika right now,” Nikolai growls. “We’ll get to that.”
“Oh yes.” I smile tightly at him, taking another sip of my whiskey. “We were talking about me fucking your mother.”
Nikolai’s gaze burns with fury, and his hand moves slightly. His men start to shift, and I chuckle.
“Are you really going to die over a jest?” I finish my whiskey and set the glass aside. “I turned your mother down, before I knew the plot your father had concocted. I told her she was very beautiful and that it was difficult for me to tell her no. That I did want her, and she deserved better than the hand she had been dealt. But I also believed that marriage was not something to be tampered with. I felt for her and the marriage she had been forced into. I wouldn’t judge her, for finding her way into another man’s bed. But it wouldn’t be mine.” I shrug, turning to pour another slug of whiskey. “Of course, your father had a plan, and she wouldn’t give up. She came to me with bruises on her face, playing on my sympathy. I have no doubt they were real. I also could tell that her mental state was—not the most stable. She begged me to give her something she could enjoy. She tried every way she could to seduce me. She practically pleaded with me to fuck her, trying to pass it off as desire, until I finally saw the panic underneath the seduction, and managed to get her to tell me what was really going on.” My mouth tightens, and I glare at Nikolai, returning his angry stare. “Your father made me complicit in her death against my will. I knew that getting her to tell me the truth would endanger her, and I justified it by telling myself that she would have been punished anyway, for failing to succeed at the trap your father baited with her. But I convinced her to tell me anyway, and then I sent her back to your father.”
“What was thetrap?” Nikolai asks, his voice dripping with disbelieving sarcasm.
“Your father planned to have her seduce me, and then when she came back, frame me for rape. There were already cracks in his Bratva, long before your late father-in-law took advantage of them. He knew forcing his men to try to attack my territory could fail, and if it did, they would revolt against him for the bloodshed it would cause. But if he could pin his wife’s rape on me, they would attack me gladly, and count every man lost a martyr, until they either ran out of men or took me down. Of course, when she failed, and he discovered that she had ratted, he murdered her. I hear he beat the truth out of her, first. A little bird told me.”
Even as I say the words, trying to sound careless, I can’t keep the emotion out of my voice. Irina Vasilev hadn’t deserved the fate that had been thrust on her. Marika and Nikolai hadn’t deserved to grow up without a mother. I hated Nikolai’s father for forcing my complicity in it. And now I hate Nikolai for the same—for putting Marika in this position that I’m beginning to see has done something very similar.
I punished Marika for something that, while her lies were very real, she was also manipulated into by some extent. She’s not as blameless as her mother was—but neither is she entirely at fault. And if I’d known—
If you’d asked more questions first, you would have. But you let your temper get away with you instead.
I can’t remember the last time I acted in such reckless anger. I don’t regret what I did to Adrik, and I haven’t changed my mind about what I intend to inflict on him. I, at the very least, can’t let him live, not after this. I’d make an enemy that I’d be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life. But I feel a sick pang of guilt over what I did to Marika.
For Adrik, I would have punished her. A spanking, a good fucking, to remind her who she belongs to—but I should have asked herwhyfirst, I realize, with deepening guilt. For all that I’m furious with her for lying to me, it’s not the loss of her virginity that I mind so much. I might have understood, if she’d told me the truth from the beginning. It’s the lies about everything—and I see now that all those lies stemmed from her brother’s plots that he involved her in. How could she have told me the truth, and risked my turning her away, when Nikolai had depended on her playing her role?
She wouldn’t have expected me to start to care for her. She wouldn’t for a moment have thought I’d be anything but cold and distant. I realize, as I stand there facing off with Nikolai, that I caught Marika off guard. I gave her something she never expected—and she didn’t know what to do with it except try to stay the course.
It doesn’t make it easier knowing that she lied to me. It doesn’t heal over the wounds that created—and it doesn’t fix what I did to her, under the assumptions I’d had. But it does make me wish I’d done things differently.
It makes me wish that, somehow, we both could have.
“I was happy with Marika,” I say quietly, looking at Nikolai. “Before I knew all of this—before I knew that she lied to me on our wedding night, before I knew that she was lying about the contraceptives, before I knew that the two of you—but mostlyyou, youlying bastard—were plotting my death, I washappywith her. I was falling in love with her, and I treated her in ways that no other man you might have married her off to would have. I wanted to make a life with her that was more than just duty.” The words come out between gritted teeth, each hard thump of my heart in my chest underlying the pain I feel—the regret for how I’ve handled the situation, now that I know the truth.
Nikolai is staring at me, his jaw clenched. “I don’t know whether to believe you or not,” he says in a low voice. “If it’s true, then I’ve set Marika on this path over a lie that our father concocted. I would have been less inclined to move on your empire if—”
“If you knew that your father was a lyingpíosa cac?” Each word comes out harsh, punctuated. “For a man who has inherited so much, you aren’t very bright, are you, Vasilev?”
Nikolai’s glare could melt ice—or at least, ice not as thick as the layer surrounding my heart. All of this is a convoluted mess beyond anything I could have imagined, and the fault rests with him more than anyone else.
“If I accept that you’re telling the truth, what then?” Nikolai lets out a slow breath. “What you did to my sister today—”
“Was no more or less than other men in my position would have done, and you know it. You want more proof that your father lied?” I shrug. “I can show you a letter I meant to give your mother, until I found out she’d been murdered before I could. It’s dated, although I suppose you can believe I made it up and wrote it for just such a reason—even though I didn’t know you believed any of that was true until just now. You’ll have to give me a moment to get it, though. It’s upstairs—”
Ignoring the men still ready to point their weapons at me, I stride towards the door, shoving it open. It slams into something hard, and I flinch back—only to see Marika on the other side, about to flee.
I grab her arm before she can. She looks like a mess still—it’s clear she hastily cleaned herself up and threw on a loose shift dress, her hair wet and tangled around her face, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed. “What are you doing out here?” I growl, and she wrenches her arm free of my grip, hard enough to almost hurt herself as she darts out of my reach.
“Listening to find out what the hell was going to happen to me and my brother!” she hisses. “The one thing I’m good at beyond taking your cock, apparently. And now I know everything.” She moves away from me as I grab for her again, shoving her way into the living room, and I enter behind her just in time to see Nikolai’s stunned face as it occurs to him that Marika might have heard our conversation.
“Marika, I—”
“Don’t say a word,” she whispers, her voice harsh and cutting even at the low register. “I heard everything. I thought for sure, when you told me, you must have real proof. Actual evidence that made yousurethat Theo had done that to our mother.” Her voice breaks, choking up as she stares at her brother. “The more time I spent with him, the more I didn’t think it could be possible. I didn’t see how it could be true. I questioned it and questioned it, but we were in Ireland, and all I could do was stay the course. It wasdaysbefore I knew something must be wrong about all of this, and I wished I’d never agreed to it, but it was too late. And now—”
