6

Katya

My head was high in the elevator as I headed to my father’s office. I’d already told him about the plan falling apart, and he hadn’t said much.

He’d just fixed a meeting with me for three.

My hair was in a severe bun piled on top of my head while I was in a classic plaid suit. I wish I’d succeeded. I’d have come with my biggest smile because it would have been hardcore evidence that I was made to take over after him. That I could be that stone-cold leader, taking the family higher and keeping it from the vultures.

Deep breaths. Nothing in the world terrified me. Not heights, not guns, not fucking knives. Never in my life had I admitted it out loud, but my single fear was my father. He was strong, powerful, and loving. He’d freaking pampered me as a kid.

He was the best father in the world, and I was afraid that I couldn’t measure up as his only child.

I was the only one my mother had managed to give birth to before she passed. I was all he had for a successor, and I never wanted to hear it from him, to even see the flicker of that look pass by his face. The look that said I wasn’t fit to take the business on after him.

Both my hands gripped the handle of the basket I was carrying tighter. It was after lunch, and I was sure he hadn’t eaten.

Even though I behaved as if we lived together, my father didn’t live too far from Blue Range. He had a room in our house, but since I’d been old enough to legally live on my own, he’d spent what little free time he had in that apartment.

Our house was now just a place he visited and occasionally spent the night.

I understood.

There were too many reminders of my mother, and I knew how much he’d loved her.

Besides, I was not the type to keep a roommate for long. In college, I only had a roommate for the first week of the first semester of my freshman year.

I started for my father’s office, nodding to Sasha, the secretary. The door opened, and I stopped in my tracks, narrowing my eyes out of instinct.

“What are you doing here?” I sounded slightly breathless and narrowed my eyes further. Something always happened to me when this man was close by.

Alessandro Sorvino gave me a stern look that made a shiver run down my spine. From head to toe, very slowly, taking in the basket in my hands. “I came on business.”

There was somebody with him, the half sane brother, Dom, drinking from a glass. He winked at me.

I glanced between the both of them as they walked past the men, heading for the elevator.

“What business would you have with my father?” I put the basket on Sasha’s desk, turned around, and followed them.

Alessandro kept walking, not once looking at me.

“What did you talk about?”

Nothing.

I stamped around them and stood in front of the elevator, blocking them off.

“Well,” Dom clasped a hand on Alessandro’s back. “I’ll go try with that lovely secretary. Take your time.”

He left, and I crossed my arms and raised a brow.

“You will look at me and fucking answer, or you’ll use the stairs.”

His eyes came down then. Eyes so hot my breath caught in my throat. There was barely any time to think before he rushed me, hands against the elevator on either side of my head, my back pressed against the ice coolness of the iron doors.

“I came to confirm that there was a man I needed to kill, Katya. Slowly and terribly.”

I raised a brow, my throat was trying to work itself, but I was resisting so hard. I wouldn’t swallow when he was this close, when he could see and hear it.

But the flesh is weak. I think a reverend had said that once, because I swallowed, and his eyes locked on my throat.

I licked my lips. Every thought that ran through his mind was leaking into me.

But he didn’t crack that devilish smile. He stared at my throat for a minute with a perfectly serious face. Then, he stepped back and pressed the elevator button.

I stood up straight just as the doors started to open. Alessandro stepped around me, my eyes trailing him.

“Is this the famous anger of the Sorvino don?” I asked, halting him before he could press the button. “I’d heard so much about it, but it’s a bit disappointing.”

He regarded me for a while before talking.

“If you want to test me, Piccola, you’ll have to try on another day. If I get too close to you, I’ll touch you without a care for where we are, and if I do, I guarantee you won’t be able to get up.” He thought about that last part. “Very much like the man on my mind…except for a completely different reason.”

I looked at Alex for a minute. Something stirred inside me. More than one thing, actually.

Today, I knew that one of them was desire.

I smiled at him. “I think I like seeing you like this. Furious. Out of your mind.”

Alessandro pressed the button, and the doors started to close.

“I think it runs in your family.”

***

I had Martha’s delectable borsht in the basket, a small loaf of rye bread, and a bottle of brandy.

Anything more, and I’d have been pushing it.

The mouth-water scent of Martha’s borsht filled my father’s office as he ate what I’d laid down for him.

“What?” I asked because I couldn’t possibly have heard right.

My dad chewed, nodding his head probably to the taste. I had a live-in maid, cook, and gardener that came three days a week, and then, there was Martha, who’d been with me since I was a child.

Her cooking was the only way I had been able to force vegetables down my throat.

“I don’t know what he thought of our family, but he came here a few weeks ago to form an alliance.”

I snorted and crossed my arms where I was seated on the couch. “He must have been joking.”

“Yes, well, even if he had been joking, I still turned him down. The Petrenkos will never sully themselves with human trafficking. Some bridges aren’t even worth crossing.”

I nodded, thinking back. “He’s the reason Alessandro left here seeing red.”

My father paused to look at me, his beautiful eyes sparkling. “Triev caused him lose forty million dollars today after one of his cargo ships was sunk.”

“Do you think Maxim will try to make an alliance with the Sorvinos?”

He helped himself to more soup and bread, chewing for a short while. “They will, it’s new territory. They might be rabid and disloyal, but they won’t run around like mad dogs unless they’ve been turned down by everybody worth anything. Making new ground is always the most dangerous time for any mafia family, they know they are surrounded, and they fight brutally. The stake is high for them, and they become very desperate. You know what they say about a desperate man.”

“He will eat his own legs for food,” I said even though it hadn’t been a question.

“Yes, but only after he has eaten the legs of everything around him. Turning him down means he won’t consider us allies again. There won’t be any need for him to go easy. If everything until now has been child’s play, it will get a whole lot worse.”

“They will come for us.” Brutally and with the intent to kill.

My father nodded, finishing up the simple lunch I’d packed. A perfect choice on my part. He’d practically wolfed it down. You’d have thought a rich man like him would know to eat more.

“If you keep skipping meals, you’ll lose weight,” I warned with a keen eye as he opened the brandy. Half a glass of water to put down the whole meal, but I knew that he would drink that brandy until it was empty.

“Or I’ll get fat like a baby because you keep bringing me food.”

I didn’t like the lines on his face, the glaring reminder that he was aging. Even more, I didn’t like that he was skipping meals more frequently. He’d barely resisted it when I’d plopped my basket on his desk.

Usually, he argued like they were medicine.

That I was only just learning of Maxim Triev bothered me the most. My father must have been busy handling all the troubles, which concerned me.

“He won’t be getting his hands on anything of ours,” I said aloud, a reassurance to us both.

My father started to shake his head and tut at me. “There you go again, talking like that. I am still the head of this family, Katya, I am the one who is responsible for everything, you should not worry yourself with it.”

“I am the only heir you have, papachka. What use would I have if I could not keep the business from falling into the hands of a mad man?”

My father looked at me for a while. “I don’t think I’d be able to remain rational if things went sideways with you involved.”

I stood and went around the desk to pack the dishes back into the basket.

“That works out well then,” I said, “I don’t plan on having things go sideways.”

My father gave a small, amused smile. “Of course not, my little baby.”