“Stand still, Ama. You fidget so much, and she’ll fit you into a lopsided gown,” Irina chides.
My lack of care is the elephant in the room we all ignore. I should count my blessings that, aside from this fitting, nearly all the wedding planning can be handled by my mother on her own. I never spent time playing bride and groom as a little girl. Even from that tender age I’d known I’d dread the day of my nuptials.
“Yes, Mama.” I force myself to stop fidgeting. “Is all this really necessary?”
The instant the words pass through my lips I know it’s a silly question. Mother rounds on me, horror giving her wide eyes a cartoonish oversized look.
“You would embarrass your father with a meager celebration?” Irina Balakin exists to bring honor to the pakhan. The thought of one day becoming such a caricature of myself wrenches a defeated sigh from my chest.
“Of course, you’re right.” My agreement prompts a satisfied hum from my mother. The dressmaker she has selected silently continues fitting the heavy gown over my curves. Beyond her skill as a seamstress, I’m sure she was chosen partly for her loyalty to the family. Loyalty and discretion.
Born of fear. I never realized there could be different motivations for loyalty before I met the Ghost Born crew. I’m sure some of my father’s men belong to him for reasons other than fear, but there can’t be many.
“I’m done, ma’am,” Cece, the seamstress mother prefers, says quietly.
“Very well. I can—we can—expect the dress to be ready by the end of the week?” The slip of her tongue is a reminder of how invested my mother is in this wedding.
I might as well be a spinster with the way she’s so overjoyed to plan this wedding. As if she’s had to wait years and years for the day to come. I follow her from the dress shop to the car, both of us riding quietly while one of Father’s interchangeably nameless men drives us home. Another of his men sits in the passenger seat, head on a swivel.
The pakhan swears he’s resolved everything that led to my abduction, but he’s also unwilling to relax security until I’m,his words, safely wedded and no longer a soft target. Being less stealable once I’m someone’s wife is not the comfort he thinks it is. Women shouldn’t need the shelter of marriage to be safe, but this is the world we live in, and so we do.
A jacked-up truck is dead center of the circular drive in front of our home, blocking any other vehicles from entering or leaving the property. Since I’ve been home, the pakhan has kept all business away from the house, insisting on limiting the number of men who are in and out of the place to only his most trustworthySovietniksandAvtorityets.
However, lately, I have seen Feliks theObshchakstalking in and out of Father’s study with his arms full of ledgers and his glasses askew plenty of times. So there must be at least some business being conducted here at the house. There’s no way fussy Feliks Rykov drives a lifted pickup like the one our car is currently easing onto the lawn to drive around. Even if, by some inexplicable chance, it is his truck, there’s no way a bratva bookkeeper would show such disrespect for his pakhan.
Call me sheltered, but the only people I’ve ever been around, who drive hulked-out trucks, are the bikers I stayed with after Jax and Blakely rescued me. The Ghost Born men. Shaw.
Just thinking his name makes my chest go tight with misery. He left more than a week ago, like a thief in the night. The day I eavesdropped on him accepting a mission was only a few days before he left. When everyone woke up one morning, he was gone. Then a day or two later, my father arrived to collect me, promising the safety under his roof would be ironclad.
Grey, Blu, Blakely, and Abbie have reached out a few times over since I left to check up on me, but I’m ashamed to admit I’ve been dodging their calls. Forming friendships with all of themover the past months meant the world to me, but there’s no way we can be friends in the long run. Their lives are tied up with their men and the club, and mine?
I think of the dress we left at the seamstress shop. Pristine white and heavy with crystal beadwork. Then I look down at the weighty diamond glittering on my finger. The one Zinovy couriered over to my father to present to me two days ago.
Yeah, my life is tied up, too.
CHAPTER 9
FAME
“She is already betrothed. Where you are from, maybe, you make demands and get your way. Simple. This is not that world.” Balakin’s smug face makes me want to punch him, but I’m not stupid.
Well, okay, I’m obviously not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. If I was, I wouldn’t be here choking back words that could get me executed for disrespecting a man as powerful as Anatoly Balakin is. If I had half the brains nature gives frogs, I’d have laid claim to Amaliya while she was still under my roof.
We’d probably be snuggled up at the compound, doing shit that would rival the noisemaking the others get up to. But no, not me. I couldn’t be smart enough to see what was plain as day until I got my lights knocked out by that damn tree branch.
“No disrespect intended, Pakhan, but she can be unbetrothed. You want her married to a man who can assure her safety. I believe I’ve already been doing that for months.” Saying ‘no disrespect’ feels a lot like disrespect, but I stand by my statement.
“I’m well aware of the…assistance…you and your men have provided.” The way he pauses when he acknowledges everything my club’s done for his business, his daughter, and the community at large by taking down the trafficking scum pisses me off.
As if it was a trivial level of help we accomplished. As if his own arrogance and blind spots didn’t almost lead to his daughter being lost to him forever when she was drugged and kidnapped from under his nose.
“Then you’re aware there’s no need to marry her off to some old crony of yours like she’s a painting being auctioned to the highest bidder.” My temper gets away from me, and I realize my mistake as Balkin’s eyes grow cold with fury.
“Zinovy Bayev is not, as you say, some old crony of mine.” He gestures, and a man I’d clocked merely as muscle steps forward from the corner where he’s been observing our conversation.
“Bayev isAvtorityet. How you say, Captain, possibly. One of only four men in all of the organization to hold that position. Trusted beyond measure. Not old. Not a bidder.” Ice drips from Balakin’s every sneered word.
“I apologize, Pakhan. I meant no disrespect,” I repeat. Shock and despair war for supremacy in my gut.
