Freedom never tasted so sweet.
It’s ridiculous that I’m even calling it that. But after three days trapped in one room, even stepping out into the hallway feels like my first day in heaven.
I’m walking towards the stairs when I see a shadow growing on the wall, coming from around the corner of the hallway. I freeze, wondering if whoever I run into is just going to drag me back into my room and lock me inside again.
Then a maid appears. She is cute, petite, in a demure gray dress with her hair pulled into a neat bun.
“Ma’am.” She sounds respectful. I’ve almost forgotten what that feels like to be talked to like a human being.
“I’m allowed to be out,” I blurt. “Aleks, he… That is, the man—” I stumble desperately, hating myself already, but unable to stop the words from flowing out. “He said I was allowed to go anywhere I wanted within the house. Compound! I meant compound. That includes the garden, right?”
The maid is looking at me as though I’ve gone completely nuts. I can’t really blame her. I’m wondering the same thing myself.
“Of course, ma’am,” she says slowly. “It includes the gardens.”
“Right. Good. So then I’m just… walking.”
She gives me a sympathetic smile. “Can I get you anything?”
“Like what?”
She raises her eyebrows. “Can I offer you something to eat or drink? The kitchen is always fully stocked. The cook went out a little while ago to get provisions for dinner, but there’s always food available if you’re hungry.”
“Oh. I’ll just help myself, thanks.”
“Shall I show you the way?”
“I can manage it myself,” I say. “Thanks for your help.”
I dance around her and reach the staircase. When I glance over my shoulder, I realize she’s watching me. She looks positively confounded.
Like she’s trying to figure out why a man like Aleks would choose to marry someone like me. It almost makes me want to regale her with the entire tale.
Oh, don’t worry, you sweet summer child—he wasn’t really interested in me. It was a power play between my brother and him. I’m just the useless pawn caught between two men with egos the size of Texas.
Instead of making me feel important—look at me, I’m the centerpiece of a clash of titans!— it makes me feel sad, depressed, inferior. As though I’ve been reduced down to a shiny bauble for powerful men to paw over. A scrap of meat for the alligators.
Shuddering, I turn away from the maid and go down the stairs.
I’m wandering aimlessly down endless halls when I accidentally happen upon the kitchen.
It’s as beautiful as the rest of the house. A tall wall of glass looks down onto an open-concept living area on the floor below. Next to an open pair of lovely French windows sits a wrought-iron table set for tea for two.
Just like the maid said, I don’t see a cook—or anyone else, for that matter. I hold my breath and listen to be sure.
As soon as I confirm I’m alone, I sprint to the massive double door fridge and pull it open.
“Oh, sweet baby Jesus,” I breathe, taking in the containers of food stuffed into the first three shelves. Has anything ever looked so beautiful?
I pluck out an armful of containers, line them up on the marble-topped island, and open them up one by one.
Lasagna.
Ceviche.
A bunch of little pastries like sugar-coated clouds from heaven.
It takes some looking to find the drawer with all the cutlery and another few minutes for me to locate the microwave. I scrounge up a fork, but when I finally stumble across the microwave, I realize that there isn’t a button in sight. It looks like it was stolen off the set of The Jetsons, all black glass and smooth titanium.
Hm. I’m too hungry to crack this code right now. So I abort the microwave mission, pop myself up on one of the barstools, grab a fork, and start shoveling cold lasagna into my mouth like a hungover Garfield.
“So freaking good,” I moan with my mouth stuffed.
I power through half the lasagna before I start craving something to drink. I swivel around on my stool, but like everything else in this kitchen, the glasses are probably hidden somewhere out of sight.
“If I were a glass, where would I be?” I muse out loud. My words come out muffled because there’s still so much food in my mouth.
“Top cabinet.”
I nearly choke on my lasagna as I turn to see the one person I was really, really trying not to see.
“Aleks,” I try to say, but that just makes the choking worse. It’s taking full effort not to spray chunks of cheese and tomato across the room.
Smirking with amusement, he glides into the kitchen and pulls out a glass from a cabinet so high up that I’d never have been able to reach it on my own. After filling it with water from a pitcher in the refrigerator, he slides it across the counter towards me. It’s a thoughtless, effortless flick, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it cruises to a dead stop right in front of me.
Everything always works out perfectly for Aleksandr Makarova.
Rolling my eyes, I reach for the glass—and promptly knock it over.
Jesus Christ, not this again. The man must think I don’t understand the concept of cups.
I pick up the glass hurriedly as I swallow the massive meteor of food in my mouth and dab up the spilled water with a nearby dish towel.
Aleks, meanwhile, is snorting with laughter at the far end of the island. “I forgot who I was dealing with.”
“Shut up,” I mumble. “It’s your fault. You can’t just sneak up on people like that.”
“I wasn’t sneaking up on anyone; I was walking into the kitchen in my own home,” he says, still amused. “You were just so deep throating your food that you failed to notice me.”
I flush with color. “Imprisonment makes a girl hungry, I guess.”
“That’s no one’s fault but your own.”
“Right, of course,” I snap, rolling my eyes. “You had absolutely nothing to do with it.”
“As I’ve told you before, Olivia, we all have choices. But don’t let me stop you. You and that lasagna seem to be getting along really well.”
I pick up the fork like a hatchet, even though I have no real interest in continuing to eat. But I also don’t want him to think that I’m so self-conscious that I’m going to stop eating just because he walked in here. It’s a Catch-22, as always with him.
“You have maids and a personal chef,” I say, mostly to fill the silence. “Spoiled much?”
His gaze is always so much more intense when it’s quiet. “You think I have the time to cook and clean?”
“You wouldn’t do it even if you did have the time.”
“No, probably not.”
“What’s it like?” I ask. “To have other people manage your life for you?”
He scoffs. “They manage my house. I manage my life. There’s a difference.”
“Feels like you’re splitting hairs, but I digress. Do all your slaves live here?”
“My employees,” he enunciates, “have quarters in the back.” He points through the open window to an elegant longhouse-type structure past the pool. “There’s room enough for twenty, though only twelve are occupied at the moment.”
I gulp, realizing how far out of my league I am right now. One housekeeper is an unfathomable luxury. Twelve is… I don’t even know the word for it. A lot, to say the least.
“Is this where you grew up?”
“More or less. We moved here when I was young. I shot my first gun at that tree back there.”
“I should’ve known that would be a fond memory for you,” I mutter. “We had very different childhoods.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
He gives me a subtle glance there that suggests there’s more to those words than he’s letting on. It wouldn’t be right to call it sorrowful, but it’s something along those lines. Somber, maybe. Melancholy.
“You didn’t mind it?” I ask in a quieter, less bitchy voice. “Being trained like a soldier instead of being allowed to be a child?”
“Why would I have minded?”
I raise my eyebrows. “You never missed, shoot, I don’t know… kicking around a ball in the garden with your dad?”
“What good would that do me now?”
“Never mind,” I say with a shudder. “Question retracted.”
He leans against the refrigerator and folds his arms across his chest. “Not all of us have cookie-cutter upbringings, Olivia. Some of us are built for different things.”
“That sounds like something you should address with a therapist, not with me,” I retort. “But surely you did something normal. College?”
“No.”
“A job?”
“The Bratva is my job.”
“Yes, God, you say that enough, I get it. But did you ever work at, like, a Burger King?”
He snorts. “Absolutely not.”
“What about a normal dating life?” I ask, encouraged by the fact that he’s actually answering my questions. “How did you meet girls?”
“In clubs and bars like everyone else.” He leans forward and adds, “And they were women. Not girls. The kind of women who knew exactly who they were and what they wanted from life.”
Playing the comparison game doesn’t end with any winners, but I can’t stop myself. I find myself wondering about his first time, his first love. Did he even have a first love? Is he even capable of such a thing?
“I can see all those questions filtering through your head, you know,” he remarks, breaking my concentration.
“Oh, so you’re a mind reader now?”
“It’s my job to know things that people don’t want to tell me,” he says simply. “But with you, I can’t exactly take the credit.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re not very good at hiding how you feel.”
I flinch back defensively and put down the fork in my hand. “I hate that you think you know me.”
“But I do, kiska. I know you better than you know yourself.”
“One day,” I say, looking him in the eye, “one day, I’m going to do something unpredictable. I’m going to prove you wrong.”
He smiles that deadly, sexy smile of his. “I look forward to it.”
When he pushes himself upright, I actually feel the disappointment swell in my gut like something physical. Why on earth does he make me feel like I’m losing something every time he walks away from me?
“Where are you going?” I ask, trying to sound unconcerned.
“I have a few things I need to discuss with my mother.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He eyes the half-empty container in front of me. “Don’t let me stop you from picking up where you left off.”
The moment he leaves, I end up opening the container and taking another huge mouthful. I’m not hungry anymore, but I have a tendency to eat my feelings when the mood catches hold of me.
Apparently, today’s one of those days.
I’m washing my dishes in the sink when it strikes me that Aleks and I had an entire conversation without my brother coming up once.
Somehow, that feels like a betrayal.
This is not some vacation home I’ve come to so I can unwind and relax. I have a family on the outside who is no doubt scared shitless on my behalf. I have a brother who might be sacrificing his career to save me.
I should not be having comfortable little chats in the kitchen with the man who is responsible for everything that’s gone wrong in my life since the moment my flight was delayed.
I drop the dirty fork and Tupperware in the sink. Aleks can pay someone else to clean his shit.
I’m stalking towards the gardens, fed up with someone—myself? Aleks? God? Fuck if I know the answer—when I hear a voice. Definitely a woman’s.
And she sounds upset.
I follow the sound of the voice to a room in the far corner of the house. I position myself between the staircase and the wall in front so there’s no chance of me being seen.
From here, I can see Aleks’s broad shoulders. I’m silently grateful that he has his back to me. The man is too perceptive not to notice me standing here if he was facing the other direction.
He leans slightly to the side and Yulia comes into view. She’s wearing pale jeans and a cashmere sweater. She doesn’t have any makeup on today, and for the first time, I can really see her age.
“Calm the fuck down,” Aleks growls.
“I will not calm down,” she stammers, clearly rattled. “Now, you’re telling me who I’m allowed to associate with?”
My first thought is that she might be talking about me. But the fact that she’s so worked up makes me think otherwise. What would she care if he said she couldn’t see me anymore? I’m nothing to her. Just her son’s helpless little toy.
“I’m not telling you anything of the sort,” he says. “I’m telling you to be careful. The man is the king of network television.”
King of network television—that rings a bell. A name is right on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite place it. The fight happening before me is too distracting, anyway.
“So? He’s accomplished and entertaining. And he enjoys my company.”
“Are you dating him?”
“No, we’re just friends.”
I wouldn’t trust anything she’s saying right now. Apparently, Aleks doesn’t either.
“You are not to discuss Bratva matters with the man,” he says firmly.
“What makes you think I will?”
“Because you’re lonely and you have been known to make poor choices in the past.”
“Don’t,” she hisses, twisting away from him. “Donald and I are just friends. We share a lot of the same interests. Besides, it’s good for me to get out of this godforsaken house.”
“If that’s the case, then why didn’t you accept the mansion I bought for you in Paris last year?”
I nearly laugh out loud in disbelief. A mansion in Paris? And she said no? Rich people are a whole different kind of crazy.
“Because this is my home!” she cries out. “This place is my home and I’m not leaving it. I deserve to have a life outside of this Bratva without having to sacrifice everything else in the process.”
“That’s fine. Leave the house, don’t leave the house, I don’t give a fuck. But family business stays under this roof.”
“What do you take me for?”
“A woman who wants attention,” he retorts sharply.
Ouch. Even I wince at that. Their relationship is obviously a lot more complicated than I first realized. There’s bitterness between them. A rotting, festering kind of resentment.
Aleks sighs and puts his head in his hands. “This isn’t a lecture, Mother. I’m not trying to micromanage your life. I’m just saying—”
“Saying what, precisely, Aleksandr?”
He wrenches his head upright. “That spineless motherfucker will be on the prowl for newsworthy stories. If he gets wind of the investigation or—”
“Or what?” Yulia taunts. “The fact that you have a young woman here against her will?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lies coldly. “Olivia is my wife.”
“You haven’t spent one night with her since you got married. On second thought, sounds like the marriage I had with your father.”
“As you’ve said so often, I learned from the best.”
I cringe at the vicious barbs flying back and forth between them. Yulia is getting in some damage of her own, but she’s much too worked-up and emotional to retain the upper hand. Her son, by contrast, is perfectly calm.
“What else are you scared of, Aleks?” she asks, her voice getting lower and lower until I can barely hear it. “Worried that he’ll find out your dirty little secrets? The women…”
I freeze on the spot. Are they talking about Isabella?
But Yulia said “women.” Plural. Are those the same women Rob was referring to?
“Enough!” Aleks roars. “Don’t say another fucking word, Mother.”
I take that as my cue to leave. If he storms out unexpectedly, he’ll catch me eavesdropping, and then there will be hell to pay.
My heart is beating so hard that it’s all I can hear as I slip out of sight and climb the staircase up towards the second floor.
I avoid the maid cleaning one of the sitting rooms and slip into the next room instead. I don’t know what exactly I’m looking for.
But I know something: if I look long enough, I’m certain I’ll find it.
