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I leaned against the kitchen counter, staring at her, eyes narrowed. I could tell she was doing her best not to make eye contact with me, but I had questions for her. Questions I wasn’t going to let her get away without answering.
It had been about twelve hours since she had arrived at the penthouse, and I had woken early that morning, a million questions filling my head about what she was doing here and exactly how this was going to go.
The night before, I had been too tired to put up much of a fight against Maxim, and I knew he would never have listened to me anyway. No, the only way I was going to figure out more about her was if I came in and asked her myself, and I wasn’t going to skip out on the chance while Maxim was at the gym and I had her all to myself.
Maxim had told her to help herself to food, and she had been picking her way around the kitchen, eating nearly everything in sight. She was wrapped in a large robe that swamped her slight frame, her long blonde hair tumbling loose down her back, her face scrubbed free of makeup and utterly bare. She looked younger than she had the night before, and I wondered just how someone of her age had managed to get herself pulled into a mess like this one.
"How old are you?" I demanded, my voice curter and sharper than I had intended it to be. I wasn’t used to having other people in my space like this, and I would have been lying if I said it didn’t throw me for a loop. Maxim was the only person I trusted to have around like this, and allowing this woman into our space was bothering me.
She looked up from the glass of orange juice she had been chugging down and wiped her mouth.
"Twenty-one," she replied. It didn’t sound like she was lying, but who knew?
"How did you end up at that auction?" I pressed. Her cheeks flushed, and she shook her head.
"I … I …"
"Were you sent here by another Bratva family?" I demanded. "Markov, is that what they said your name was?"
She seemed overwhelmed, biting her lip as she stared up at me.
"Markov, that’s right," she muttered. She didn’t seem to know how to handle me. Maxim was one thing—he had been willing to coddle her and treat her like a precious creature, but me? I wasn’t going to be so soft with her. I knew how important it was to keep your guard up, even when the person you were dealing with seemed harmless.
And Markov—that was a name I’d heard before. Sounded old-school Russian and could easily have belonged to someone who wanted to get one over on us.
"And no, I’m not from a Bratva family," she fired back. "You think they would have let me use that name if I was?"
She had a point. If they were trying to sneak a spy into this house, somehow knew that Maxim would try to help her, they wouldn’t have allowed her to use a name that would tip us off to her origins.
"How the fuck did you end up at an auction like that?" I demanded. I wanted to know the details, all of them. The more information I had, the easier it would be to figure out what her intentions were.
She averted her gaze from me. I could see a redness in her cheeks, like she didn’t want to admit what the real reason was. I caught her arm, drawing her back towards me, already knowing that Maxim was going to tell me off for getting up in her face like this.
"What happened? You owed them a debt?" I demanded. She glanced up at me.
"What?" she replied, sounding surprised.
"Did you owe them some kind of debt?" I pressed. I knew that was how a lot of girls ended up in situations like the one she had found herself in—they got hooked on drugs or drink and wound up racking up a bill they couldn’t pay. Those fuckers, the ones who had held the auction, would deliberately get the girls addicted sometimes, knowing it would make it easier for them to hand over their bodies and their freedom without too much of a fight.
"No," she snapped back, pulling her arm away from me.
"So, what, then?" I asked her. "You just volunteered for it?”
"No!” she exclaimed, shaking her head, as though she couldn’t believe I would even say that. "I … I wasn’t the one who owed the debt."
She finally got the words out, staring down at the floor between us, as though she couldn’t believe she had just said that out loud. I took a step back from her, staring at her.
"What does that mean?"
"I wasn’t the one who owed the debt," she muttered, not even able to look me in the eye.
My mind reeled as I took in the information. She wasn’t the one who owed the debt, which meant someone else had gotten her into this mess. A boyfriend? A husband, maybe? Someone who had racked up enough in the way of a bill that he had to pay with her?
A flood of anger hit me at the thought. This girl, she didn’t deserve this. Nobody did. I could see how much she hated it, so much as standing here in front of me.
"Who was it?" I demanded, but she shook her head.
"Does that even matter?" she pointed out. "I’m here now. You got me."
