“You,” she whispers, failing to hide the horror on her face, “You killed him.”
“No, Malishka, he killed himself. Very few people are so conceited as to celebrate themselves. Had Grigoriy not been a smug, self-serving asshole, the bottle would have remained untouched and he would be alive.”
“The moment he knew he was dying; he told his closest men that he had a daughter and where to find you. Instead of seeking you to take his very last opportunity to meet his daughter in his final days, he gifted you like chattel to his closest Avtoritet, his second In command, Pavel Orlov, he signed your betrothal in his blood.”
“What?” she whispers.
“You and Pavel Orlov are betrothed. The Pakhan’s final gift was you,” Dimitri tells her calmly.
“It’s not the eighteen hundreds, people don’t get betrothed anymore,” she says, shaking her head.
“Maybe not normal people, but in the old country, in the Mafia, they do. Women are traded like cattle, used as broodmares or whores and then discarded or thrown to the made men to use up and kill. Orlov is sixty-five, he’s had four wives and sixteen children. His last wife killed herself after he punished her for giving birth to a baby girl and not the boy he wanted. He killed his daughter, then locked his wife in a dog cage, cut a hole in the metal of the back and allowed every one of his men to take a turn, three days after she gave birth. She was so traumatized; she threw herself out of a third-floor window the moment they let her out of the cage.”
“Oh my god,” she whispers, covering her mouth with a shaking hand.
“Your father gave you to that man. He knew he was dying and instead of keeping you a secret to protect you, he described in detail how tight your mother’s cunt was when he filled her with his cum. He talked about how he fucked her over and over in every hole and that if her pussy hadn’t been so stretched and destroyed after she pushed you out, he’d planned to bring her to Russia and add her to his stable of whores. He laughed with his men as he told them if you were anywhere near as good as fuck as your mother, that Orlov should enjoy breaking you in as his new bride,” Dimi tells her, his eyes hooded and dark, filled with the same anger we all feel whenever we’re reminded of the man Grigoriy Polakoff is.
“Will you kill Orlov?” she whispers.
“Yes,” Vik answers.
“Why?”
“Because he has the audacity to think you could ever belong to him,” he tells her.
“You didn’t bring me here to protect me, you want to use me too.”
“Yes and no.” Dimi shrugs. “We took you because we needed you to gain access to the inner circle. But that wasn’t the only reason.”
“Then why?” she asks, her voice so quiet I can barely hear her.
“Because you’re ours,” I tell her honestly. I wait for Dimi to object, but the truth is, even though none of us have really ever said we all want her, we do. Vik thinks Dimi and I don’t know that the cameras we placed in her home and work were permanently playing on his phone. Just like Dimi likes to pretend that he wasn’t furious when we found out Grigoriy had gifted Alabama to Pavel fucking Orlov.
If we were all honest, I think we’d agree that from the very first time we saw her at her aunt’s house when she was a teenager, we all became consumed by the beautiful, enigmatic girl. She’s not a girl now though. She may only be twenty, but she’s all woman, and judging by the fact that she’s only wearing one of Dimi’s shirts and in the bed, rather than hiding under a table in the closet. Dimi clearly reached his limits and did whatever he had to, to get her where he wants her and at least pretending to be compliant.
Clambering up the bed, Vik flops down beside her, propping himself up on his elbow and invading her personal space as he smirks that smirk that’s had women throwing their underwear at him our entire lives. “Don’t you think it’d be fun to be ours?” he purrs seductively.
“I think one man would be hard work, three kidnappers that are hellbent on using me for revenge and mayhem sounds like a nightmare,” she says sarcastically.
“We wouldn’t be using you if you were in on the plan too. We could all work together, the four of us. We could destroy the Russian Mafia, blow them to pieces from the inside out,” Vik coaxes.
“Until two days ago, I’d never even thought about the Russian Mafia. I don’t want to be involved in your destruction,” she sighs, shaking her head.
“You’ve been involved since the day you were born, Alena. This is as much your world as it is ours, and if you’re not fighting, then you’re losing. We can put you on a plane back to America this afternoon, but I give you less than a week and Orlov or one of his men will have a bag over your head and you bundled in the cargo hold of a plane and out of America before you can say Mother-fucking-Russia. How long do you think it’d take him to break you? How long till he rapes you, fills you with his kid and then locks you in cage for not giving him a son? No one will protect you from him. They don’t care that you’re the dead Pakhan’s daughter. To them you’re just a hole to be used, then thrown away.”
She grimaces at Dimi’s words, shaking her head to deny them, even though I can see from her face that as much as she doesn’t want to admit it, she knows that what he’s saying is true.
“Why did my mother have to be such a fucking whore?” she growls, tipping her head back and looking at the ceiling. “I mean turning tricks is the oldest profession in the world, but she was the only prostitute in a town of less than a thousand people. How the hell did she end up getting knocked up by a fucking Mafia boss? You can’t make this shit up.”
She’s rambling in the way I’ve watched her do a thousand times before, only now I’m not watching her talk to herself, like she did so much while we peered into the room when she thought no one was looking. I’m here, close enough to touch and I want to. I want to reach out and hold her hand, put my palm on her thigh and kiss her. I want to comfort her, and I want her to want it.
“How do you know they won’t just kill you all on sight?” she asks, looking to Dimi for answers.
“Because we won’t just be walking into the lion’s den waving around a DNA test,” he says calmly.
“We’re business men.” Vik smirks.
Scoffing, Alabama gives him the side eye. “I thought you were kidnappers and murderers.”