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I wouldn’t know what to do with a man, most certainly not a man such as him.
I haven’t even had a boyfriend, though I’d been flirting with the thought of returning Mile’s playful conversation after church—before Mama got sick. When she got sick, it happened fast, and it happened hard. One day, she was her normal self. The next…
And then I stood over her coffin, my father’s arm wrapped around my shoulders, the heavy weight a comfort I knew wouldn’t stay. He’d promised to return more often, vowed I would always be taken care of, before he again left for his work. It’s not like I could blame him. Life went on, even in death.
I could never have known that the last time I saw him at Mama’s funeral would be the very last I would ever see him. Maybe I would have hugged him harder. Maybe I would have begged him to stay.
Now they’re both gone.
Either way, I hadn’t had the will to flirt with Mile’s after Mama.
And then—then, one night as I entered the home I’d always shared with Mama after a night working in the library, everything changed. A man moved behind me, his fabric-covered hand sliding over my mouth—and I’d fallen into an unwilling sleep.
I’d woken up here. With him.
No. I feel my shoulders slump, hopeless. I don’t have the experience or the will to begin the dangerous game that would be seducing a man like the man who sits before me now.
In trickery, I am foolishly naive. In danger, I am shamefully harmless. In seduction, I am harrowingly innocent.
He would eat me alive and toss away my broken, used carcass.
My heart gives a quick jolt as he pushes forward, his hands steepling on his desk. “Are you aware you have a brother?”
I blink. Three quick blinks. “I’m sorry?”
“In fact, you have multiple brothers, that I am aware of. Although, like your father, my brother has killed all but one.”
Something icky and sticky swells in my throat. I do my best to swallow it down. “Y—you’re mistaken.”
“No. I’m not.”
“My father was loyal to my mother,” I stammer. “T—they were married.”
Even if he’d never allowed her to take his name, they were married.
His eyes travel over the length of me slowly, pausing at the trembling knot of my hands in my lap. He pulls his bottom lip into his mouth and sits back in his chair again. I’m not fool enough to think the lazy way he lounges doesn’t mean he isn’t ready to strike. I have a feeling this man is always coiled to strike, like a cobra. Deadly.
“Marriage means nothing to a man like Ivan Popov.”
“Marriage means everyth—” I stop, hope flooding my chest like a beach in high tide. My hands grip the arms of my chair, and I lean forward. “My father’s name is Ivan Petrov. You have the wrong man.” My laugh is high, a little wild, and a lot unhinged. I can’t control the rattling of my bones; I’m shaking with revived adrenaline. All this time, he’s had me because he thought I was the daughter of Ivan Popov. “You have—” I can’t stop laughing. “The wrong girl.”
That must mean Daddy is alive.
My heart soars. Hope and love and a new will to live mounts inside me.
Daddy is alive.
“No,” his harsh voice, with his thick accent, cuts through my joy like a blade. “I don’t have the wrong girl, Ruby Belle.”
My laugh dies a soft, breathless death. “You said his name was Ivan Popov.”
He cocks his head curiously. “If he married your mother, why don’t you have his last name?”
“My mother kept her last name, for safety. His work was dangerous. I—I was given her last name.”
“And what is it you think he did for work, my little Ruby Belle?”
I’ve yet to tell him anything, even under threat of torture. Then, when he’d told me my father had been killed—I’d simply not spoken because there’d not been a point. Now, now I know he is asking about the wrong man. I don’t know an Ivan Popov. My father is Ivan Petrov.
