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I arched a brow. “Well, since a bratva bull will be taking your place as her roommate to ensure that she doesn’t forget her place, then he can take on half the expenses as well.”
Masha gasped as Samara’s eyes widened. “You can’t…you can’t just…just move some man in here with her,” Samara squawked.
“Why not?” I challenged. “Masha is thirty, not thirteen.”
“Avgust-”
“Do not act as if you have a say in any of this, Razh,” I reminded her harshly. “Your input ended when you decided how you wanted this to be handled. The rest, you have no say in.”
With her jaw ticking again, she asked. “Can I have a moment alone to say goodbye to my sister?”
I grinned at her. “Take two,” I offered. “After all, I doubt that you’ll ever see her again after this.”
Chapter 8
Samara~
As soon as we shut the door to the bedroom, Masha started crying again, and as much as I loved my sister, this wasn’t the time for tears and hysteria. If she knew nothing else in life, she knew that Avgust Kotov didn’t care about tears.
“You can’t go with him, Samara,” she plead. “You don’t…you don’t even know what he wants with you.”
That wasn’t true.
I knew exactly what Avgust wanted with me.
He wanted me to suffer.
Nonetheless, that wasn’t anything that I was going to tell Masha. “What would you have me do? Let him kill you? Kill me?”
Masha started shaking her head. “Avgust wouldn’t really-”
“Let me stop you there,” I said as I grabbed her shoulders with both of my hands. “The Avgust Kotov sitting in our living room is not the same Avgust Kotov from our childhood, Masha. This Avgust Kotov will kill the both of us without a second thought or any sleepless nights. He is the Kotov Pakhan, Masha. In fact, we’re lucky that we’re still alive.”
“Then let him take me,” she offered selflessly. “I mean, it’s all my fault that we’re in this mess to begin with.”
Even though that was true, I wasn’t going to be cruel and agree with her. Masha was already going to have enough guilt to live with, so there was no value in making her feel worse for something that she couldn’t take back. Just like I did, she knew that I wasn’t Avgust’s favorite person, so we both knew that what I was signing up for wasn’t going to be pleasant.
Besides, even if I was the type of sister to let Masha sacrifice herself, what Masha didn’t know was that Avgust had never wanted her as collateral to begin with. Because Avgust was a master manipulator-something that he’d always been-every word out of his mouth since he’d walked into our condo had been deliberate to achieve this particular outcome. Avgust wanted me to pay the price for Masha’s transgressions, and I knew it like I knew my own name.
Looking at my sister, I said, “I cannot do that and still be able to live with myself, Masha. I’ve always taken care of you, and I will continue to do so until my last breath.”
She started crying again. “And how do you expect me to live with myself?” she sobbed. “I’ll go crazy knowing that…that…”
I started rubbing her arms up and down. “Look, we just need to convince Avgust that you won’t ever say anything,” I reminded her. “All you have to do is keep living your life the way that you’ve been living it, and after a while, maybe he’ll feel confident enough to let me go. After all, the guard that he assigns you will be reporting back to him, so…just make sure that there’s nothing bad to report back.”
My sister’s lips trembled as she asked, “Do you…he’s going to mistreat you, isn’t he?”
I grabbed her hands, then squeezed them. “It depends on your definition of mistreatment, I suppose.” Doing my best to reassure her, I gave her a small smile. “I can handle Avgust, Masha.”
“How can you be so sure?” she questioned. “Like you said, he’s not the same boy that we grew up with. He’s a monster now, and he blames you for making him that way.”
Before I could say anything to that, a rude knock shook the bedroom door, so I let go of my sister’s hands, then walked over to open it. I’d been expecting Avgust on the other side, but like a nightmare come to life, Maksim Barychev was the one staring down at me, his dark eyes glittering with his obvious dislike of me.
In a different world, Maksim would be one of the most stunning men that I’d ever seen. He stood at about six-foot-four, had dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, was ripped from head to toe, and he had so many tattoos that it’d take days to identify them all. Next to Avgust, Maksim Barychev was the sexiest demon that I’d ever met, and those eyes of his could suck you in like a warm blanket if they weren’t empty of emotion.
“Your two minutes are up, kukla,” he said, purposely calling me doll again just to add salt to the wound.
Now, while most women would think it a flattering endearment, Maksim only called women doll when he thought that they were empty of any sort of intelligence. After all, dolls might be pretty to look at, but they had no brains, hearts, or souls. Dolls were playthings and nothing more.
