Page 66 of Taken By My Grumpy Pakhan

We fell into a comfortable silence, the sounds of the waves drowning out every tension left in the atmosphere.

“What are you going to do to him?” she asked, worrying her lower lip between her teeth.

I reached out, pulling the innocent flesh from her teeth. “He won’t see you again.” I repeated my earlier promise.

She looked at me for a moment as though she was trying to decode what a claim as such could mean.

Eventually, she lowered her gaze, pulling back from my embrace.

“I’ll be going to Dallas on Monday.” I broke the silence. “And you’ll be coming with me.”

Her eyes snapped up. “You’re not serious.”

“I am.”

“Is this because of what happened? You don’t think I can take care of myself in your absence?”

“This is hardly about what happened, Genevieve,” I lied through my teeth.

She folded her arms in front of her body. “Really? Then what’s it about, then?”

“It’s about the fact that you’re my personal assistant and should be wherever I go for business.”

She scoffed. “Yet you conveniently passed me by on this one.”

“Because Russia is ten hours away and I was only going to be gone for a few days. It didn’t make sense to drag you through it.”

She swept her eyes over my face, taking her time to scan my features before her gaze finally dropped.

“Just work, not a pity travel because you walked in on me being harassed by one of your staff?”

My lips tilted at the corners. “You should already know I don’t host pity parties, little bird.”

Chapter Sixteen

Kazimir

“He tried to start a war between the two families,” Vasily, Svet’s brother, hissed.

“And we already diluted the threat.”

“I’ll speak to you when I’m in the mood to address a foreign body.”

Nico was on his feet in a flash, fists clenched and eyes ablaze. “What did you just say to me?”

Vasily’s lips curled into a scornful smirk. “What did you hear?”

“We’re not going to get through this by calling names,” Svet cut through, eyeing her twin brother. “Like Nico said, the threat has been neutralized and the shipments were retrieved with minimal intervention. To doubt him would be to doubt the Pakhan.”

A semblance of calm settled over the men with Nico lowering into his seat and Vasily swallowing his words.

He was a big man, easily the biggest in the room, but I could see why his father favoured his sister over him.

Svet was calm, calculated and knew exactly where and how to aim. She charmed with her looks and cut with the precision of a Japanese chef.

It was the reason she was the only woman in the room.

“We don’t mean to disrespect anyone,” an older man I assumed to be her uncle because of the characteristic family nose spoke. “But it was a very tense situation. We missed an unnecessary bloodbath by a narrow breadth. It is reasonable to be apprehensive.”