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“Actually,” Rome said, “we met three years ago. You were hiding quietly in a corner.”
I wracked my brain trying to think about when this could be, but I couldn’t remember. There’d been so many parties over the years, and for all of them, I’d sat quietly in a corner. Better to be seen and not heard after all.
“Have you told my father that you know where I am?” That was the only thing I wanted to know. It didn’t really matter how Rome knew me. What mattered was whether or not I needed to take the papers I'd had made and run as far and as fast as I possibly could.
Rome’s dark eyes looked at me, and it felt like my heart was going to burst out of my chest. “It would be a kindness to tell your father that you are alive. He thinks that you are dead, and he mourns you.”
“He mourns the possibility of what he could use me to gain.” My father had used me my entire life. He’d groomed me to be the perfect partner for Nikolai Petrov, and never once asked if there was more that I might want.
Rome sighed. “You aren’t a parent, so allow me to assure you that losing a child is every parent’s worst fear. His pain for your loss is great.”
I looked out the window trying my best to ignore the guilt that was starting to form in the pit of my stomach. As much as I wanted to hate my father for the situations, he’d put me into, there was a part of me that would always love him and want his approval.
“Besides,” Rome stated, “he’s Pakhan now. There’s very little that you could offer him.”
I snorted and shook my head. Rome’s words reminded me of what really mattered in my father’s world. Power meant everything to them.
“Do you plan on telling him?” I asked. I wanted to know why he hadn’t said something already. The first time we met was over a month ago, and since neither my father nor his men had kicked down my apartment door, I assumed that he wasn’t currently aware of the fact that I was alive and well.
Rome looked at me, and I did my best to stay absolutely still through his examination. I wasn’t sure what he was looking for, and I prayed that whatever it was, it would help him to keep his mouth shut.
But after a few minutes, which felt like a few hours, I needed answers. “What is it that you want from me?” I asked.
Rome released a heavy breath. “It’s not what I want from you that’s important. Knowing that you are alive might damage my business with your father if he were to find out.”
My father might not think I was worth more than a pretty face, but I’d grown up at the foot of the Bratva. My godfather had been the Pakhan and unlike Sasha Petrov, I hadn’t had the luxury of being completely sheltered from the reality of our world.
Joseph Rome was about to learn that I wasn’t someone who would simply roll over. I turned his words over and over in my mind, and I didn’t miss how he’d been very deliberate in his phrasing. “You want something from Ezra, right?”
A slow smile unfurled on Rome’s face. “You are very quick,” he said. “If your father had been smarter, he would have used you as an asset in his business. You are nearly as cutthroat as he is.”
My shoulders tensed, and I could feel a migraine forming behind my eyes. “I’m nothing like my father,” I bit out.
“It was a compliment,” Rome said. “Your father is Pakhan for a reason. People trust him to get the job done.”
I was sure to him that it was, but to me, it was like a dagger in my chest. I didn’t want to think that I was someone who had any of the same characteristics as a man who killed people for a living. I didn’t know what happened to the Bratva after I was shot, but I knew that my father became Pakhan because he was vicious, not because people trusted him.
“You might as well deliver me to my father now because I don’t have enough pull with Ezra to get you whatever you want.” What Rome didn’t know was that Ezra and I were in a fake relationship. He might give me money, but it was so that I could be on his arm when he needed, and these days, he didn’t seem to even care to be around me.
But my words simply made Rome laugh. “Ezra Wright isn’t the type of man to let himself be led around by any woman. But he likes you. Don’t discount that.”
“I’m not sure what you are saying.” Honestly, I was confused as to what Rome wanted from me. He’d implied that there was something I could get from Ezra that would keep him from telling my father that I wasn’t dead.
Rome leaned back in his seat and ran a hand through his hair. For the first time, I was able to look at him closely. He was a handsome man, dressed in a lovely, expensive gray suit. His dark eyes were intense, but I noticed that purple bags were under them. His wrinkles were pronounced, and there was a sense of exhaustion about him.
“As you know, my son has had some run-ins with the law in the last few years…”
I bit my lip to keep from releasing a chortle of laughter. Saying that his son had had some run-ins with the law was downplaying things. He’d been wanted for everything from petty theft to assault.
“He’s struggled over the years since his mother passed. They were close, and he’d not handled it well.”
I hated how my heart softened towards Rome. I didn’t know that his wife had passed. I hadn’t really known my own mother, so I couldn’t imagine mourning to the point where I would destroy my own life.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” I genuinely was. “But I’m not sure what I can do to help your son.” I worried that he was going to ask me to force Ezra to expunge his son’s records or something like that. I prayed he didn’t because Ezra would never go for that. He wasn’t someone who would skirt the law for his own gain, which was one of the things I liked best about him. He might think that he was like his friend Marcel, but Ezra lived by a staunch code of ethics, and no one, especially not a woman he was in a fake relationship with, would get him to break it.
“I need you to convince Ezra to write a letter of recommendation to Harvard. He’s a large donor, a big name, and a letter would hold a lot of weight with the committee.”
I was shocked. I couldn't believe that he was asking for something so—simple. “You just want a letter?” I asked. “That’s it.”
