Defiant. Sweet. Alluring.
A business deal gone wrong brought me to her doorstep.
She's everything I shouldn't want; everything I was against after watching my mother's obsession destroy her.
Still, I can't stop myself from craving her.
I should know...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"ARE YOU READY TO TELL ME why you're here? You've spent one night here already, and I know it's certainly not because you enjoy the company."
Igor dropped two cubes of ice into his whisky glass, taking his sweet time swirling it around the amber liquid before he responded. "You know, Alyosha, sometimes you sound like a fool, and that's a shame because I know you are a smart man."
I lifted an unimpressed brow at him. "You could do better with the jabs, Igor."
A deep scowl settled on his face. "Or you could do better with your reasoning. It seems like sometimes, you forget I fathered you."
"I wish I could. Trust me, that's the only reason you're in the guesthouse, and not in some hotel out there." I pushed myself out of the armchair I was perched on. "Well, now that it has been established that you have nothing important to say, I'll be on my way."
"Sit down, Aleksei," he snapped sternly, digging his nails into the padded arms of his chair. "Where's Misha? I need to speak to both of you."
"He's handling some business I assigned to him."
Dry laughter spilled out of Igor's throat. "Is that the new way of saying he's avoiding me, these days?"
I shrugged, dropping back into my seat reluctantly. "Why bother asking if you already know?"
He released a deep sigh, his shoulders sagging with the motion. "Viktor's father was my older brother, but I'm sure you already know that. Why he's not around on the other hand remains a mystery to you and Misha."
"A mystery? He's dead." That was hardly what I'd a mystery. People died everyday, and he happened to be one of the many others.
"He is," Igor agreed. "When you were eight and Viktor was ten. But why do you think he was never around for those eight years?"
I cocked my head to the side, watching the stiff lines of his shoulders and the guarded look on his face.
Why was this a question at all?
Admittedly, I never bothered to ask Viktor about his father when he showed up at our doorstep with blood dripping down the fresh scar on the side of his face, but I doubted he'd have said anything anyway.
Twelve-year-old Viktor was tight-lipped and brutal, and I only found out how he got his scar because I eavesdropped on his conversation with my father.
That said, what did Viktor's father have anything to do with Igor's unwelcome presence?
"Zhenya wanted no part in the Bratva, even though he was the older one. He was eight years older than me, but he claimed I had more balls than he did. My mother didn't seem to mind because she would coddle him even more back in the day, but my father grew alarmingly worried as the days passed. He never said anything, though. He loved his family too much to disrupt the false sense of peace.
