Page 15 of The Bratva Contract
“The duties should be obvious. You’ll accompany me to social events, play hostess at dinners and charity functions in my home. Keep up appearances and behave in a manner befitting the wife of thepakhan. Maintain cordial relations with the wives of my brigadiers.”
“Is that all?” She rolls her eyes. “It sounds like you’re marrying a Barbie doll. I have a master’s degree, and I designed the best cybersecurity on the market. Pakhans as far away as Los Angeles have contracted with me.”
Infuriated, I grab her arm in sudden heat. “Iam pakhan,” I growl. It sickens me that she refers to some California crime boss with Russian origins as pakhan when I, her husband, am the only man she will ever call by that title.
She doesn’t seem daunted by my rough handling of her, my insistence. It looks to me like there’s amusement in her eyes. She’s playing a dangerous game and I’ll be damned if I let her laugh at me. I haul her against me, with nothing gentle orrespectful in my grip. I hold her so close she has to bend her neck to look up at me. I like that. I can’t help it.
“Say it,” I grind out from between gritted teeth. She seems to consider for a moment before relenting.
“You arepakhan,” Karina says, and if her voice weren’t a little breathy I’d still know she’s turned on by the flush on her cheeks, the darkness in her eyes.
What I don’t expect is how it affects me when she calls me pakhan. A razor-sharp blade of satisfaction buries itself in my gut, a delicious burn, because that word on her lips makes me feel more powerful than anything ever has in all my years as head of the bratva.
Fuck yeah is what I want to say, in the guttural tone of a man buried balls-deep in his lover’s pliant body. That’s how completely it unravels me. It’s not lost on me that her curves are molded to me from chest to thighs, or not quite to the floor, because when I hauled her up, I lifted her. Her feet dangle a few inches above the carpet. She doesn’t seem distressed; the unconquerable flash of her glare is still leveled at me. The soft heat of her body presses so close she must feel the rigid proof of my reaction, the unruly prod of my hardness against her belly.
I set her on her feet and brush my hands off as though I’ve just finished a job.
“Now that we’ve established you’re in charge,” she says, striving for boredom. “What other duties are part of my job, apart from being stripped of my stake in the software firm I founded?”
“I won’t make you divest your ownership,” I say magnanimously, “but there’s no chance you’ll stay involved in day-to-dayoperations. You’ve got a VP with enough experience to take over as COO.”
“As much as Iappreciateyour interest in my leadership decisions, I’m confident you couldn’t rifle through my personnel database,” she says smugly.
“I don’t have time in my schedule to hunt for HR forms on a small company outside my purview,” I say dismissively. I don’t intend to tell her I put my best IT guy on it and he still couldn’t crack her software after forty hours of trying.
“Let me guess, you couldn’t access any of the encrypted information,” she says. “Your approach would be the traditional bratva take-a-sledgehammer-to-it strategy: destroy what I’ve built and transfer total control to an employee who’s been in his role for seven months. Or perhaps I should use the bratva model, treat him as my brigadier, then hire a couple of guys to spy on him and make sure he’s loyal?”
Fine. She knows the traditional organizational model for the bratva. That’s not news. She’s trying to provoke me, I know it, but it’s working.
“Whatever management model you put in place, you’ll need to move quickly. Be decisive. Because you’re about to be my wife and I intend to exercise my rights extensively.”
“Your rights?” she challenges.
“To you in my bed. Every night. And every day.” I inform her as coolly as possible.
“You must have excellent brigadiers if you can be absent from the management elite so often,” she counters. “But I guess an autocrat like you does whatever he wants.”
“No one in the organization would dare to cross me.”
“Let me guess, you made an example of someone during your first week on the job.”
She sounds disgusted, and she’s not far from the truth.
“A crude but effective technique to ensure loyalty,” I tell her.
“You think I should slaughter one of my VPs and make it a lesson to the others?” she says, and it might sound teasing if she didn’t look so scornful. Turns out I can’t endure her scorn.
“However you want to adjust the leadership before our marriage is up to you,” I say flatly.
“Any other orders I need to carry out? Besides giving up my business and transforming into an ornament for you at social occasions?”
“Sergei did warn me,” I say with a cold laugh.
I reach into my desk drawer and set a bottle of ibuprofen on the blotter between us. “He gave me this as a wedding gift and said I’d need it.”
She stares at the bottle of headache medicine and goes utterly still. Hurt flashes across her face before she masks it behind that unflappable engineer’s facade. She snatches up the plastic bottle and hurls it at my head. I dodge just in time, and she yells in frustration when she misses.
“I can’t believe you did this!” she rants. “You just had to refuse my offer to make me feel smaller. Of course you don’t want a partner. I’m something to put on your shelf, a prize broodmare with the right bloodlines and the right connections.”
