Page 72 of Devil's Vows
“You have brothers,” Milana says, urgently.“Unmarriedbrothers. We make a deal. You tell your Don you’ll only feel safe here if there’s an exchange, a swap. You and me. I get married to one of them?—”
“Wait.What?” I can’t believe she’ll marry just to get out. And to one of my brothers! She hasn’t even met any of them.
“Hear me out, Gabi,” she says, leaning forward, urgent. “Once I’m married, I’m halfway out. I just need out of the house, away from all the surveillance.”
God, we are being watched. All the time. I feel it to my bones, every day. “I’m leaving, Milana, I’m not staying. Ivan is getting married and his wife?—”
She smirks. “Those fucking assholes. Should have known. They’ve told you nothing, absolutelynothing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re not leaving,” she says flatly. “Do you know how many women Ivan has let into his life? Into this house? Allowed tosleephere? Be with his daughters as you are, day in and day out?” She holds up one finger. “Their mother. He married her in an arranged marriage. To strengthen our alliance withRussia, because the Pakhan thought we had to, pushed into it by our stepmom. Darya came here with one goal: to weaken the Pakhan, to weaken Ivan, to prepare for a coup.”
Acoup?
The Fourth of July party that got a bit wild. A pit opens in the bottom of my stomach. Now it makes sense.
Ivan with his two bullet wounds.
“We didn’t know that Darya was already sold into the Chertnikov Bratva.”
And there’s that name again. Chertnikov, a surname based on the wordchort, the devil in Russian.
A ghost sweeps over my back. My stomach clenches into a fist. What did I step into here? Willingly. Blindly. Without knowing anything about these people. My sure-fire escape has turned into a trap, and like an animal, I pushed my head through the wire loop while admiring the circle it makes.
Milana is sitting up, and I become aware of the photos burning on my lap. I almost jolt when she gives my forearm a tight squeeze.
“You don’t want to acknowledge this, but Ivan has a hold over your brothers, and you being here is the repercussion.”
How could Ivan have a hold over me? Just like that fucking decrepit Russian has? And through mybrothers? I was a secret for so long, they thought I wasdead.
“Repercussion?” I breathe, repeating her last word on autopilot, not knowing what else to say. But somewhere, a shiny penny glitters in the light, and it’s dropping in slow motion.
“Ivan had only one woman in this house, Gabi…one.”
Hiswife. I feel the color drain from my face in a rush of pinpricks. No. She can’t mean this. It makes no sense whatsoever.
“I’m just here as the nanny—” I break off, staring flabbergasted at Milana who is on the verge of rolling her eyes at me. “But nobody’s asked me about marriage,” I say, the innocenceand the stupidity of the question slapping me in the face at the same time.
This whole fucking set-upI’veso innocently gotten myself into is a prelude to anarranged marriagemy brothers stealthily guided me into, me so eager because I thought I had agency.
“Nobody asked you because you don’t have a voice or a choice. You’ve been played. It’s the Bratva way.”
A pawn. I’m never going to be anything else.
That morning in Central Park rushes back to me. Dominic’s brewing anger, the feeling that something was going down that he couldn’t control. Matteo sketchy and avoiding looking me in the eye.
But I’ve been promised to another Russian and he is looking for me. Something none of these people know. There are so many secrets here, and they’re straining to burst out.
“I…” Being a secret has kept me safe for years in Italy—as safe as I could be. Whatever happens, nobody can know about the Russian on my trail.
With steel fortitude, I slip my mask back on, scared I’ve already revealed too much in front of Milana, but she’s too deep in the clutches of her own dilemma to be aware of mine. I’m custodian of her secret now, and it’s way weightier than my knowledge of Russian. And it isn’t something I could ever hold over her head. Not with what I’ve lived through.
“Don’t feel bad, Gabi,” she says, oblivious to my inner turmoil. “I’ve been played, too, so fucking hard, held hostage by my own choices, my own mistakes.” She wipes at her cheeks as if she’s wiping all her bad decisions off the page. “I’ll never allow a man to do that to me again. Not a brother, not a lover, notanyman.” Her hand drops to the photos, and with decided, unflinching precision, she tears them up into strips. “In retrospect, Boryslav was my solution, but I was blind to it. And now he’s dead.”
“Boryslav? Who?” She’s going on a different tangent now,and I drag my focus back to her, stepping into character. Later, when I’m alone, I can digest everything.
“My fiancé. Boryslav Petrenko. He could have taken me back to Russia, I could have?—”
