She sighs. “I would have liked to be included. I still would.”
I observe her carefully, trying to see things from her perspective. It’s not a gesture I’ve attempted very often. “There are still duties that are required of you.”
“Yes,” she says bitterly. “That of a glorified housekeeper. How could I forget? Tend the gardens, oversee the staff, dust the bookshelves.” Her expression twists into disgust, mixed with anger. “I led this Bratva through war, through expansion, through everything. You think I’ll be satisfied folding laundry?”
“There is a life for you outside this Bratva, Mother,” I say. “You just have to find it.”
“Is this your way of asking me to get out more?”
“It wouldn’t hurt.”
She presses her lips together tightly. “I’ll work on it.”
“Good.” I walk back around to the seat behind my desk.
She nods and stands, hands folded in front of her lap. “I stand by what I said before: I think you’ve made this thing bigger than it needs to be by taking the girl.”
I don’t even bother looking at her. “I can handle it.”
“Which one: the girl or her brother?”
“Both. All of them. Anything.”
“Then why such drastic measures to ensure he backs off?”
Finally, I meet her gaze and give her the crumb of information she’s so desperate to feast on. “Because I’m trying to catch a bigger fish.”
Her eyes go wide with excitement. “What do you mean?”
“The FBI didn’t come across my name by accident,” I inform her. “It was planted. Someone decided to frame us for something they did.”
She frowns. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s okay. I do. This thing started long before Robert Lawrence was ever involved.”
“Do you have any leads?” she asks.
“Not yet,” I lie, keeping the other details of my discoveries to myself for now.
My trust in my mother has always been somewhat fluid, to put a word on it. Ever since the moment I walked in on her fucking one of the men who came in to take care of the gardens.
I was ten at the time. She gave me explanations. Tried to convince me I didn’t understand what I saw.
I never said a word about it to anyone, including my father. I knew he fucked other women, too. So why shouldn’t she?
The cheating isn’t what bothered me. It was that she tried to sell me a different story. She tried to convince me she was eternally loyal to my father when I’d seen evidence to the contrary with my own two eyes.
I’m no saint. I have crimes and sins under my belt, and I own them both. Which is why I’m immediately wary of anyone who pretends they are above such things.
“I have to be delicate where the law is involved,” I explain. “And since Lawrence is the one who gave this case momentum with his personal vendetta—”
“You targeted him,” she finished.
“He’s nothing more than a cockroach beneath my heel,” I say. “But the FBI’s monitoring is making it difficult to operate the way I want. And I don’t like being restrained. Regardless, I’m not worried. Lawrence isn’t going to risk his sister’s life for the memory of a missing woman, fiancée or not.”
“You’d really kill the girl to make your point?”
“I think I’ve made it clear that I’ll do anything to make my point,” I snarl.
My mother nods and glances downwards as if thinking. But I know her. She had a plan for this conversation before she ever set foot in my office.
So I bide my time and wait for her to say what she came here to say.
“She wants to talk to you,” she says at last.
I snort. “I’ll bet she does.”
“She’s young and pliable,” she points out. “She’ll be easy to manipulate.”
“Is that what you saw in her?”
“You didn’t?”
“She’s scared,” I acknowledge. “But she’s smart. She’s not going to be as easy to crack as you might think.”
I don’t say it aloud—God knows my mother doesn’t need the fucking suggestion—but there are many ways to crack a person, no matter how difficult they may be. And the image in my head of a naked Olivia begging to do as I say is enough to get me very excited about a particular course of action.
“You know the reason we butt heads so much, don’t you?” she asks, interrupting my thoughts. “It’s because you’re too much like me.”
I don’t dignify that with an answer. I just wave a hand to dismiss her. “You can close the door on your way out.”
She nods and grabs the door handle. But she freezes as I give her one last order.
“Oh, and… send the girl to my office.”
12
OLIVIA
I sit back on the carpeted floor and stare at the face I’ve scraped into the pristine white wall next to the bed.
Pyotr. That was his name.
The jerk who shoved me into that jeep. The same jerk who carried me into this house.
Even as he manhandled me, his features caught my eye. His broad, flat nose that accentuated the sharpness of his jaw. It’s a half-assed sketch crudely scratched into the paint, but I know I nailed his appearance. The eyes are just as dead and devoid of original thought as they were in person.
He’s merely a robot, following the instructions of a monster.
I take the blunt point of the pencil I found earlier and move on to the mural of his master. He’s standing behind the dumb robot goon, but he’s still bigger, his presence suffocating and intoxicating and impossible to ignore.
I get so lost in my world that I don’t even notice the door open. Not until I see a shadow fall over my drawing do I realize that I’m no longer alone.
“Jesus!” I yelp, jerking back.
Yulia looks at me with an amused expression as she takes in my drawing. “Well, well… that’s an interesting way to deface my walls.”
My heart starts beating a little faster, but I try hard to shove down the fear. They’ve abducted me and trapped me in this room for almost two days. Why shouldn’t I deface whatever the hell I want? Tit for extremely-not-equal tat, right?
“There was a pencil in the desk drawer,” I explain. “But no paper.”
“So you decided to go for the walls?”
I blink. “Sure looks that way.”
She smiles. “Fair enough.” She moves to sit down on the edge of the bed just next to me and examines my drawing. “Is that… Pyotr?”
“I prefer to think of him as Pyotr 3000, Cyborg Extraordinaire.”
“The likeness is brilliant. And who is the figure behind him?”
The drawing is incomplete. I haven’t figured out how I want to capture the harsh lines and shadows of him just yet. For now, he’s only a silhouette.
“The master,” I say. “Or maybe I’ll call him ‘The Monster.’”
Yulia raises her eyebrows. “Also known as my son?”
“The fact that you made that connection speaks volumes.”
She gives me an amused glance. “Is that a speech bubble over Pyotr’s head?”