“Nobody told me where the room was.”

  He raised his eyebrows at Sergei.

  “Sorry, sir.” Sergei was a man of few words, and he looked abashed.

  There was already food on the table, but my stomach was in knots. I started eating tiny bites of what was available. I was aware that my dad’s two bodyguards were just standing there and watching us. I wondered when they ate. I could feel the weight of Sergei’s stare. I didn’t know if what I felt was just nerves.

  “Tell me about your mother.”

  I swallowed the bite of food I had just taken. “Mom tried to provide for me the best that she could over the years. She took a position in a factory that turned out clothes made on American soil, spreading clothing that was inspired by the kind of clothing surfers wore on Venice Beach. She became middle management by the time that she died. We were lucky to have health insurance the entire time.”

  “What did she tell you about me?”

  “She never told me your name. She said that you had been a fun fling never meant to last.”

  My dad flinched, but then his face became neutral.

  “How will you prove that you are my daughter?”

  “I have no idea. You won’t take my DNA test.”

  “I’m definitely not going to.”

  Silence sat there for several moments.

  “I can leave, if you don’t want to connect with me.” There was a part of me that had wondered all of her life what her dad was like. I was being introduced to something I knew might happen. My dad was cold.

  “You can stay until you prove yourself.”

  I didn’t like the way that my dad was phrasing it. I also knew that if I left his home now, I might never get another shot at knowing him.

  We finished the meal in heavy silence. I couldn’t wait to get out of my borrowed dress and back into my room. I had homework to do if my dad wasn’t actually interested in talking to me. My mom had made it really clear that, unlike her, I was getting a bachelor’s degree. She didn’t want me to have any limits on how far I could go.

  My dad said, “Good night.” He left the table. I got up, my food unfinished. I didn’t feel very hungry. As I went to my room, Sergei shadowed me.

  “I don’t need you to show me back to my room. I’m not a little kid. I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “While you’re staying with Arseny, you’re stuck with me.”

  “I’m not in any danger.” I snorted. What could happen inside of my dad’s fortress?

  “You could be the danger.”

  I laughed at his ludicrous statement. He had a dry sense of humor, because he wasn’t laughing at all.

  “How are you going to make sure that I’m not too dangerous?” I asked Sergei, flirting a little.

  “Observing you.”

  It sounded like a challenge to me. I threw away the idea of going through boring homework, deciding on another course of action. “Does my dad have a pool in here?”

  “He does.” Sergei nodded.

  “I’ll use it.”

  Sergei leaned against the wall outside of my door. I grinned to myself, because I knew what I had packed.

  5

  SWIMMING

  SERGEI

  I yanked at my collar. I was sweating. The temperature felt like it was summer, even though I knew that Arseny’s house was kept carefully temperature controlled.

  It was all due to the string bikini that his daughter had donned. When she came out of the room, she had a towel wrapped around her. As soon as she got to Arseny’s indoor heated pool, she had taken the towel off.

  The curves of her hips and breasts were incredibly distracting. She was doing a backstroke back and forth, and I was hard. However, I couldn’t do anything about it. My mission was to get close to her and figure out why she had appeared at this moment in Arseny’s life.

  “Do you want to get into the hot tub with me?” She climbed the steps up to me, drops glistening on her skin. She looked like a young fertility goddess.

  “I can’t while I’m working.”

  “Do you ever break the rules?”

  She startled a laugh out of me. I’d broken tons of rules since I had started my clandestine role working for Arseny.

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She sauntered into the hot tub. She moaned as the heat loosened her muscles. I could see the swell of her upper breasts. I was going to hell for thinking the kind of things I was about a nineteen-year-old girl who was perhaps Arseny’s daughter. He’d kill me if she was truly his kid.

  “How did you meet my dad?”

  “I worked my way up within his organization.”

  She pouted a little. “That’s not a lot of detail.”

  I wasn’t going to give her much. I’d been trained to resist interrogations under more duress than a nineteen-year-old girl in a string bikini in a hot tub could apply.

  “I left high school with my diploma and looked for the right opportunity. My parents weren’t particularly close to me, so they didn’t mind when I moved away for a job. We speak once in a while.” It was really once in a blue moon. My handler had someone manufacture handwritten postcards to my parents for holidays. They weren’t the sentimental type who needed phone calls all the time. As long as they knew that I was alive somewhere, it was enough. They’d filled out all the forms when I’d gone through security clearance, so they were aware that I worked for the government. We didn’t share details.

  “Do you miss them?”

  “No.” My parents had worked incredibly hard. I’d been a latchkey kid, able to pour myself a bowl of cereal before they came home. I’d been born in Siberia, but I didn’t remember much of my babyhood. My parents had secured paperwork to come to the US and had lived in America ever since.

  “I miss my mom,” she told me. “I came looking for my dad, but I don’t think that he intends to be much of a parent.”

  I didn’t know what Arseny would do with her if she was real. Arseny’s life wasn’t a safe one. He could be killed any day.

  I didn’t answer her. She got out of the tub and put a towel around herself. I escorted her back into her guest suite and went into my own room. I was relieved to finally be alone. Nobody but Cleo could have noticed how physically aroused I had gotten when I had seen her nearly naked. I put my hand on my erection and closed my eyes.

  “Open your mouth wider,” I told her. Cleo was on her back on my bed. She complied with my request. She was wearing the bikini that had driven me wild. I tugged her body until her head fell back and was hanging off of the bed. She made a startled sound as I sank my dick into her mouth, glad to find some relief.

  “Breathe when I pull out.” I started hammering her mouth. I knew that she was young and inexperienced, but the fantasy version of her could take it like a pro. She swallowed everything down as I exploded into her mouth.

  I caught my breath and washed up. She was still only nineteen. I knew my superiors would hate the idea of me having sex with Arseny’s daughter.

  I pulled out my laptop to see if there was any new information. Jake Bennett had confirmed that Cleo really was Dianna Dawkins’ daughter. He had confirmed her school records in the Los Angeles region, and her birthday was the one that she had given Arseny.

  I sent over the information that Arseny had given me about Dianna Dawkins getting an abortion. Obviously, something was off between Arseny’s memories and Cleo’s appearance. I needed more details on Cleo’s life so I could understand her motives. That’s what I told myself, anyhow.

  6

  LIBRARY

  CLEO

  It was nice not to have to wake up to any kind of alarm clock. My student loans meant that I had a little breathing room for a temporary period, even if I dreaded paying them back. I knew I needed to get a job that simultaneously paid me enough to cover rent in Los Angeles while covering all my bills. It was going to be tough unless I moved to somewhere like Tulsa, with their remote worker incentives.

  I decided to take my phone and read in Arseny’s giant library. I didn’t know if I should call him my dad or not. He didn’t seem eager to claim the title. I was still confused why I was even here.

  Sergei didn’t show up until almost lunchtime. I was curled up in a corner, reading The Little Prince, and he knocked on the door, a grin on his lips.

  “Ready for lunch?”

  I looked him up and down. He was dressed to be an unobtrusive bodyguard. I knew some girls I had grown up with would ignore someone like him, because he wasn’t displaying a huge amount of wealth, power, or fame.

  “I could be, if you make it worth my while.” I wanted to flirt with him. I’d tried my best to lure him into the hot tub with me yesterday, but I hadn’t been successful. I thought that there could be a spark between us. I had no idea about how my dad would feel if I started a romantic entanglement with his bodyguard, but I might not stick around for long enough to learn much about Arseny. I was open to being kicked out of the house with all of my possessions. Right now, I had my stuff in one of my friend’s storage lockers.

  Because we never had a ton of spare money, I’d worked here and there on short projects as a teenager for extra cash. I didn’t dress the way that a lot of the other girls at school did. I was really grateful that my generation was so obsessed with the treasure hunt nature of thrifting, so nobody cared that a lot of my clothes were up-cycled. Mom could sew and taught me how when I was a kid, so we could tailor all of my clothing to fit my body.

  Mom’s cancer had eaten up all of my mental space while she was dying. Sergei was the first guy I’d really felt like flirting with. He was pretty stoic. I had no idea if what I was doing had any effect whatsoever.

  My dad showed up before Sergei and I really started a conversation.

  “What are you reading?” he asked me.

  “Le Petit Prince,” I told him, showing him the French language edition that I’d found on his shelf. “My mom used to read it to me all the time. I was obsessed with it when I was five.”

  “It’s one of my favorites.” Arseny cleared his throat. “I met Dianna when I was at a public library. We were both searching for that book.”

  I frowned, wondering why my dad would be hunting for a library copy of The Little Prince. Mom hadn’t had the budget to buy every book that she wanted. For my whole childhood, a lot of my entertainment came from the public library system. We didn’t have money to waste on a giant library like Arseny’s library.

  “Why were you getting a book at a public library?” I asked my dad.

  “I was still in college then, trying to fight against my path.”

  I didn’t know what my dad was talking about. “Was my mom part of your rebellion?”

  “Maybe.” Dad was silent for a few moments. “You know, I loved Dianna. She was the one who left me.”

  I felt my jaw drop. I got the impression from my mom that it had been a fling. I had learned in health class that it just took one time to make a baby. I didn’t know why my mom gave me the impression that the relationship had just been ships passing in the night. While she was alive, she had never told me his name. As she died, I had never stressed her out by asking for more details about my sperm donor.

  “Would you like to accompany me to the ballet tonight? I have a box and rarely go, but it’s a gift I frequently give to my business associates.”

  “I’ve never been to the ballet. I don’t know if I have the clothes for it.” In movies, going to the ballet required dressing up.

  “I can send Sergei with you to go shopping. Let me spoil you a little bit.”

  “Okay,” I said. I didn’t know if it was some kind of trap to see if I was there to milk my dad for everything he was worth, but I wasn’t averse to having a new experience. “I’ll buy one dress and shoes.”

  7

  MALL

  SERGEI

  I knew my orders were to get close to Cleo. She grabbed her purse, and we headed out to get her ready to go to the ballet.

  I knew the shops where Arseny’s name got you unlimited credit. The women who circled around him were showered in gold, even if he didn’t let them close in any way other than physically.

  However, Cleo had no intention of going to the most expensive boutiques in Los Angeles. She directed me to go to a mall.

  I didn’t think that any mall would have the sort of evening wear that her father would have preferred, but Cleo was also his daughter, not a date.

  I stayed near here as she picked through the clearance racks, wondering if she understood that her father was footing the bill. I knew that Dianna might have had a hard time raising her, but Arseny didn’t lack any kind of cash flow. Yeah, we paid in cash, but he could pay for any kind of dress she wanted. She would be on display at the ballet.

  She picked a pair of ballet flats that had crystals all over them. I guessed she was still a teenager, even if she was nineteen. She looked like she was ready for a school dance, not trying to grace the arm of a wealthy Russian businessman.

  It made me more convinced that she had had the childhood with Dianna that she said she had. Any boutique in the area would have been fine, but she was trying to pinch pennies on an occasion when she should be trying to fit into Arseny’s life.

  I was starting to understand that her objective wasn’t to milk her dad for everything that she could get. Her dress was good enough to pass muster, but I could imagine that Arseny would have some harsh words to say to me if he realized that the dress came from the clearance racks at the mall.

  “You know you could buy several options, right?” I asked her as she brought her single dress and new shoes to the register.

  “I only need one dress to go to the ballet.” I paid in cash for the transaction and snapped a shot of the receipt with my phone. Arseny’s bean counters would make sure that we kept track of what was spent on Cleo Dawkins, for however long she stuck around.

  I insisted on carrying her bag, and she continued to wander around the mall. It was the first time that she had been out and about since she had moved into Arseny’s place. I guessed that she needed a little more human interaction.

  When we were getting off the escalator to reach the second floor, she fell at the transition between the moving and stable parts. I rushed forward, catching her in my arms.

  My entire body responded. She smelled really good, like coconuts. She was soft; every part of her was womanly. I was trying to figure out the last time I had gotten laid. Surely I shouldn’t be reacting this way to Arseny’s possibly 19-year-old daughter. I wanted to kiss her, since she was so close, but I forced myself to let her go as soon as she found her footing.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, I’m just embarrassed.” She looked away.

  We kept walking around the mall, window-shopping. I kept an eye out for any threats, but I didn’t think that anybody would have expected the two of us to come to a mall today. As long as we kept moving, I wasn’t worried. I texted Arseny’s security team that we’d likely stay in the mall for a while.

  We ended up eating at the food court. I was amazed that she didn’t want to go home to eat, but I also thought that she might have felt cooped up. I paid for the two of us to eat poor quality pizza. She was happy enough, cutting it into small bites since it was too hot to eat. She was relaxed enough to feel chatty. She was telling me all about her online studies, and she told me about promising her mother she’d get a degree.

  It made me remember what I’d been like as a high school student, before I entered the military. My parents had left Russia to give me a better future. I didn’t know if my position made them proud, since they couldn’t know much about it.

  By the time we had finished the pizza, I was sure that she had had a normal American childhood. There was still a chance that she had been sent by somebody else, but she seemed driven by an honest desire to connect with her remaining parent. I’d report back to Arseny that she really just wanted to have some kind of relationship with her father.

  While we walked back to the car, I got a text. I read it.

  Vlad has summoned me for a meeting tonight. You’ll take Cleo to the ballet.

  I knew that Arseny would never refuse the head of the local mafia just to take your new daughter to the ballet. It seemed that Arseny still wanted Cleo to have the experience of going to the ballet, so that she wasn’t disappointed by the change of plans.

  “Your dad has a last-minute business meeting tonight. I’ll be the one accompanying you to the ballet.”

  Her face fell. I guessed that she had really been looking forward to spending time with her dad. “Oh, okay.”

  I needed to dig out clothes that would fit in at the ballet.

  8

  BALLET

  CLEO

  A FEW HOURS LATER

  I had cut off the tags and put on my new dress with my cute ballet flats. I didn’t want to torture my feet the first time that I walked into the ballet. The dress hid my feet anyhow, so I didn’t feel self-conscious about not being as fancy as everyone else.

  When I met Sergei in the foyer, I couldn’t believe how great the tux that he was wearing fit him. It looked like it had been tailored onto his body. He swept his eyes up and down my body, as if he liked what he saw. I hadn’t modeled the dress for him when we were shopping.

  We went out for dinner at a casual fine dining place where we fit in. He was just quietly eating steak while I consumed a chicken breast, nervous about messing up my dress. I made it through the whole meal without dropping anything on myself.

  It was really intimate to have a one-on-one conversation with him prior to the ballet. I didn’t want to pepper him with questions, so I just chattered about the classes that I was taking. I had no idea if he was interested or not. I just didn’t want to be utterly silent.