“You look beautiful,” Sergei said, putting an arm around me. Beaming at him, I felt warm and secure with his arm around me. I knew that I might’ve been scared off by my dad by now if I hadn’t felt a spark with Sergei. I was starting to love him, but I wasn’t ready yet to have that kind of conversation.

  Because I could feel everyone in the room turning towards the front entrance, I looked over, too. Seconds ago, Vlad had walked through the door with someone my age on his arm. He had security team members dressed in black fanned out around him, making sure people knew not to get too close. People were whispering in Russian, English, and other languages throughout the room. Vlad ignored me and Sergei. He asked people where he could find Arseny, and I shrank back. Maybe I’d be better off hiding alone in my room. I didn’t want to be at the party anymore. My grandfather seemed really hostile, even after the DNA test. It seemed that my parentage didn’t matter to him.

  “I’ve got to excuse myself,” I told Sergei, shaking off his arm. “I’ll be right back.” He gave me a nod as I left his embrace.

  Hands shaking, I escaped into the bathroom, where I touched up my makeup with some light powder. I looked at myself in the mirror and fortified myself to go outside. I could handle anything that my grandfather wanted to dish out. The more I stuck around, the more I understood why my mother had made the choices she had made. When I got out of the bathroom, Vlad was standing there with his security team forming a perimeter around us.

  He grabbed my arm in a bruising grip that hurt. “It’s time that you disappeared. Your mother understood that this world wasn’t for her. You seem like a bright girl. You can do the math.”

  My stomach churned. Before I could respond to his warning, I vomited on my grandfather. He tried to step away from me, but the damage was done.

  Sergei pulled me away from Vlad, despite the efforts of my grandfather’s security to keep him away from intervening. “She’s sick. She needs medical attention.” He lifted me into his arms like it was nothing. “Don’t upset her.”

  I glanced at the sour look on my grandfather’s face. He clearly didn’t like Sergei telling me what to do.

  Sergei took me to my room and made sure that I rinsed my mouth with the mint mouthwash that I had in the room.

  “Vlad said something about my mom understanding that this world wasn’t for her.”

  He looked at me for a second. “Yuly said something about Dianna, too. I think I need to find out what happened to make your mother leave. I want to keep you safe, even if we have to escape from your father’s home.”

  “I’m not ready to escape, because I’m enjoying getting to know my dad.”

  “Arseny isn’t who you think that he is. He’s involved with the Russia mafia.”

  My jaw dropped. “I guess I’m not too surprised,” I said after a beat. “I didn’t expect him to be part of a grand criminal enterprise, but it has already been obvious to me that my dad is involved in shady stuff. Before I approached him, I tried to find any information I could online. I came up nearly empty. I’m trying to love my dad as he is.” I decided to take the leap. “I’m coming to love you as you are, too.”

  Sergei smiled at me. “I love, you, too.” He was interrupted from saying more when there was a knock on the door.

  17

  PRETEXT

  SERGEI

  Once I had opened Cleo’s door, Yuly was outside. “Vlad wants us to run an errand. He needs us to deliver a package.”

  I turned back, looking at Cleo. She shrugged her shoulders. I didn’t have the clout to resist an order from the man who was at the top of the organization. I said, “Let’s check with Arseny.”

  Yuly nodded, and I left Cleo’s room. I had a vague sense that something bad could happen to her, but I wasn’t sure what I could do to stop it. I took out my phone and told her to stay inside of the house. Surely Vlad wouldn’t try anything when there were so many people here for Arseny’s party.

  There were too many people around Arseny when we got downstairs for us to speak with him. As his personal bodyguards, we melted into the background. We would interrupt if the issue were truly urgent, but just dropping off a package didn’t seem like something that Arseny would need to sign off on. Vlad overruled Arseny, even when it came to Arseny’s personal staff.

  We went into the garage and got into one of Arseny’s cars. After making sure the package was in the back seat, Yuly drove the two of us to the point that Vlad had indicated.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. I knew that Vlad wouldn’t interfere with Arseny unless he saw a purpose in it. He let his son run most of the day to day operations, preferring to sit like a spider in a web most of the time.

  “I know more about Dianna than you do,” Yuly told me.

  “What is it?”

  He sighed. “It was so long ago, about two decades. As soon as Vlad realized that Dianna was pregnant with Arseny’s child, he arranged for her to be mugged and beaten, trying to make her miscarry. Of course, he couldn’t have his son know that he was trying to kill his own grandchild. We hired people connected to triads who flew into the country one day and were gone the next. It would’ve been too obvious if they were Russian.” Yuly shook his head. “They tried to damage her enough that she would miscarry, you understand. It was a targeted attack.”

  Inside, I was seething. There was a reason that I had been placed inside of their criminal organization to take them down. In cold blood, Vlad had tried to murder his own grandchild before she ever saw the light of day.

  “But she didn’t miscarry,” I pointed out.

  “He didn’t know until a little while later. He sent Arseny straight to Moscow once he understood that Dianna still had the child.”

  “And?” I didn’t like this story. I certainly hadn’t gotten these details from Jake.

  “I was Vlad’s bodyguard at the time, if a low ranking one. I was with him when he brought a gun and came to Dianna’s home. He forced her into his vehicle. My loyalty was and is to Vlad, so I didn’t intercede. At the time, I thought that he was tying up loose ends. We could not let someone who wouldn’t raise the child in our ways to have a kid.”

  “You say that as if you changed your mind.”

  “Arseny is happier with a child. He has been exceptionally careful for years not to have an accidental pregnancy crop up. He doesn’t trust anyone inherently, so having his daughter appear and bring so much joy has made me re-examine what it would have meant for Dianna to stick around. I think Vlad would have been unhappy no matter what happened. Frankly, I believed Dianna was dead. There wasn’t anything that I could do to fix things for Arseny.”

  Because Arseny didn’t have this information, I made an executive decision. “Stop at the next corner and complete the delivery by yourself. I need to get back to the party.” My instincts were screaming that Vlad was about to try something or had already put his plan into motion.

  Obligingly, Yuly said, “Be safe.” He stopped the car and let me out.

  We were only a few blocks away from the house. I started to jog, tapping my wrist to call Arseny. He didn’t pick up. I didn’t think that he’d want to deal with business while his party was in full swing. I swore. I took out my actual phone to get a Lyft back to the house. Something bad was about to happen to Cleo.

  18

  VODKA

  CLEO

  My mind was whirling. I couldn’t figure out what was going to happen. Too many changes had happened in my life too quickly. I might be nineteen, but I was still a teenager. I put a hand on my stomach. I couldn’t imagine carrying another human being to term inside of my body. Sergei had said that he loved me; Arseny said that Sergei should marry me.

  Marriage at my age wasn’t usual, not where I grew up. Sure, teenagers got pregnant, but we didn’t normally form permanent bonds.

  My door burst open. Normally, Sergei would knock. I didn’t even have time to get off of my bed before they shoved a gag in my mouth and put a hood over my head. They lifted me and took me down the service stairs.

  If they were making sure that nobody at the party would notice my disappearance, it meant my dad didn’t know about it. Something was going wrong.

  When I was unceremoniously plopped down, the hood was taken off of my face. I pulled the gag out of my mouth, since my hands were free. They had taken me so swiftly from my room that I hadn’t had any kind of opportunity to escape.

  The vehicle was moving, though.

  “What do you want?” I asked my grandfather bluntly.

  “You have to ruin everything. You did it from the moment you were conceived until now.”

  I crossed my arms. “I grew up in a single-parent household.” My mother made sure I had never gone hungry, but I knew that she personally skipped meals when times were tight.

  “You should never have existed at all. You’re clearly not good enough to be a Stasevich.”

  “My last name is Dawkins.”

  “And it’ll stay that way. Arseny told me that you got your hooks into a good Russian boy by getting pregnant. My son says that I must accept that you are part of our lives now, but it will never happen. I will not have you in my family. It was bad enough that my son never settled down to have heirs, but I have nephews and great-nephews to pass our family’s business to. There’s no chance that I would have accepted Dianna’s son as Arseny’s heir, and there’s no chance at all that I’ll accept Dianna’s daughter as Arseny’s heir.” He sighed. “I should have taken Dianna into the clinic and held my gun on the doctor until I was sure that the procedure was done.”

  My jaw dropped. “You tried to force my mother to abort me?”

  “Of course,” my grandfather said.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “I’m ensuring a permanent solution to a problem I should have fixed two decades ago.”

  He was going to kill me. He had spelled it out. I glanced at the drinks in the bar inside of his limo. Before I could really think about it, I grabbed the glass bottle of vodka and hit my grandfather on the head. He was unconscious within seconds.

  I didn’t have much time, not if the driver noticed I’d knocked out my grandfather. I pulled off his tie and tied his hands. When I yanked on the door, I realized that the doors were all locked. I wouldn’t be able to get out without the driver stopping the car and letting me out.

  Plan B. I used Vlad’s cell to call Sergei.

  “Sergei, I need help. Vlad kidnapped me and I’m not at home anymore.”

  “A friend of mine is tracking the signal from Vlad’s phone right now. Sit tight. Get a gun if you can. There are a handful of places to look in his limo.” Sergei rattled the list off like it was totally normal for him to tell his pregnant lover where to look for guns inside of a vehicle when she had been kidnapped. “Stay safe. I’ll be with you as soon as I can be.”

  I looked everywhere that he said, but none of those places had a gun. I looked at my grandfather, unwilling to pat him down for a gun. His hands were tied, but I wasn’t the world’s greatest knot-tier. He was regaining consciousness now.

  “You hit me,” he accused.

  “I’ll do it again if you move.”

  His eyes flicked to the cell phone in my hand. He still had his driver in the car. I wasn’t sure what he’d do next.

  19

  TRACKER

  SERGEI

  I stormed into the house, although I’d already sent a car to tail Vlad’s phone. Arseny was still in the middle of his party, but I approached him. He must have read in the look in my eyes, because he excused himself with a laugh.

  “It better be good,” he told me.

  “It is, Arseny.” I shook my head. “Cleo called me. She was using Vlad’s phone.”

  “What did she want? What did my father want with her? I thought he didn’t want to acknowledge her as a Stasevich. That’s how he reacted when I brought it up.”

  “Come into your security room.” I could waste a lot of breath trying to convince Arseny that his father had it in for Cleo. I’d rather just show him what had happened, since I needed the details myself.

  The two of us went in there. “Show us the tapes from Cleo’s room.”

  The men in there were visibly uncomfortable. They had orders to follow both Arseny and Vlad.

  “It’s my home,” Arseny said to them. It was simple, but his statement was effective. They queued up the tape to show what we needed.

  Arseny cursed in Russian as we watched Cleo being gagged and carried out of the house.

  “We have to get her back. My father would not hesitate to kill her. I’m guessing the only reason he didn’t kill her inside of my house was because of the party.” Arseny rubbed his jaw. “We’ll need to find him.”

  “I have a tracker looking at the signal coming from your father’s cell phone. We established where Cleo was when she called, and I sent a car over there to follow them.”

  “You sent a car?” I normally operated under Arseny’s authority.

  “Yes.” Arseny locked eyes with me. “I am focused on finding Cleo, but we will discuss it later.”

  If I stayed alive long enough, I could have a discussion with Arseny about why I had been placed as his bodyguard.

  “Let’s get on the road,” Arseny said. He pulled one of the security guards with us. “You’re driving.”

  He looked scared, but he came along with us. All of the security team had training to protect the powerful men inside of the organization. We all got into a car, and the engine started. While sitting in the passenger seat to navigate, I was looking at my phone.

  “Were you going to betray me?” asked Arseny idly. “Understand that I’m more concerned with keeping my daughter alive, but I might not be able to justify your life to my father.”

  “I didn’t want to betray you, but you’ve hurt plenty of people.”

  “I convinced my dad to get out of the human trafficking business. It was messy, and it got us too much attention. We mostly engage in white-collar crime now. Laundering money is much easier.” He sighed. “There are worse people waiting in the wings if you take my father and me out of our positions.”

  “What you’re saying is true, but I’m here to burn everything down to the ground. It’s not individually targeted at you.”

  Arseny didn’t reply from the back seat. I had no clue if he’d just have the driver shoot me when I wasn’t expecting anything.

  When we found the limo that Vlad favored, I had the driver honk in the pattern that everyone knew to recognize. The limo driver must not have thought anything was wrong, because he obligingly turned into a parking lot. We parked alongside the limo. We opened the door and Cleo sprung out, straight into my arms.

  After kissing her, I said, “Wait a minute.” I tapped out a message to Jake with our location to have him take Vlad and Arseny into custody.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I had to call the FBI in. I’m an undercover agent.”

  “Thank goodness,” she said, kissing my jaw.

  “Get into your dad’s car,” I told her.

  Arseny was watching us. I could see the cold calculations clicking in his mind. He hadn’t stayed on top, family connections or not, without being able to read situations. “I can help you. I can give up what I know in order to bring down this section of our empire. It might even help you weaken our operations in Russia. In return, I want to have access to Cleo and for my father to rot in prison.”

  “I don’t do plea deals,” I told him. He started to protest. I held up a hand. “But I will tell my handler to approach you with a bargain.” I had watched Arseny bargain plenty of times, and he was exceptionally good at getting his way. I knew that he was going to jail, but he could probably talk his way into getting an extremely light sentence.

  Cars arrived, and people wearing FBI gear swarmed out. They put cuffs on Arseny and Vlad before taking them away.

  “I can wait in the car,” Cleo offered, seeing that I had work to do. She jumped into the back seat of the car.

  I wrapped up what I needed to, knowing that I wasn’t going to be able to take Cleo back into Arseny’s house anymore. Everything that we had there would need to be extracted by someone both sides trusted.

  When I had done enough, I went back into the car. I gave the driver the name of a secure hotel in the area. The government had negotiated a lower rate than sticker price, and it would do as a base of operations until Jake could get Cleo and me out of town.

  “Where do we go from here?” Cleo asked me once the driver had dropped us off and gone.

  I wrapped an arm around her and dropped a kiss on her temple. “It’s my last undercover mission. I think I’ll be a stay-at-home father with you and the baby.”

  “Really? You’d want that?”

  “Well, you need someone to take care of the kid while you’re in school fulfilling your promise to Dianna, so yes.”

  She put her hands around the base of my neck and made our mouths connect.

  “I love you,” she told me.

  “I love you, too,” I responded.

  20

  REAL HOUSE

  CLEO

  A WHILE LATER

  The secure phone line rang. I looked at it, worrying about talking to my dad. Someone would be listening.

  “Hello?” I said, starting our conversation.

  “Hello, Cleo.” I knew that accepting me into his home had led to his downfall. I had only been the last straw on the camel’s back, though. Sergei had been in place for a while before I came into the picture. I wondered what would have happened if my mother had not died. My dad would have kept his position, and maybe Sergei would have ensured that he ended up in jail anyway.