I’m feeling so good that I want her to feel the same thing. I want to melt away her fear and stress, and show her that I’ll do anything, anything at all for her.

But when I go to kiss her, and I try to touch her like she touched me, she stops me with a hand on my chest.

“I can’t,” she says. “I don’t have time. I have to get back.”

“When can I see you again?” I ask her.

“I don’t know,” she says unhappily.

“I don’t want to sneak around,” I tell her. “I want to make a formal agreement between our families. So your father knows I’m serious.”

“Really?” Yelena says. The relief on her face is palpable. “Will your family agree?”

I think about Dante, gone to Paris with the love of his life, and Nero, immersed in his plans for financial domination on an unprecedented scale, and Aida, whose husband is about to run for Mayor of Chicago.

They’re too busy with their own concerns to care what I do. It’s down to my father. I don’t think he’ll oppose me—not in this. After all, he gave Aida to our most hated enemy, so he’s willing to make deals. And his own match to my mother wasn’t strategic, so he knows what it feels like to fall in love.

I kiss Yelena again.

“They want me to be happy,” I say.

She buries her face against my chest for one last moment. Then she hurries out of the theater, to go back home to her father’s house.

I hate to let her leave all on her own. I hate to let her go back there.

As much as I tried to reassure her, I am afraid of what Alexei Yenin might do to her. Which is why I need to get her away from him as quickly as possible.

10

Yelena

My father calls Adrian and me down for dinner in the formal dining room. We don’t eat in here very often, so immediately my nerves are on edge.

I’ve changed my clothes so that I’m wearing a sober high-necked dress, tights, and flat shoes, and I’ve brushed my hair and pinned it back with barrettes. This is what my father expects from us—that we dress and behave with the utmost respect for him at all times.

It reminds me of something I read a long time ago, about the different types of respect. There’s respecting someone as an authority, and respecting them as a human. My father believes that if we don’t respect him as an authority, he has no need to respect us as humans.

I hate the dining room. I hate all the ornate and elaborate furniture in this house. It makes me feel like I’m suffocating.

My father likes to think that he’s the tsar of his kingdom. He loves the luxury and history of our culture. Every room is full of plush oriental rugs, rich velvet antimacassars, cabinets painted with geometric Khokhloma folk art, and mosaic tiles in the bathrooms.

You would think that all these signs of home would help me not to feel the culture shock of moving to Chicago, but instead it gives me this sense that I can never escape the Bratva. Their tentacles extend through every major European city, and even here in America.

My father intends to take over Chicago like he’s taken over every other space he’s ever inhabited. He thinks the Irish and Italian mafia have become weak and complacent. He thinks they’ve forgotten how to rule.

When I sit down at the table, my father is already seated at the head, dressed in a dove-gray suit of impeccable fit. He’s adopting the American style of suit, but he still hasn’t cut his hair, which hangs down lank around his shoulders. I don’t think he’ll ever cut it. It makes him look like a warrior king, like a grizzled old lion. Like Sampson, he believes it’s the seat of his power.

The Bratva can be extremely superstitious. Maybe that’s a characteristic of all mafia families—after all, Sebastian seemed to believe in the luck of his gold medallion. Or at least, that his uncle had lost its luck by giving it to him.

That’s why my father is so wound up about the Winter Diamond. It represents the luck of the Bratva, and their pride.

Perhaps he should consider the fact that we don’t have it anymore. Our luck has run out.

As Adrian and I sit down at the table, my father watches us with his blue eyes, cold as Siberian frost.

“Good evening,” he says.

“Good evening, father,” Adrian replies.

“Good evening,” I say.

“Look at my two children,” he says, surveying us as we sit at his right-hand side. Adrian always sits next to our father. I sit next to Adrian. I prefer to have a buffer between me and Papa. “Did any man ever have such impressive offspring?”

Adrian glows with pride. He has always had a different relationship with our father than I have. He’s aware of our father’s cruelty and sternness, especially as it related to our mother. But Adrian is treated differently as the son and heir, and that blinds him to the true depths of our father’s selfishness. Adrian believes that our father loves us. That he would never actually harm us.

I think he’s wrong.

Adrian defends him. He says, “We can’t imagine what it was like growing up poor in Soviet Russia. He had to do whatever he could to survive. And look how far he’s come. No one ever taught him kindness. He had to be harsh and violent to survive.”

The problem is, there’s a difference between doing what you have to do, and enjoying it.

I saw my father’s face as Rodion tortured the banker.

He definitely enjoyed it.

Just as he’s enjoying this right now . . . making me squirm in my seat, as he pretends to be in a good mood with us.

Rodion already told him what I did. I’m sure of it.

“What were you two doing while I was gone?” he asks us.

“I spoke with one of our Armenian suppliers,” Adrian says. “They have a new way of shipping product—they package it like a bath bomb. Scented and colored and wrapped in cellophane. Almost impossible for a sniffer dog to detect.”

“What’s the price?” Papa says.

“The same. They save money because less is seized at the border.”

My father nods slowly. “Very good,” he says. “Double our order. We’ll be expanding distribution on the west side of the city. I want a full presence in our old territory.”

The Bratva used to have exclusive run of that side of the city, until the Gallos torched our warehouses and drove us out.

Now that I think about it, that happened twelve years ago. Right around when Sebastian’s uncle was killed. Which action came first, I wonder?

It doesn’t matter. Because the bloodshed and violence is a cycle. An ouroboros of revenge.

My father turns and fixes his eyes on me instead.

“And what about you, my daughter?” he says quietly.

I take a sip of my wine, to stall for time. We’re having prime rib and mashed potatoes with asparagus on the side. The prime rib looks raw. It turns my stomach.

I consider lying to my father—or attempting to lie.

It’s pointless. He already knows. He’s just testing to see what I’ll do.

“I’ve been seeing Sebastian,” I tell him.

No flicker of surprise on his face. He definitely knows.

“And what have you been doing with Sebastian,” he hisses.