Then we break apart, and I’m in a basement again.

“Should we finish the game?” Sebastian asks me.

“No.” I shake my head. “I have to get home.”

He looks disappointed, but not sulky. He helps me gather up my dress and shoes so I can make myself decent again.

“Don’t forget your shirt,” I tell him.

“Oh,” he laughs. “Right.”

Once we’re dressed, Sebastian follows me back upstairs. He waits while I call an Uber, and even offers to ride back to my house with me.

“Just for company,” he says.

I shake my head. “My father wouldn’t like that.”

“You’ll give me your number though, won’t you?” he asks me.

I hesitate for a long moment. I know what I’m supposed to do, but suddenly I don’t want to do it.

“Yes,” I say. “I will.”

Sebastian copies the number into his phone, looking pleased.

“Talk to you soon,” he says.

I ride back to my house, my stomach churning.

My father bought this massive stone mansion two years ago, when he came here to replace Kolya Kristoff as head of the Bratva. He never asked my brother or me if we wanted to move from Moscow to Chicago. He didn’t give a damn what we thought.

I can see the lights on all across the main floor.

He’s waiting for me.

The security gates part automatically, and I tell the driver to go all the way up to the front door. He looks slightly awed at this house.

“You live here?” he says.

“Yes,” I reply. “Unfortunately.”

I climb out of the car. Iov opens the door before I can even touch the handle. His face is bruised, and he’s hunched over slightly, like he might have broken a rib.

“You didn’t have to kick me,” he says sourly.

“You slapped me too hard!” I say.

I push past him, impatient to get in the house. I’m exhausted and I want to go to bed.

But first I have to speak to my father.

He comes padding silently into the entryway, wearing his velvet slippers, his silk pajamas, and his long, belted robe. His iron-gray beard is neatly combed, as is the thick gray hair reaching down to his shoulders. He looks like a medieval king. The kind who would invade a nation without hesitation.

“How did it go?” he asks me.

“Exactly as you said,” I reply.

The tiniest of smiles pulls at the corners of his lips. “Did you engage his interest?”

“Of course,” I say.

Now he does smile, showing his straight teeth the color of bone. “Good,” he says. “Well done, moya doch.”

3

Sebastian

I can’t stop thinking about Yelena.

I’ve never seen a woman so ferocious, so haughty, or so utterly gorgeous.

I have no problem getting girls. When I was the star of the U of C team, they quite literally threw themselves at me after every game. I had a cheerleader do a backflip onto my lap at one of the afterparties. She was a little bit drunk and she clocked me with her heel, but I still let her give me a BJ to make up for it.

Even now, it’s not hard to pick a girl up at a club or a party.

But that’s all it is—a quick encounter. A few dates, plenty of sex, and then I move on to the next one as soon as my head turns in a different direction.

I’ve never actually had a girlfriend. Never wanted one. At first because I was too focused on sports, and later because I was stewing in frustration, feeling like I hated everyone and everything.

This . . . this is different.

I want this girl.

I want her badly.

I should have let her take her bra off. Trust me, I wanted to see those tits bare and close enough to touch. I only stopped her because I felt the tiniest bit guilty about running the table on her. And also, now that I know who her father is, I have to be careful.

We’re not on the best footing with the Russians at the moment.

The Chicago Bratva has been going through a decade-long rough patch. And a lot of their problems can be directly or indirectly traced to my family.

Our territories overlap. Sometimes we’ve been able to cooperate and keep the peace. Other times, we’ve had skirmishes that have resulted in some of their men dead, or some of ours. Warehouses blown up, product stolen, soldiers arrested.

All of that could be forgiven.

But they’ve lost two of their bosses now, and I can’t think that’s gone unnoticed in Moscow.

The first wasn’t our fault. Ajo Arsenyev got himself thrown in federal prison when he got sloppy with his weapons shipments. But his replacement, Kolya Kristoff—that’s a different story.

When my family allied ourselves with the Irish mafia, the Bratva and the Polish Mafia made their own alliance in return. They tried to attack us. But their pact didn’t last. Mikolaj Wilk, the head of the Polish Mafia, fell in love with Nessa Griffin, the youngest daughter of our Irish allies. He turned on the Bratva. Kolya Kristoff tried to gun her down in the Harris Theater—Fergus Griffin riddled him with bullets instead.

Without a leader, the Bratva went rabid for a while. We had to beat them back, driving them underground, smashing their businesses, seizing their assets.

Alexei Yenin was dispatched from Moscow to clean up the mess. He took over as the new Pakhan. We came to a shaky kind of truce. Without making a formal agreement, it seemed mutually determined that our skirmish was over. We would each stay within our newly defined borders.

But my family hasn’t exactly kept to that.

It’s Nero’s fault.

He saw a temptation he couldn’t resist.

He found out that Kolya Kristoff was storing the Winter Diamond in a vault on LaSalle Street. After Kristoff died, nobody came to collect the stone . . . so Nero decided nobody knew about it.

That’s where I got roped in.

Nero and I broke into the vault. We stole the diamond. We sold it. And we used the money to fund the South Shore Development.

That was over a year ago. We haven’t heard a peep about it. So I’m assuming that we got away with it. Nero is an evil genius, after all . . . he doesn’t usually make mistakes.

But there’s always the chance that fate will intervene in even the best-laid plans.

So with all that in mind, I’m wary to kick this particular hornet’s nest. The Bratva are some nasty fucking hornets. They’re not going to appreciate me fucking around with one of their queens.

From what I’ve heard, Yenin is an old-school gangster. I can only imagine how he protects his one and only daughter.

The smart move is to walk away right now. I saved her from her would-be kidnapper. Probably earned myself a little goodwill with the Russians, if she told her dad about it. I can chalk that up as a win and let the rest of it go.

The face of a warrior princess . . . the body of an Amazon . . . the spirit of a wild wolf . . . Surely I can find that again, in a girl whose father doesn’t crush skulls and break spines for entertainment.

I tell myself that. But the other part of my brain scoffs at the idea that there’s more than one Valkyrie walking around on the earth.

All week long, I throw myself into activity to try to distract myself. I go to the gym every day with my roommate Jace, lifting harder than ever, until I’m grunting like an animal and sweat is running down my body.