Sold: A Billionaire Bad Boy Mafia Romance (2 page)

“... always be winners? That can’t be. I appreciate it, though. But you haven’t had any drinks,” Ace said, his voice soft and hard at the same time. “Are you sure you want to leave?”

Oh gods, I don’t know.
I felt danger in the air, and the way his companions (save for the cool stocky man) looked at me seemed to stress that I was not welcome there. I had already seen and heard too much... but at the same time, I was fascinated by the man, and I still felt as if some invisible force wanted me to stay in that room. I couldn’t shake off the surreal atmosphere of the whole situation.

I was still a bit drunk, and maybe that’s why I decided to play for a while. Also, I didn’t like the way he had made me hesitate and mumble like a little schoolgirl. I wanted to come back at him somehow.

“Well, I don’t know,” I told Ace. “Are you sure you want me to stay?”

“Oh, I do,” he said. “I know nothing about you. We could get to know each other a bit more, don’t you think?”

Yeah, with an unconscious man lying on the floor beside us, bleeding from his broken nose.

“And are you sure you want to get to know me?” I replied. He was two or three sizes too cocky, to be sure. I was about to add a sardonic quip, but instead, my beloved Dostoevsky’s words came to my mouth instantly. “The soul of another is a dark place,” I told him, as I turned around to walk away.

To my surprise, he replied immediately.

“And the Russian soul is a dark place,” he said, completing the quote.

I turned around to face him again. He had a weird look in his eyes, as if he had suddenly realized something. Finally, he found the words: “Are you Russian?”

An additional spark of interest. Being the pretty foreigner is good, I guess. But I still felt I was playing with fire. Hard, cool fire. I had to get out of there.

“I am,” I replied, “and you wouldn’t believe how dark my soul is.”

As I walked out of the door, through the corridor, and out of the pub into the cold night, I thought I had actually impressed him in the end.

And boy, he had certainly impressed
me
. It was good that I wouldn’t ever see him again. I’d had my share of dangerous men.

3. RULES TO LIVE BY

ACE

There’s nothing better than fucking up a cheating cretin and screwing two gorgeous bitches afterwards. Sadly, that’s not what happened that night.

Well, the fuck up a cheating cretin part
did
happen. It had been a while since the last time I broke a jaw, but I never lost the touch. His bone broke very satisfactorily under my fist, with a loud crack that made the girls gasp and the men lean back in their chairs. He fell down instantly, and he was unconscious before touching the ground. Red blood and red cards surrounded his inert body when I kicked him and made him roll away from me. On a corner of the room, the computer revealed his lie.

Nobody dupes Ace Hart. Or, if they do, they don’t stay in one piece for long. I didn’t get to be a billionaire by mingling with cheaters.

You betray me, I fuck you up. It’s a very simple rule. Men respect simple rules, and women seem to like them pretty well.

It’s because I live by simple rules that there were two gorgeous bitches beside me that night, eager for the game to finish so that they could fuck me. Veronica Redd, the blonde, and Bibi Faire, the brunette. Arantxa Black, the redhead, was not there that night. They didn’t even have the good sense to match their lastnames with their hair colors. I kept mistaking them with each other. They didn’t seem to mind.

“So,” Bibi asked, exploring my stubble with the back of her fingers, once the foreign girl had left, “do
we
win a prize tonight?”

“Of course.”

That’s what I should have said. “Of course.” Why the fuck not? They were gorgeous, and I’ve always been down for a good time. That’s a pretty simple rule too.

Simple, clear rules, and a strong hand to enforce them. That’s the way to a good life.

It took a while for me to understand this, though. When I was younger, I lived an unnecessarily complicated life. But that’s the past, and I live in the present. Who wants to go back to the past, after all? There are dark things in the past, and quite a bit of heartache. And you don’t become the ace of hearts by having your heart broken. In fact, you need to break some hearts on your way to becoming the ace. Not yours.
Other
hearts. You keep your own heart intact.

It’s weird that I’m repeating all of this to myself now, because when Vanina Vokhtazin appeared on the doorframe that night, reeking of alcohol and barely dried tears, it was like the past had broken the fabric of the present to pay me an unexpected visit. And my heart skipped a beat.

An apparition from the past, or something very much like it
, I thought as I contemplated her gorgeous body and tried not to get lost in her big dark eyes.
Color me impressed.

And then she left, and life recovered its usual rhythm and texture. Only not quite.

“No. There’s no prize tonight,” I said, waving away Bibi’s hand and sitting up without even looking at her. My eyes were still fixated on the empty doorframe, as if the pretty foreigner were about to appear again at any moment.

She looked so much like Rhonda...

On my way to the top, I have been able to get rid of almost everything that could make me weak. I stood strong and steadfast, I faced all obstacles, and I rose. I’m stronger than ever now. But I still have a few weaknesses.

Dead girls from the past named Rhonda, with big dark eyes and curly hair, who took the sunlight with them on their way to an early grave, are one of them.

And Vanina Vokhtazin looked
so much
like Rhonda.

Rule number one is no mercy for cheaters. Rule number two is you keep your heart safe. Intact. Protected. Out of the game.

Until that night, I had been able to enforce both rules.

Until that night.

4. THE RUSSIAN BRIDE

VAN

Many years ago

About the only thing I liked in Arzamas was the Gaidar Museum, because I had read Arkady Gaidar’s books for kids and I was fascinated about the life of someone who had made a living out of writing books. I visited the place where he had lived and spent long minutes staring at everything, getting soaked in the atmosphere of the place. Otherwise, it was a sad neighborhood, with more churches than people, or so it seemed to me as I grew up.

But a little girl does not decide where she lives, at least as long as she’s a little girl. And when we lost Mother (to death) and Father (to abandonment), even though I was not so little anymore, it fell upon Misha to decide what we would do with our lives, even though I was four years older. It didn’t matter that it was always me straightening his path, mending his mistakes and forgiving his slip ups; he was male, so he made all the decisions.

So we stayed in Arzamas for sad, long years. Misha became a
gopnik
, one of those young jobless guys who turn into smalltime criminals as a natural result of a long succession of days and nights pointlessly roaming the streets. I worked at a grocery store, then cleaning a couple of nice houses downtown, and in my free time I devoured old books from the library and the used bookstore.

I wanted to be like the women in those novels and short stories written by Russian men long years ago: self-assured, enigmatic, impossibly beautiful and secretly tragic. Some of them were utterly dismissive of their many suitors, others suffered dramatically for things that a modern girl would find silly, but all of them had such a deep soul, a twisted nature that revealed the highs and lows of human condition.

As I grew up, I had my suitors too, but I was never dismissive. A friend of ours, Piotr, was in love with me, and it was so painful to turn him down only to see him come back again with some silly argument why I should be with him... He was dramatic too, I could almost touch his suffering at my denial, but there was nothing I could do about it, only try to be soft and gentle in my repeated
no
s.

The horizon was closing around us very fast as we went from childhood to adolescence and from there to young adulthood. One day, as categorically as years before he had decided that we would stay there, Misha decided that Arzamas was not the place where we would find a future after all. Not a week had passed before we were on a train that would take us from Oblast to the big city.

* * *

But St Petersburg was not much better. We ended up in a tiny old apartment in the suburbs, where the
gopniki
roamed the streets too. Actual jobs were scarce and we had to struggle constantly to get by. We grew up, became adults, and we still couldn’t get out of our woes. Misha went to jail once, twice, thrice, and every time he got out, he returned to the gang life. There was no other way for him, for us.

We had almost given up to despair when he came up with the idea. By sheer chance, he’d met some people who ran a website offering brides to people in the US, he said. Men in the US would pay good money, up to fifty thousand dollars, for a girl like me.

“Misha,” I asked him incredulously, “are you saying you’d sell me to a prostitution ring?”

“Oh, no, no,” he said, blushing instantly. “How could you think that, Vanina? This is real. It’s a site where you can get to know the guy and decide if you like him. You can be talking for months. Look,” he said, and fired up his old laptop. He had bookmarked the site, and he already had an account, since he logged in in front of me. “Take a tour of the site. You’ll see it’s all good. Vanina, you’re beautiful and interesting. Men will flock to your profile. You’ll be able to choose anyone you want. This could change our lives.”

I was not convinced, partly because I didn’t consider myself that beautiful (you’d easily find thousands of Russian women who look like supermodels, with perfect faces and bodies, unlike me), but I started browsing the site all the same, familiarizing myself with the system. The people who ran it took a commission from every contract, and the girl got the rest. She could back down at any time, though; in that case, she’d still be paid a small sum for her time, and the client would be reimbursed part of his money, without the commission. This way, only the client could lose, but the site owners and the brides would at least break even.

I had never met a girl who had been sold as a mail-order bride (or Internet bride in this day and age), but what I saw on the site assuaged my doubts. There was a mechanism to report harassers and block annoying clients; also a phone number to talk with the site owners themselves. But of course, since Misha knew them personally, there was an additional layer of safety for me. “They are serious, Vanina,” he insisted. “Please, think about it.”

“Misha,” I said, “I don’t wanna leave you. I won’t.”

“But Vanina,” he said, holding my hands and looking me in the eye, “this is a new life for both of us. Think about it! A new life for
you
in America, and some money for me to build something here. I will start a business, I will come clean and forget about the gang and everything. No more dangerous people around, no more visits from the police, no more phone calls from jail. I promise.”

“So you’ll keep the money?”

“Just part of it. If you agree.” His eyes were big and needy.

If I did this, I would be doing it as much for him as for me. That I knew from second one. It was not the money for me; it was the
freedom
, it was the
possibilities
. Every time I looked through the window and saw grey buildings barely contrasting with the grey roads and the grey sky, I wanted to leave this place forever, but Misha was what kept me anchored to this grey life. Misha and not knowing what else to do, where else to go.

Well, perhaps there was a what and a where now, and a way to help Misha, even if that meant that we’d be separated.

Because it meant that we would be separated. He had put it in those terms, at least implicitly.

“Misha, why don’t you come with me?”

He flinched at the question. He looked hurt. “I can’t,” he whispered almost inaudibly.

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

I realized, even before he said it, that I knew why indeed. Misha had been in jail several times. He would never be admitted in the United States. That door had closed for him long ago. He looked down to hide the tears, but tears were flowing from my eyes too, as I hugged him and held him tight.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I said, and then again and again, as the sun disappeared in the West like a red-gold promise.

* * *

Two years ago

As soon as I got off the plane, I knew Steve was there. He had sent me no less than six messages in the previous minutes, and I got them as I disabled the airport mode. He had bought the phone for me on the Internet. It had a US line and a full plan he was paying for. It was a surprise, and the package got stolen as soon as it arrived to our modest apartment in the suburbs of St Petersburg. Misha had to chase the thief and make him turn the damn thing back at knifepoint. My brother is like that.

I had seen Steve’s face, of course, because we had exchanged pics before the deal was done. We had also chatted once, through that same phone, just a week before I got on the plane to leave Russia forever. But seeing him in person was kind of a letdown. I mean, I already knew he was kind of average, but his smile when he saw me was... too innocent, maybe, as if he was clueless about the ways of the world.

I have a master’s degree in the ways of the world, of course. You learn quite a bit about life when you grow up in Arzamas, then your mother dies, then your father leaves and your brother becomes a
gopnik
. Roaming the frozen streets of our decadent hometown, fighting for every little thing, moving to St Petersburg and having to keep fighting, left me with very little space in my heart for believing in fairy tales.

And that’s what I was to him: a fairy tale. A princess come from the winter lands to instill some warmth into his heart. Even the premise was stupid, but then again, we’re all stupid when we are in love.