by Vivian Wood
And Damir? Do I want to let him win, too?
I wrench myself out of Misha’s embrace and snap my fingers in front of his face. “My head can overrule my heart like that.”
He doesn’t blink but his face becomes a cold, hard mask once more. “Yes. I know it can, but it doesn’t matter. You’ve got no choice but to do exactly what I tell you to do.”
I stare at Misha, wondering how he managed to hide this part of himself from me for so long. I think back to when I first met him, the relentless manner in which he pursued me, the way he made me give into him using words and badgering, money and affection, and I realize that this Misha was there all along. I just refused to see him. I think he might be capable of anything, and what power do I have? I’ve got a sprained wrist. Bandaged knees. A stupid dress and high heels that I put on to please him. Misha’s got all power, and all the time in the world to do whatever he wants with me.
“I only slept with you because I thought my life depended on it.”
“Liar. I never asked you for sex. You were the one who went down on your knees before me in my car. You were the one who insisted on coming to my room in Croatia.”
I pull back my right arm and slap him hard across the face, and his head snaps to one side. Pain explodes in my palm but it’s a good, powerful pain. It reminds me of who I am. “I had to do those things. You brother threatened to kill me.”
A muscle in Misha’s jaw flexes and when he turns back to me and his eyes smolder with fury. “Sit down, Ciara.”
“No. I won’t do anything you say ever again. Do you know how much of a mindfuck this has been, you fucking asshole? I have been killing myself to look good for you and make you happy so that you keep paying me so I don’t die, and you’ve been touching me and kissing me like you actually care about me. And now this?” I gesture around at the aircraft, at him. “You kidnap me, and then try to feed me a whole new pack of lies? Are you insane? Of course I don’t believe anything you say.”
He points at the ground between us and says, “This is about keeping you safe, the best way I know how. We both have to make sacrifices now to stay alive.”
“We have to make sacrifices? What have you had to sacrifice in all of this? You didn’t have to pretend to be dumb and happy and a constant delight and waste hours putting on makeup and choosing cute outfits, all for your benefit. You didn’t have to lie awake at night worrying about what your feelings mean, and see blood and death and blades whenever you close your eyes.”
“Ciara—”
My voice becomes so loud and shrill I’m sure lifeforms can hear me in outer space. “Fuck you, Mikhail!”
The words ring in the air for a moment but are drowned out by the muted roar of the jet.
Misha says quietly, “Damir sent those men after you and he would have kidnapped you tonight, so now we’re going someplace he will never be able to hurt you. We’re both going to start again, together.”
He holds out his hand to me, palm up, an intensity in his expression like he’s trying to convince me of what he’s saying through sheer force of will.
My chest is heaving but I try to rein in my emotions. I need to frame this in terms that he might be able to get his Neanderthal brain around.
“I don’t believe anything you’re saying and I never will. Even if you’re telling the truth about Damir Ravnikar—which I don’t believe for a second—you have been lying about who you are this entire time. You had sex with me multiple times under false pretenses and I’ll never forgive you for that. Ever.”
Chapter Seventeen
Misha
“Even the most unenlightened man should be able to understand that women don’t like to be lied to and then taken to bed, Misha.” She says my name with venom and hatred. “And that’s the last time I’ll ever call you that.”
Her blonde curls are tumbling over her shoulders and there are two bright spots burning in her cheeks. She’s never looked more beautiful and I want to take her now, here on this sofa, letting her work all her fury out with her nails on my back as I pound into her. I could reach out to her now and take hold of her and feel her struggling in my arms, her body no match for mine. I could do anything I wanted to Ciara and no one would stop me. Certainly not her with her injuries, in her skimpy dress and no weapon at hand other than the pair of high heels on her feet.
It’s what Damir would do. It’s what my father would do. The Ravnikar way.
She must see the desire in my eyes as her lips part with shock and she takes half a step back, her face draining of color.
The furious impulse passes a moment later. I’m not Damir or my father. I move away from her and glance at my watch, and in my peripheral vision I see her sag in relief.
She really thought I was going to hurt her.
“We’ll be arriving at our destination in six hours,” I say crisply. “There are things we need to discuss.”
She wraps her arms around herself, shaking her head. “I don’t want to talk about anything. I just want to go home.”
“You were nearly abducted tonight. It’s not safe for you to be in London.”
“I was abducted tonight.”
Frustration crests in me like a wave. We can’t keep going around in circles. I need to start from the beginning and lay out everything for her so she understands who I am, who Damir is, and exactly why she’s in such terrible danger. I sit down on the sofa and pat the cushion next to me, inviting her to join me. She doesn’t.
Fine, she can stand while I talk. I reach for my laptop and sort through my emails until I find the one that I want.
“The first time I saw you,” I say quietly, looking up at her, “was at your parents funeral. I wasn’t there,” I add, as her eyes widen in surprise, “but Damir filmed you and he emailed me the footage the next day, wanting to know if there were any accountants or lawyers you were surreptitiously meeting with. He was certain you were hiding money from him.”
I pass her my computer and she takes it. I watch her face carefully as she reads Damir’s email and watches the footage. Her face goes blank in surprise.
When the shock at seeing herself passes, Ciara hands back my laptop and huffs angrily, “There is no money. I’ve told him a dozen times that I was left with nothing after my parents died. Why do you think I’ve been doing all this?” She plucks at the hem of her dress and scrunches her hair.
“I know, Ciara,” I say, hard and heavy, and then pause. The next part is hard to explain: the impulse that made me set this whole scheme into motion. I take a small tangent and tell her something she doesn’t know about me. “I’ve worked with Damir for nearly twenty years. We were young when we started Ravnikar Enterprises, and we built it up from nothing. The things I do everyday at work are ambitious and fulfilling, but I don’t deal with people very often and I don’t really know how to. You saw how I was the first few interactions we had.”
Seemingly against her will, her eyes soften. “Yes, I remember. You were stuffy and rude.”
Looking back, I don’t know how we made it past that first date. I disliked her as much as she disliked me. I didn’t know then the pleasures of talking to Ciara, of making her smile. I wonder if I ever will again. “When I looked at you in that footage, I saw someone who didn’t deserve to become embroiled in our cutthroat schemes and ruthless ambition, and I wanted to help you.”
Ciara looks away, vulnerable and uncomfortable, and for the first time I appreciate that she was orphaned at the start of all this. She’s a strong young woman who’s used to taking care of herself, but all the same it must have been a shock, knowing that she only had her own wits and resources to protect herself against a man like Damir.
“Why did you want to help me?” she whispers.
I shake my head, remembering Bethany’s ironic comment when I told her my impulse to help Ciara. “Oh, sir, what’s that on you? Is that—a conscience?” “It wasn’t just one thing. You looked like you needed my help, and I was growing weary of Damir. Weary, and afraid
.”
She looks at me in surprise.
“It’s the truth. Damir consumes people like wildfire and sooner or later I know he would have turned on me. So I’ve turned on him first.”
There’s so much more to the strange relationship between Damir and me. Our upbringing in Slovenia. My parents’ relationship to each other. To us. His disappearance. My coming to work with him. But I try to focus on just this part first, so Ciara knows how she became tangled up in it.
“My PA gave me the idea about the sugar website and I thought it was worth a try. She knew you from class and so she went to put the idea in your head.”
Being reminded of that day must be painful as Ciara’s face creases as if she’s about to cry, but she holds the tears back. I stand up and go to her, but she fends me off with her uninjured hand.
“It just hurts, hearing you admit how much you lied,” she says in a thick voice. “Don’t, please.”
Unwillingly, I sit down and keep talking. “I knew you’d have to face Damir to give him money and I thought the less you knew about where it came from the safer you’d be. I was wrong.”
She shakes her head, as if despairing of something. “I actually considered telling you about Mr. Ravnikar extorting money from me, but I didn’t because I thought I’d be manipulating you. God, I’m such an idiot. It was you who was manipulating me all along.”
At the beginning, yes, but that doesn’t mean that everything about our relationship was a lie. My feelings for her aren’t a lie. I lean forward, beseeching her. “Ljub—” I cut myself off seeing the furious look in her eye. “Ciara. Everything I said and did after our first date was the truth. I wasn’t pretending to enjoy your company or find you beautiful. I thought about you every minute of every day, wishing I could do more for you. Trying to find ways to protect you from Damir. Feeling guilty about how little you knew about me.”
She immediately bridles. “You expect me to believe you felt guilty about sleeping with me under false pretenses?”
I hate the outrage in her voice but at least she seems to be open to what I’m telling her, even if she’s struggling with some of the details. “I didn’t like deceiving you. I gave you honesty when I touched you. Every kiss was the truth.”
Her eyes drop and I think I see another flush of color in her cheeks. She’s silent for a moment, considering what we’ve said. “What were you going to do after our time was up and my debt was paid off? Were you ever going to tell me that you’re Damir Ravnikar’s brother?”
It’s something I’ve thought about so many times, and every time I made a new resolution. “At first, I was going to let you go. That was my intention. Then I started to imagine that I might keep you. Forever. Because I love you.”
“You don’t love me.”
“Yes, I do. I’ve loved you since Dubrovnik. I wish we’d met any other way.”
A wistful expression crosses her face, as if she’s imagining the same thing that I am. That we’d met innocently on a dating site, or perhaps in a bar one night. That we’d both worked hard to overcome our prejudices and insecurities, just as we have, and then that we’d fallen in love, just as we have. That there was no Damir. No extortion. No lies.
I think we might have been happy.
Ciara snaps out of this happy daydream before I do. “Well, that was a lovely fairy story to while away some of the flight. I think I’ll see what else can entertain me until we land and you tell the pilot to take us straight back to London.”
She turns and strides to the other end of the plane, her gait loose-limbed as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. But her clenched hands by her sides are white-knuckled.
I consider going after her and talking until I make her believe me, but I decide against it. She’s got a lot to think over between now and when we land. I don’t want to force her to come with me, but I will if I have to. There’s no way I’m letting her go back to London to face her death, or worse.
I set out from the beginning to protect her and I’m going to do it whether she likes it or not.
I go back to my laptop and keep working on the ruination of my brother, feeling oddly calm about everything that has happened, and everything that lays ahead of me. I’m surprised that drugging and kidnapping my lover hasn’t filled me with misgivings. Maybe I’m more like Damir and my father than I thought I was.
A few hours later I glance at my watch and then up to the front of the plane where Ciara’s sitting. She hasn’t moved, apart from to recross her legs or shift in her seat, and her eyes are fastened on a spot directly in front of her.
I get up and go and stand by her seat. “We’re going to land shortly. Do you have any questions before we change planes?”
She shakes her head, still looking straight ahead. “I’m not changing planes. I’m going back to London.”
There isn’t time for persuasion. I’m going to have to force her. “Take off your clothes.”
Ciara’s eyes snap to mine and she regards me with a look of mingled fear and disgust, but I don’t care. Better alive and hating me than dead.
“Screw you, Mikhail.”
I lean down and put my face very close to hers and say in a low, seething voice. “I’m not asking. Do it or I’ll strip you myself.”
Chapter Eighteen
Ciara
I fucking hate him. This has to be some kind of record, confessing your love to a man and then doing a one-eighty on your feelings in a matter of hours.
We disembark the plane with Misha’s coat covering both of our heads, and walk quickly down the stairs to the waiting car. My high heels flash in the thin morning light and a brisk wind blows. Misha hasn’t told me where we’ve landed but it’s cold here, and winter has cast its pall over the sky and landscape. Are we somewhere in the Arctic circle perhaps, like Northern Canada? Or the southern hemisphere?
We get into the car and it speeds off along the tarmac to the gates. The moment we’re through the barricade another car races toward us. There’s a screech of tire rubber as the unknown car cuts us off, and three men leap out, brandishing handguns.
Misha points a finger at the pilot and co-pilot, dressed in our clothes and currently getting out of the car with their hands up. “This is why we changed clothes.”
Inside the jet, I put a hand over my mouth and shrink away from the cabin window. I don’t want to see this. The co-pilot’s uniform is baggy on my body. Beside me Misha, dressed in the pilot’s uniform, grips my arm and holds me in place. “No. I want you to see this.”
In the distance I see the co-pilot, wearing my dress, pull a gun out from behind my clutch and fire six shots in rapid succession. One of the attackers goes down immediately. The pilot, dressed in Misha’s dark suit, grapples with another of the assailants.
I feel my heart beating in my throat as I watch the scene. I thought Misha was being needlessly dramatic when he told me we were going to switch clothes and the pilot and co-pilot were going to take our places. It doesn’t seem real. That could be us down there, fighting for our lives.
“Are they going to be all right?” I ask in a tight voice.
One of the men brutally backhands the co-pilot across the face. He responds by driving the point of my high-heel into his attacker’s crotch, and the ill-fitting shoe flies off. He slams the hilt of his gun into the back of his attacker’s head as he doubles over. The man slumps to the ground, unconscious.
“Both of them are ex-Royal Air Force. They’ll be fine.”
The pilot dispatches the last assailant with a brutal punch and suddenly the fight is over. We watch as the pilot and co-pilot drag the dead or unconscious bodies into the back seat of their car, and then drive back to us.
Misha stands up, and his face is tight and cold. I can’t sense any emotion from him now at all, and it disturbs me. It’s as if he’s decided to switch everything off so he can focus on the task at hand.
I turn to face him with a shiver. “Who were those men?”
He reaches over and
pulls a blanket off one of the couches and passes it to me. “They were probably local gang members, hired by Damir to take us prisoner. I doubt he’s had time to get here himself. Not yet.”
“But how did he know where we are?” As I wrap the blanket around myself, I think I see grim satisfaction in his eyes that I’m asking these questions, and I add quickly, “This doesn’t mean I believe what you’ve told me.”
He flicks me a sardonic look. “This is my jet. It’s not hard to track a plane via air-traffic control systems when you know its registration.”
The pilot and co-pilot come aboard. Both are disheveled, and the co-pilot’s nose is bleeding. I want to go to him, say sorry, ask if he’s all right, but he grabs a stack of paper napkins and holds them to his face, matter-of-fact. Everyone is calm except for me.
Misha motions to me, brisk and authoritative. “Come on. We need to get out of here before Damir becomes suspicious about why those men haven’t reported in to him.”
The pilot passes him a handgun and shoulder holster, which Misha buckles on and then covers with the pilot’s jacket.
I stay where I am. “Are you asking me or telling me?”
Misha straightens the collar of his shirt. “Ciara. Please don’t make this difficult.”
He’s stopped saying ljubica. I’m just Ciara now. I know I told him not to use that endearment, but it still sounds strange from his mouth. “I never said I was going anywhere with you. In fact, I distinctly remember you promising to take me back to London if I listened to your nonsense.”
Misha leans down to me and says, “Do you think that was a welcoming party out there? If you don’t stand up and start walking I will haul you over my shoulder and carry you to that car myself.”
I stare up at Misha, weighing my options. I’ve got no money, no passport, no phone. I don’t even know what country we’re in. There was a shootout less than five minutes ago a few hundred feet from where I’m standing. Would the pilots come to my aid if I starting kicking and screaming and trying to get away from Misha? I glance at them and they’re talking in low voices to each other, not bothered in the least by the fact their boss is looming over me in a threatening manner.