by Nicole Fox
And best of all…
Desperate.
So from now on, we’re going to do things my way.
It starts with five little words:
“Let me own you, kitten.”
KOSTYA is a standalone, single dad mafia billionaire romance.
Kostya
Yeblya vecherinki. Fucking parties.
I don’t mind what I do for a living—the weapons, the threats, the blood. I don’t mind business deals in crowded boardrooms or surreptitious beatings in back alleys.
What I hate is people. I hate parties. Fundraisers. Endless goddamn galas.
Each one is the same as the next. The inane small talk. The glad-handing. The smiling—the endless, fake, thousand-megawatt-grin-with-expensive-veneers-fucking smiling—until I want to pound my fist against anything in striking distance.
And yet here I am, in yet another ballroom, for yet another party, with candles lit on every table, clinking silverware against fine china plates, the chandeliers’ dim light casting shadows on the corners while a spotlight throbs in time to the music.
I’m here because this cause is my cause. One close to my heart.
And still … Yeblya vecherinki.
“Kostya!” A blonde, in a room full of them, wanders over with her manicured nails like claws closing in on my Armani-clad arm. She’s dressed in sequins and diamonds with hair piled on top of her head and shoes that add another four inches to her already impressive height. Her skin has the same fake, store-bought tan as every woman in the room, but her confidence gives her a glow of superiority absent in most of the others.
I can’t think of her name. Charlotte would know, if only I’d thought to bring her. My cock twinges at the thought of my curvy, sexy assistant. I’d rather be glad-handing her ass instead of the idiots surrounding me.
But instead of cursing my oversight or concentrating on the pang of lust in my nether regions, I smile at the blonde and wait for the requisite kiss of greeting on my cheek. American women always go for the cheek first.
As soon as her lips peck against my skin, I pull back and look down. She’s fortyish, slender, and dull. But she reeks of money, and since her checkbook is undoubtedly the reason she made the guest list, I suppose I can be accommodating.
“I heard a rumor,” she drawls conspiratorially. Her voice is soft, toned by years of good breeding and grooming on the Los Angeles social circuit. “I heard you are designing the neonatal wing.”
Once, I was an architect, a builder, a man who could take nothing and make it into something awe-inspiring. Now, as don of the Zinon Bratva, I do the opposite: I take those who oppose me and turn them into nothing.
Not that this expensively perfumed witch knows any of that. No one does. To her, I am merely Kostya Zinon, elusive financier and billionaire property developer. It’s best that way for all involved.
“Oh, darling”—I still can’t think of her name—“you shouldn’t listen to rumors.”
She leans in close, the smell of cranberry vodka on her breath repulsively strong. “Why don’t you meet me in my room? You can teach me the error of my ways.” She adds the last part in a whisper against my throat as her fingernail traces a line over my jaw.
I chuckle more at her audacity than at her offer. Her husband is across the dance floor, a senator working the guests—playing up his part in the improved relations of our countries—while his wife works her hand around my bicep. She’s all but screaming that she wants to be fucked.
To be fair, my cock is hard, and this woman is standing close enough to me that perhaps she notices it. The erection is not for her, though. I’ve been wrestling all night with the memory of Charlotte, bent over on hands and knees on the floor of my office this afternoon, picking up a cup of pens she clumsily knocked off my desk. The creamy white of her thighs beckoned to me as the black pencil skirt crept higher and higher and …
The witch takes my sigh as an agreeable moan and leans in to purr against my earlobe. “Room 306. In an hour.” She gives a tug to my sleeve, a slow wink, then sashays with heels clicking to where her husband is standing, oblivious to his wife’s adulterous scheming.
Stupid American. More money than sense.
I do not suffer such foolishness. If I let myself be the kind of man who took up offers like that, I would never have clothes on. I’d be too busy diving into every blonde made of plastic and Botox that hit on me—with her husband thirty feet away—while her cloud of Chanel failed to cover the stench of cigarette smoke. My businesses would fail. The flow of money would dry up, and the Sieczkarek Hospital would have to look elsewhere for the funding for the new neonatal intensive care unit I’m financing.
Better to keep my distance.
My fingers drift absentmindedly to my cufflinks—diamond-encrusted Russian brown bears, the national animal of my country—a gift from Charlotte. Once again, my mind flashes on an image of her bent over my desk as she straightened up what few accoutrements I keep in my office. The soft curve of her hips in that midnight black pencil skirt. The image alone is enough to send another rush of blood to my cock.
I need to get my fucking mind straight. Screwing my assistant is a recipe for disaster, just as much as heading to Room 306 in an hour to tango with a senator’s wife would be. I plan on doing neither. And yet, my libido is begging me to reconsider the former option.
I’m standing in a room full of the overdressed elite—enough money and power circulating around me to give any social climber a hard-on—but it is the mental image of my assistant’s soft, pale flesh that is distracting me from the task at hand. I am remembering how she stumbled over the area rug in my office—the one she insisted I needed to “breathe some life into the room”—as she stepped back to pick a mote of dust from the shoulder of my suit. A simple touch, an innocent one at the time, but as I think back on it now, it feels less pure. More tense. Less like grooming, and more like foreplay.
I caught her when she tripped against me and held on a moment longer than necessary, but letting her go wasn’t easy. Not when I wanted to fist my hand in the roots of her hair and yank back to expose that soft, tender neck. Not when I wanted to hike her skirt up over her hips and spread her thighs farther than she’d ever spread them for another man.
But I had to let go of her. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from fucking her senseless then and there.
What I force myself to remember is this: the feeling of wanting to drive my cock into Charlotte is no more than that—a feeling. I know damn well what happens when I let my emotions drive my decision-making. Even an emotion as base and reductive as sexual desire can be dangerous when misapplied.
No, my thoughts are best kept to tonight’s work, and far away from young, innocent Charlotte.
I let out a long breath and finish the three fingers of whiskey in my glass.
I close my eyes to reorient myself. Control, Kostya, I admonish silently. Get your shit together. Charlotte’s curves fade away. The cold hard steel of concentration takes her place.
I need no limitations; I will tolerate no distractions. I will make room only for the presence of mind to do what needs to be done.
My silent meditation prevents me from immediately noticing the man coming for me. One rabid foot tangles with the other as he falls forward. His champagne spews on the front of my jacket and shirt, as the bulb of the glass shatters into my chest.
Clumsy bastard.
He catches himself and stands upright unsteadily, holding the stem of what’s left of his glass. I clench my fist, ready—always ready—to feel the crunch of his jaw beneath my fingers. He looks up, and mumbles condescendingly through fat, drunken lips, “Oh, big man, too slow to get out of the way.”
He gives me a petulant shove, and my head throbs with the need to crush him.
“Move!” he snarls.
He would be wise to exercise more caution. One more shove, and he’ll find himself in a dumpster by morning.
“Excuse me,” I
reply. I’m polite because we don’t need a crowd. A simple warning will do.
For now.
I hand him a new flute of champagne from the dozens on the bar and hang on when he tries to take it from me. I fix him with a cold stare. “This will be your last glass and then you will leave.”
“Wha—”
I keep my voice low, calm, but unyielding. “You will leave, or your family will find pieces of you on every beach on the West Coast. Am I understood, or would you like a more hands-on demonstration?” My voice is quiet enough for only his ears, but the anger vibrates through every accented syllable.
I’ve always found the fear my voice inspires in these people to be funny. Too many evil Russians in the American cinematic diet, I would guess. But the truth of the matter is far simpler: I could do exactly what I am threatening. I know it, and he knows that I know it. His pupils dilate and his breath wheezes out his nose.
He fears me.
Good.
He nods slowly, sets his glass on the bar behind me, and stumbles to the door. I don’t know who he is, but he certainly knows who I am. And that’s enough.
I check my watch, a classic Volstok Amphibia given to me by my ex-wife on our wedding day. Yelisey Rusnak, my advisor, is already at the door, earpiece in, connected to a microphone in my lapel.
“Get the car,” I growl under my breath to him. I’ve had enough. I want to leave before any more of these overbred scum try to drag their grubby fingers across my suit.
I see him in the distance and we make eye contact. He nods once. I walk toward him. Only a bit smaller than my six feet four inches, Yelisey is as imposing as any man I know. Women find him irresistible, and I find him indispensable. But only one of those two parties knows the real Yelisey, and I hired him for his ferocity more than his knack for separating housewives from their panties.
His eyes sweep the room, taking in faces and associating them with names. For Yelisey, danger lurks everywhere. The man stays on constant high alert. Another of his more valuable traits. At my approach, he spins to fall into step beside me and, along with tonight’s bodyguard, Geoffrey, leads me to the black SUV already waiting at the valet.
I climb inside with Yelisey beside me as Geoffrey walks around to take his place at the wheel. There is a glass window between us and the driver’s compartment, and Yelisey pushes the button to secure it into place.
He hands me a drink, whiskey in a glass tumbler, as we take off. “There are developments you should be aware of.”
I’m not worried, even though it’s bothered Yelisey enough to bring it up. I pay him to worry for me.
“Oh?” Though I look at him, he doesn’t return the favor. Fuck. Not a good sign.
“It’s Natasha.”
Oh. Fuck indeed.
Natasha. The one name guaranteed to cause a growl in my stomach. The shlyukha who waited until the dark of night to leave me three years ago.
“Where is she?” The words grind out of my throat, because finding her and wringing neck is all I’ve thought about since the morning I woke to find her wedding ring on the bureau by our bed.
“I’m sorry. She’s …” His pause is long enough that I sit forward.
“Spit it out, Yelisey,” I order. I brace myself. Anything that takes Yelisey this long to say isn’t anything I want to hear. Not that I want her back. I just want her to know that I know where to find her.
“She was in a car accident, Kostya. She’s dead.”
Dead.
My Natasha. The woman I loved since childhood. The woman I married. The woman who left me.
Dead.
I hear a crunch and look down to see that I’ve squeezed the whiskey tumbler in my hand so hard that it burst into shards. There is blood dripping down my fingertips. It’s my blood, I note distantly, but I don’t feel a thing. Not one fucking thing.
I can feel Yelisey’s eyes on me, too. If he were a different kind of man, his jaw might have dropped at the sudden and unexpected display of anger, the kind of raw rage I rarely show in the presence of my men. But he is not a different kind of man; he is Yelisey, top lieutenant of the Zinon Bratva, so he merely stares at me and lets his eyes do the talking.
The glass shards twinkle at my feet. They catch the light from the passing buildings as we drive further into the night. I stare at them and watch the blood drip, drip, drip from the neat slices in my palm where the glass cut me.
I feel something stirring in my gut. A maelstrom. A hurricane, a fucking typhoon of emotions so densely swirling that, even if I were so inclined, I’d never be able to untangle them. But I don’t want to untangle them. I just went them fucking gone.
So I open my mouth and roar. I roar into the silence of the vehicle and hear my own wordless rage reflected back into my ears. It’s a black hole of a roar and I know that Yelisey wants to say something, and perhaps Geoffrey does, too, but both of them know better than to question me.
My Natasha is dead, and all I can do is fucking scream into the night like the goddamn Grim Reaper as my palms drip blood and broken glass crunches as I stomp and stomp and pulverize it beneath my feet.
Shouldn’t I be sad? Withdrawn? I’m roaring like I was stabbed in the heart, but it doesn’t feel like a man roaring for his lost wife. It feels like the sound of a man who just suffered a mortal wound.
Had she not been a master manipulator, a fucking sociopath who blinded me with her affection then crippled me with her mind games, I might have mourned, not raged. But the time for that kind of vulnerability is long past.
There is only anger in my heart now. I have not truly loved Natasha for a long time. She left me and took that part of my soul with her.
Good fucking riddance.
Only when I can’t roar anymore and the ringing of my voice has long since quieted down does Yelisey speak up again. When he does, he is quiet, muted, direct. The blood on my hands has dried now, like a red trail of tears.
“One of the housemaids mentioned a call from the LAPD police. I didn’t want to call back blind, so I checked with our contacts in the FBI.” He clears his throat and pours his own drink. “She was living here under a fake name, Natasha Volstok.” He nods to my watch.
I force a thin smile. My throat is sore. Volstok. The brand of the watch she gave me. Another petty, cruel mind game, played by a petty, cruel woman.
Perhaps it is better that she is dead before I got my hands on her. Better for her, at least.
But Yelisey has more to say. Even though he isn’t saying it. We, too, have known each other since childhood and his apprehension is as physical as the presence of another person. But I can’t do anything to rush him, so I sit quietly. He’ll talk when he’s ready.
A few moments pass as we drive on into the night. He clears his throat eventually and adds, “In the news articles our contact sent over, there is mention of a child. A three-year-old girl.”
My heart leaps into my throat. That’s certainly one way to capture my attention. “A child?”
He nods.
“Three years old,” I echo.
“Yes, Kostya. Three years old.” Yelisey finishes off his drink in a loud gulp.
We both are thinking the same thing: three years old would almost certainly make the child mine.
I don’t know what the fuck to say to that. If a roar was all I could conjure for Natasha, then a child is certainly beyond my ability to appropriately respond to.
Not just a child, but my child. Alive and out there, somewhere, wondering what has happened to her parents. A child who is half me and half Natasha. She exists. That alone is a fucking marvel. To think that, after everything that happened with my ex-wife—the lies, the games, the rifts that opened in a million and one ugly, hidden places—a child came out of all that? I don’t have any goddamn clue how to process that piece of information.
But for right now, that is all it is. Information. I resolve to do what I have always done with information: find out how I can use it to my advantage.
�
�What is her name?”
“Tiana.”
Tiana. After my mother. Yet another of Natasha’s games
Yelisey continues, “Since Natasha has no living family”—my father made sure of that—“and the police called looking for you, it leads me to believe that Natasha has left some indication that the child is yours.”
I nod because words fail me. My child. The words roll through my head again and again like the tide.
Fuck. I feel a cold swirling in my gut. This does not bode well. But my decision was made from the moment Yelisey opened his lips.
There is only one thing I can do.
“Find her. Bring her to me.”
Yelisey, who never questions my orders, glances up. “Sir, you might …”
And because he’s never spoken out before, I’ll forgive him this once.
“I said find her.”
The words need no clarification. He’ll do as I say because thirty years of friendship mean nothing when it comes to disrespect. And he knows it.
I add, “And set up DNA testing. I want proof.”
What I actually want is to bring Natasha back to life so I can kill her with my bare hands. She denied me the one thing I’ve always wanted, the thing I can’t buy—a family of my own.
It appears that the joke is on me.
This time, Yelisey nods, and the only sound inside the car is the hum of tires on the road. I think of Natasha, of her eyes. Deep brown, flecked with ambers and golds at the pupil. Beautiful eyes that once, so long ago, held nothing but love of the purest, sweetest kind.
Or so I thought.
Right up until everything changed. Until the games began. Twisting me, begging me, hiding things from me. She wanted a dog, then a car. Then a house big enough so she never had to see the dog, and a chauffeur, so she never had to drive the car. Those earliest games were petty, but the objective was simply to see how far she could manipulate me. And when she knew … then, my world became her oyster.
I was blind to it then, an idiot, a fool who deserved to suffocate in the wool being pulled over my eyes.