The God: (A Dark Mafia Romance) (Bratva Blood Book 3)

by SR Jones

Instead, he looks to me and shakes his head. “Bohdan, I’m sorry, okay?”

  “Pretty sure I should be the one apologizing,” I mumble.

  “No, if you’d have tried to take Cassie away from me, I’d have done the same,” K says. “But she wanted to go, and this way, she’s going to be where we can keep track of her, where Ilya and Amber can make sure she’s okay.”

  “What did you do?” Cassie asks.

  “Nothing, but Damen can track her via her phone. Because I helped her leave, she’s accepted letting a friend of mine pick her up at the airport and sort a hotel out for her and her mother for a few weeks. That friend is Ilya. Your ballerina is in good hands, Bohdan. You can breathe, okay?”

  “I kind of can’t,” I joke. “Think you cracked a rib or two.”

  He winces. “Sorry.”

  “You’re all crazy,” Cassie grouches.

  Yes, we are. Now though, I have hope again that if I take Andrius’ advice, Dasha still might be mine.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Dasha

  Amber, or Amanda as she told me she was really called, is the most glamorous woman I’ve ever seen. She looks like an old-school movie star. Ilya, well, he’s plain scary. Konstantin levels of scary.

  I’m having lunch with Amanda, and Ilya has popped into the room twice. His house is incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it.

  The opulence is wonderful, and the décor is a heady mix of old and new, with the most stunning colors and fabrics. Their pool is to die for. I saw it for the first time last week, and my first thought was that Bohdan would probably hate it, and then I felt sad because he wasn’t here to see it.

  So many things here remind me of him, but so much is new. I don’t live in a cheap flat in a concrete block now. I’m staying in a luxury hotel amid the old town. I dine with mob bosses and their movie star lookalike, ex-stripper girlfriends.

  The city is wonderful, and I have something to focus on. I’m going to do a show, a finale to my career if you will. Lilliana organized it for me. It will be a series of solo performances, culminating in The Dying Swan. One night in St. Petersburg, one in London, New York, Milan, Berlin, and then finally, five nights in Paris. After the show, I need to figure out where to settle down so I can send for the rest of my babies. I miss my cats so badly.

  I’m getting paid a ridiculous amount of money to do the tour, so finances won’t be an issue. Lilliana has become a friend, and I talk to her often on FaceTime. Last night we were chatting when she said to me that she hoped I could work it out with Bohdan. She said she watched us the night we all had dinner, in Paris, which seems like forever ago now. He loves me, she said.

  I told her that Jasper thought she liked Bohdan. She laughed and said of course she noticed his looks, who wouldn’t, but that she loved her husband. She said that he might be older than her, and not handsome, but he was kind, loving, and interesting. Finding someone who interests you is so important, she told me.

  As Amanda and I finish up our meal, Ilya comes into the room. “Amanda, may I have a few moments with Dasha?” he asks in his deep baritone.

  She glances at me, and I nod.

  Amanda leaves us, and Ilya takes a seat opposite me. He drums his fingers on the table for a moment. “You know that your mother told Igor about Bohdan and his uncle skimming from the top?”

  I nod.

  “Do you know why she did it?”

  I nod again. “She thought she was saving me from Bohdan. Her actions were reprehensible, but she was scared for me.”

  He smiles at me gently. “No, Dasha, that’s not why she did it. She did it for money. Lots of it. Your mother went to Igor and asked him for the equivalent in today’s terms of around one hundred thousand dollars, give or take. Told him she had information he needed. She also did it because she needed to get away. She was in debt with some rather unsavory characters. Igor paid her the cash and sent you both to London. He also knew Jasper, vaguely, through the fact that Jasper liked to bring promising young girls over from Russia to Europe to dance. Not the sort of dancing you do, though, Dasha. I’m sure you understand what I mean.”

  Jasper helped traffic girls? No. He might be many things, but not that?

  “Jasper made his money and then got out of the game. He wanted to be respectable. Legit. And Igor told him about this dancer. A girl he would want to put on the best stages in the world, not the tawdriest. A girl who allegedly made grown men cry when she danced. Your mother, Igor, and Jasper planned your life from the very moment you landed in London. None of it was coincidence. You were his passport to respectability, but he kept some of his old connections via his lawyer.”

  “Is he a danger to me now?” I ask.

  Ilya shrugs. “I cannot say. From the point of view of whether he’s still got connections in our world, I would say no. He’s spent far too long trying to get away from it. Is he a bad person who would do anything to get what he wanted? Then yes, you might still be in danger.”

  He takes my hand in his. “I don’t know Bohdan well, but I know K thinks highly of him, and so does Andrius. For Andrius to have let Bohdan be a part of this venture they are forming, he must trust him. See good in him. I know what he did was wrong, but he did it with good intentions, of that I am sure. Did your mother ever do anything with good intentions? I think probably not, and yet you forgive her time and time again.”

  Then he stands, pats my shoulder, and leaves the room.

  Over the next few days as I get ready to leave for the tour, Ilya’s words keep coming back to me. I miss Bohdan all the time. The thing is, though, every time I picture him, I see him watching me as I lay in garbage, and the most intense sticky shame coats my tongue. How do I move on from that?

  The night before we fly to the first destination, I get a letter. It’s airmail from Greece.

  He wrote to me.

  In this day and age of emails and texts, it seems impossibly romantic to hold an airmail letter in my hands.

  I open it and start reading.

  Dasha,

  I hope this letter finds you well. I hear from our friend Ilya that you’re about to embark on a final tour. You will be amazing, Dasha. Your dancing is the most inspirational and beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You move like liquid, heartbreak, joy, pain, and freedom, all contained in this amazing network of flesh and bone that makes you special.

  When I saw you on the floor in that garbage, I was furious. Furious that Jasper could take something as precious as you. Something as rare and beautiful and wonderful as you and do that to you. That’s not how I think of you, though. I think of you as a dancer. As a daughter who loves her mother enough to forgive her time and time again. I think of you as an intelligent, fiercely talented woman who brought my friends to tears under the stars in Corfu.

  I think of you as the girl who lit up the dark Russian nights for me.

  I think of you on that stage in Paris, where you moved with a grace I’ve never seen before.

  You have nothing to be ashamed of, Dasha. I don’t profess to know exactly what you feel, but I think maybe I understand some of it. You hate that I saw you like that, but you have to know that’s not how I think of you. You know my past, what my father did, and what he let his friends do. Does that change how you view me? I hope not.

  You’re not an object of pity to me, Dasha. You’re an object of admiration. You are the girl I wrote this for.

  I miss you.

  I want you.

  I love you.

  Bohdan. X

  I crumple the paper in my hand, holding it to my heart as I sob, bent over. I miss, want, and love him too.

  Behind his letter is a small booklet, and I take it out and look at it. My heart misses a beat or two. It’s one of the story booklets he made for me as kids, like the one I still have. It’s short and sweet, with frankly terrible drawings in it, but I don’t care. It makes me cry more, and I know this will also become a precious, treasured item, along with the other booklet I kept all these years
, and this letter.

  The next day, as we head to the airport, I get the driver Ilya loaned us to stop the car. I hop out by the postbox and slot the thick letter in. It’s a reply to Bohdan, and it has the book I kept all this time in there. The one I treasured, which he will get to see once more for the first time in many years.

  My mother isn’t with me. I told her at the last minute I wanted to go alone on this tour. She wasn’t as upset as I thought she’d be. She has friends here who oooh and aaah over her plans to buy a big house in the city. I’m glad she won’t be with me. I don’t want her there. I’m not sure I’ll want her there ever again. Not after what Ilya told me.

  I haven’t confronted her. There is no point. My mother won’t admit her faults, and she’ll duck and dive and do anything to dismiss responsibility for all she’s done.

  When the plane takes off, I feel light. Free. Of her. Of the baggage of the past.

  The tour is a huge success, and every night I receive standing ovations, flowers, praise, and headlines in the papers of whichever city I am in.

  By the time I get to Paris, I’m a nervous wreck. Lilliana is with me backstage before every show. On the last night, she comes to me, placing her hands on my shoulders. “Is it because this is the last night that you’re so terrified, Dasha?”

  It shows, does it?

  I shake my head. “No. I invited a special guest to be here tonight. Sent him a ticket, and I’m not sure if he’ll come.”

  “Ah, I see. If you’re talking about who I think you are, I bet he will.”

  The music starts, and I blow out a deep breath. I’m about to go out onto that stage, and someone very important to me may or may not be in the audience below.

  I walk with Lilliana along the corridor, down the stairs, and to the backstage area. Once I’m at the side of the stage, I feel as if I’m going to be sick. God, if he doesn’t come, I’ll be a wreck, and if he does, I’ll be a wreck. Either way, tonight is going to be a hard performance to get through.

  The music swells to a dramatic crescendo, and that’s my cue to get on stage. I hug Lilliana and then walk out. As the curtain rises, I stare out into the front row of seats, and my heart sinks. There in front of me, a beacon of lost hope, is an empty seat.

  I pushed him away. Our whole history has been me running away from him, and I did it again. It seems this was one time too far.

  Why did he write me, though, if he had no intention of being with me? Maybe it was a trick? Or perhaps he’s changed his mind since then?

  You can do this, I tell myself. Put it all into the dance. The Dying Swan should be a breeze the way I’m feeling inside. I strike my pose, and to the side I hear rustling in the wings. I turn, expecting to see Lilliana still watching me, but instead my heart stops.

  Right there, almost close enough to touch, is the man I’ve been waiting to see every single performance.

  Bohdan.

  He isn’t in his seat because he’s right here. Our eyes meet, and he smiles at me and then he lifts his arms and lets some leaves fall.

  Oh shit, he’s going to make me cry. He’s sprinkled some magic dust, the way he used to when I would dance and twirl in the woods for him.

  I sniff hard, which isn’t remotely Prima Ballerina like, and realize I’ve missed my first two steps. Damn. I get my head in the game and start the dance.

  I dance like I’ve never danced before. Every single move, every tiny nuance, is all for Bohdan.

  When I’m finished, it’s not the rapturous applause of the crowd, the standing ovation, or the flowers thrown onto the stage that matter to me. It’s Bohdan’s open arms as I run to him, and he holds me close.

  “Come home,” he says.

  Two such simple words, but they mean everything to me.

  “Yes,” I answer. “I’ll come home.”

  He kisses me and the crowd are roaring for an encore, but I don’t care. I’m right where I need to be.

  I’m home.

  Epilogue

  Bohdan

  Corfu

  The plans for the school are coming along nicely. Dasha will have room for twenty children, and each intake will be able to stay for six weeks. She’ll run two six-week dance camps. One in the spring from May to mid-June. The second from September to mid-October. She doesn’t want to run the schools in the height of the summer heat. Even with air conditioning, she says getting young children to dance daily in that kind of heat won’t be healthy.

  Most days, I still can’t believe she’s here. Most days, I still can’t believe I am either. Mere months ago, I was beating people up on the regular for K and plotting with Vasily. Now, I’m spending my days in the sunshine, helping Dasha build her dream, and helping Andrius build something new.

  The best bit, though, is that where Dasha and I are building our house, there’s land to grow food and keep chickens. K jokingly calls me The Farmer now. I don’t give a shit. There’s no more honest days’ work than growing your own food. I’ve got a ton of books on small holdings, and I’m looking into it. Even better, the land we’ve bought has an old olive grove on it, and there’s a local olive oil producing factory. I’m going to bottle our own oil.

  Dasha’s mother is living in St. Petersburg now, thanks in part to Ilya, who has hooked her up with a lot of old society dears. She thinks she is someone important there. I don’t give a shit so long as she’s not in my hair. I’ll never forgive her for what she did. I’ll always welcome her here cordially, for Dasha, but forgiveness? Not on the cards.

  She’s fucking lucky I love Dasha the way I do because the last person who betrayed me in half the way she did, I broke their legs.

  Dasha knows it all. I told her. I was worried she had some sort of rosy picture of who I was, and I wanted us to move forward being totally honest, so I told her. I explained that I was basically a fixer for K and that it entailed me using violence to protect his, and my, interests. She took it surprisingly well. She asked me if I’d be doing any fixing moving forward, and I told her other than the wonky shelves in the house we were staying in, no.

  She’d laughed and said okay, and that was that.

  It still all feels too good to be true.

  She’s out walking with Mr. Bojangles while I finish up some work on my portfolio. I’ve also been asked by K to look at some of his investments, and Cassie asked me yesterday if I’d start investing a portion of her wage for her.

  K is paying Cassie three hundred thousand euros a year to run the office. Now, call me stupid, but I’m pretty sure that’s not an office manager’s salary. When I causally mentioned it to K, he said he wanted Cassie to be financially independent, and with that wage, she could save, seeing as she has no outgoings. Within a few years she’ll have enough money to do what she wants.

  It surprised me. K’s a control freak, and I thought he’d have wanted to ensure she relied on him financially. I kind of put that out there. He told me that he knows she’ll stay, and then he smiled a dark smile and told me she relied on him. Needed him, but he didn’t want her to need him financially. He wanted her independent in that sense at least. He also added that with the life he’s led, who knows what might happen to him in the future, and if anyone ever got to him, he wants Cassie to have enough of her own money, in her own name, to start over. So now, Cassie has a stupidly high wage, and no outgoings, and I’m going to build her a portfolio.

  I don’t know how Violet and Andrius organize that side of things, but he’s clever and shrewd himself when it comes to investing. He’s got a lot of money in property. Now he’s building this new venture, and it should make us all extremely well off, even though that’s not his motivation behind it.

  I stretch and crick my neck side to side. Glancing out the window, I see the sun high in the sky and decide to go look for Dasha.

  I find her in a clearing in the woods, dancing. The sun is dappled through the trees, and Mr. Bojangles is dancing around under her feet, yapping. The scene is pure magic.

  Not wanting to dis
turb her, I don’t speak; instead, I stand there watching as she finishes the dance. She has headphones in, and when she does a final turn and sees me, she starts.

  Hand on her chest, she narrows her eyes. “Don’t sneak up on me.”

  I laugh. “I didn’t sneak up. I walked up, no sneaking at all, and then stayed here watching you. You’re magnificent when you dance,” I tell her as I go in for a kiss.

  She wraps her arms around my neck and tilts her face to me. “Only when I dance?”

  I smile. “Okay, all the time, but particularly when you dance.”

  “Right answer,” she tells me with a soft laugh. “Right answer, Bohdan.”

  This time when she says Bohdan, unlike in Paris all those weeks ago, my name falls from her lips in shades of gold and yellow. Warm, happy colors.

  Wanting to be near her, I take her hand in mine. “Walk with me,” I say.

  Her divorce lawyer called this morning, and she told me he says that Jasper is going to give her what she wants. Neither Dasha nor her lawyer know that Jasper was found at Paris airport waiting for a flight to Athens. Found by a man I hired to watch him and keep tabs on him. I know the bastard was coming here to come after Dasha. To do what I don’t know but I wasn’t taking the risk. My man followed him into the toilets, smacked him around a little, and threatened him with death if he boarded the plane. He also threatened him with exposure for some of the shady shit he’s done and told him in future Jasper better be squeaky clean, or there’d be reprisals. One of those threats worked and Dasha has her offer.

  She doesn’t know that Jasper was coming after her, but Dasha knows I’ve had him threatened if he does the same thing to any other young women.

  I think she’s going too easy on him and giving him far too much, but she says she wants him out of her life. Gone. Exorcised.

  I can exorcise him for her, and I’ve told her as much, but she says she’d spend years terrified I’d go to prison for harming him. I decided not to tell her quite how many people I’ve harmed in the past. There’s a limit to being truthful with her, and that limit is when it is going to cause her sleepless nights.