“I… I think that it’s better if I just go home,” she said, still nursing her wounded feelings. “I have a lot to do today, but with a change of scenery, tonight might be a good night to see if Anton can be broken from that disgusting rabbit he drags around everywhere. Maybe I should take it out of his suitcase and see how he does?”
A second glance toward the dining room showed that his sons remained focused on their toys, but Anton stared at her with an unveiled fury that left Pavel startled. Speaking loud enough for Anton to hear, he said, “The bunny needs to stay here, Linda. We’ll let Anton choose when he’s ready to make a change.”
He walked Linda to the door and had a good twenty minutes listening to his sons talk about their week before Zoya came downstairs wearing a pair of low-cut jeans, a fitted white t-shirt, and leather sandals. She’d taken the time to do her makeup and her thick, wet hair was twisted to the top of her head in a casual knot.
“She’s gone,” summarized Zoya, looking around the room. “Or did she crawl under the couch someplace. Did she say anything about me before she left?”
Slavic started to speak, but Pavel stood behind her, waving his hand to cut him off. Poor Slavic hesitated, adding, “Uh… no, she didn’t say anything much.”
She turned back to Pavel and crossed her arms. “I’m not stupid, you know.”
“I never said that you were,” he said with a sigh. “Be nice. She had an appointment and had to leave early. She’ll eat with us the next time, though.” Turning to his older son who looked a little upset, he added, “Don’t worry, Slavic. You didn’t do anything wrong, and someday I’ll teach you how to deal with stubborn women.” Taking a deep breath, he mumbled, “Once I figure it out for myself, that is.”
He stood taller and forced a smile. “It’s early for lunch, though, so why don’t we play one of those board games in the closet. Anton can be on my team so I have the extra resources to beat everybody else.”
Yuri looked up from the toys. “But I’m hungry. Can we have hotdogs? Linda makes them with dough all wrapped around them and you can dip them in ketchup.”
She stared at him as though he’d lost his mind before shaking her head. “That’s not even food.”
“Don’t be rude, Yuri,” scolded Slavic. “You aren’t supposed to ask people for food. It’s not polite.”
“Who says it’s not polite?” asked Zoya. “If you’re hungry, how will you get anything to eat if you don’t ask for it? Of course I’ll feed you first.”
“Aunt Linda says that,” said Slavic matter-of-factly. Switching over to English, he added, “Yuri’s always breaking the rules, and Linda says he’s a slob, too. Linda makes him drink out of a baby cup after he spilled his milk all over her dining room rug. She packed it in his bag so you can use it too.”
Yuri snapped at him in English. “At least I don’t have to sleep on rubber sheets. Even Anton doesn’t pee in the bed like you do.”
Slavic shoved Yuri hard enough to knock him to the floor and drop his toys, but Anton casually picked up the discarded action figures and continued to play by himself, ignoring both of them. “Settle down,” demanded Pavel, pulling Yuri off of his brother by the waist of his jeans. He’d spent many hours with them in Staten Island where they’d always shown excellent behavior, but the sneaky dissatisfaction crept up slowly when he realized that Linda had supervised their every move. “And speak Russian so Zoya and Anton can understand you. It’s not fair to have a conversation that doesn’t include them.”
Yuri shrugged his shoulders, but returned to Russian. “Aunt Linda doesn’t like it when she can’t understand us, and she says that Anton will catch on sooner if he’s forced to learn English.”
“Maybe that’s why Anton bites,” said Zoya with her eyes sparking in anger. “If I’d spent the last few months in a home where I couldn’t understand what was being said, I’d feel like biting somebody too. What else did they say about her just now?”
Without waiting for Pavel to respond, Yuri repeated the entire conversation, leaving out the part where he was a slob, but Slavic happily filled in the missing details, making it necessary for Pavel to physically separate them a second time. This time, Anton was bumped during the fracas and responded by calmly biting Slavic in the calf, requiring another round of parenting that he wasn’t completely prepared to do.
“We should have just gotten a dog,” said Slavic with a scowl, rubbing his leg over the teeth marks.
“You’ve got to be patient with him,” said Pavel, rubbing his forehead at all the signs of a brewing headache. “His mother was a biter too, and my brother and I had the scars to show for it.”
“How did you get his mother to stop biting?” Zoya asked, pulling Anton into her arms and offering him a stern frown. He happily patted her cheeks and rubbed his nose against hers.
“It wasn’t very nice,” he admitted. “Damir and I rubbed soap all over our arms and baited her until she bit us. After a mouthful of suds, she never did it again.”
“Well, we aren’t doing that,” said Zoya with a laugh. She kicked her sandals to the corner of the room to return to the barefoot status that she loved. “Come, I have lunch all ready, and if Yuri wants to eat now, we’ll eat now.”
She led the way to the kitchen filled with the rich, spicy scents unique to hours of cooking. With very little in the way of table manners, all three of the boys ate heartily, clearing their plates and asking for seconds. After he’d consumed a handful of chocolate chip cookies, Slavic leaned back in his chair and groaned. “If being Russian means we get to eat like this, I’ll stick with being Russian. That was really good, and I like the way the kitchen looks, too.”
“Yeah,” said Yuri, waving his fork to throw a little more food on the floor. “It doesn’t look like somebody threw up on the walls anymore, but don’t tell Linda that we had dessert, okay? She gets all twitchy when we eat anything with sugar in it.”
Zoya beamed and wrapped her arms around his sons. “I take that as the biggest and best of compliments. You tell me what you want to eat tomorrow, and I’ll make it for you, even if it’s all sugar.” Turning to Yuri, she added ruefully, “But not hotdogs, Yuri. That’s not real food.”
Leaving the dishes in the sink, they moved to the living room where Pavel started a fire in the fireplace. Slavic set up a Monopoly game, but Anton quickly grew bored with the logistics and strategies that the others were old enough to embrace. Crawling down from Pavel’s lap, he moved to one of the three matching suitcases in the entrance hall and dumped all of the clothes on the floor until he found his bunny. Returning to the couch, he curled into the corner and stuck his thumb in his mouth, an action Pavel had never seen him do before.
Looking up at the portrait of Pavel’s mother, he said to Yuri, “That’s my mama and her necklace.”
“No, it’s not, stupid,” said Yuri. “That’s my grandmother. She lived in Russia with my grandfather and he gave her the necklace because she was the most beautiful and the most important woman in the family. Isn’t that right, Papa?”
“My mama was beautiful and important,” said Anton, standing on the couch, clearly prepared to defend his mother’s honor. “And she was special.” When Yuri challenged his version a second time, Anton charged Yuri, kicking him in the calf before Pavel could pull him away.
“No,” said Pavel sternly, pointing his finger at the little guy’s nose. “We don’t kick, and we don’t bite. You need to understand that’s unacceptable. And you’re both right. That’s your grandmother Petruskenkov in the picture, and your mama was special, Anton. She was the first baby girl born into our family in over a hundred years.”
“Where’s the necklace now, Papa?” asked Slavic. “Did our mother ever have it?”
Zoya outwardly cringed, and Pavel kissed the back of her hand. He didn’t like to see her upset, but any conversation involving Damir tended to make her uncomfortable so he wasn’t surprised by her reaction. “Dadja Damir has it,” he said softly. Despite their young a
ge, his boys needed to understand their birthright and their responsibilities. “He’s the man in charge of our family.”
“He is not!” shouted Anton, his tiny body raging with an emotional fury that far exceeded his young age. “I’m the most important man, and my mama is the most important woman. She told me so.”
“Shut up,” said Yuri, shoving him to the floor. “You’re just a four-year-old, and four-year-olds aren’t important to anybody.”
“Yuri!” shouted Pavel, his patience finally defeated. “Apologize to him, right now.”
With yet another display of Petruskenkov anger in the same small space, Yuri exploded. “That’s not fair! How come I have to apologize to him, and he never does when he bites or kicks me?”
“Take my bunny! I don’t care.” The tiny four-year-old spit out the words, throwing the stuffed animal toward the fireplace, but Zoya moved quickly to grab it before it was caught by the flames.
“I’m not taking your bunny,” Pavel said, taking the little boy into his arms. “You can keep him, but we’re going to calm down and talk about this until we’re all satisfied, okay?”
“He’s not mine!” shouted Anton, hitting his shoulders and twisting his head in a failed attempt to bite Pavel’s shoulder. “He’s yours. I don’t want him.”
“Linda takes his bunny if he bites or kicks,” explained Slavic patiently. “He has to wait until he calms himself down to get it back. Sometimes it takes a long time, though.”
Zoya glared at Pavel, but he shook his head to silence her. “Anton, nobody is taking your bunny.” He snuggled the stuffed animal into the boy’s arms. “It’s yours, and you don’t have to share.”
Anton stopped shouting, but wiggled until Pavel let him slide to the floor. He moved to the corner of the living room, returning his thumb to his mouth and glaring at the rest of them with a death grip around the rabbit’s neck.
Turning to his sons, he said, “Go back to the dining room and play for a little while. Zoya and I want to talk on the front porch for a few minutes. Slavic, keep an eye on Anton for me.”
“What if he bites somebody again?” asked Slavic dryly, pointing at his cousin. “I’m not sure he’s had all of his shots.”
“Just… I don’t know… keep your fingers away from his mouth. You can manage for five minutes,” said Pavel uncomfortably.
Anton’s adjustment to America was clearly nowhere close to what he’d been led to believe, and Zoya started on him the second the door was closed. “You can’t take the bunny,” she insisted. “It’s like taking his mother away from him all over again. He literally dragged that thing out of a burning car that killed her.”
“I didn’t like what we heard any more than you did, but little boys aren’t the best sources of information. We owe it to Linda to get her side of the story.”
“Listen to them, Pavel. They aren’t happy there. They’re little boys, not robots with rigid rules and restrictions. Good behavior isn’t everything. Childhood should be about getting dirty and not worrying about your future. It’s the only chance they’ll ever have to explore that innocence.”
“I agree,” he said patiently. “But let me talk to Linda and see what she says.”
“But they’re still going back on Monday, aren’t they?” she asked flatly. “All of this isn’t enough for you to realize that they need to be brought home permanently?”
“Let’s not rush into making any dramatic changes until we get a little more information. For right now, we have forty-eight hours with them. What would you say about going to the zoo this afternoon, and maybe a little dinner with a nice food vendor in Central Park. You don’t even have to have a hotdog. We can have them back in bed long before they turn into crabby, tired monsters. At least, the older two.” Pavel opened the front door to motion her inside. “I’m not so sure about Anton. He’s got a glare that’s just plain creepy.”
“Oh, he looks nothing like you,” she said sarcastically.
Chapter 17
The weekend after the boys went back to Staten Island was strangely quiet, and they lounged lazily around a house that was too quiet and borderline boring. Insisting that she’d burned out after weeks of steady cooking, Zoya hadn’t even roused long enough to make dinner, relying on take-out and leftovers from the freezer, but he had no complaints and looked forward to their time in front of the fireplace.
“Pavel?” she asked, looking up from her Georgian dictionary and kicking his thigh with the ball of her bare foot. A half-eaten New York-style pizza rested on the coffee table along with an empty bag of potato chips. “What does ‘hard-headed’ mean in Russian?”
“Who called you hard-headed?” he asked absently, keeping his attention on his latest sports magazine.
“Never mind that,” she said quickly. “Let’s just assume for the sake of argument that you would be proud of me for not giving into peer pressure. What does it mean?”
“It means that you’re stubborn, Zoya,” he said, rolling his eyes and putting down his magazine. “And let’s just assume for the sake of argument that you want to finish this story. Do I need to scold Galena, again?”
“No,” she said quickly. “It was nothing, really. It’s just that, Galena’s gone back to that club a few times, and she… well… she wanted me to go with her.” Zoya sat up like she was sharing some juicy gossip. “Apparently, she went there with Liam last weekend, and they did this big scene where she knew some information that he wanted, and he tortured her until she fessed up. She said it was probably the single hottest thing she’d ever done in her entire life.”
“Did you go with her, little girl?” he grumbled, delivering the full impact of his displeasure.
“Well, no,” she mumbled, but the bright red decorating her cheeks was a telling sign of her guilt. He snapped his fingers to encourage her to continue. “I only got as far as the driveway. I didn’t go inside or anything. I knew you wouldn’t like that.”
“And what makes you think I would have approved of you getting as far as the driveway?” he asked dangerously. He loved the way she wiggled uncomfortably with her eyes downcast and her cheeks still blushing like her ass would be if he wasn’t satisfied with her response.
“It was only this morning,” she replied with an innocent frown. “I’m telling you now, and you never said that I couldn’t go to the driveway, because, honestly, that would have been a very odd demand. I mean, it was black asphalt surrounded by grass and everybody had their clothes on out there. She just needed to run inside and get her bra. She’d left it in the bench by mistake, but did you know that when she got inside, some dom made her take a spanking for being careless?”
“And how did she feel about that?” he asked with a chuckle.
“She loved it,” admitted Zoya. “But why haven’t we gone back? I thought you liked that place. She says that people are gossiping about you because you haven’t been there in weeks.”
“If it were that important to you, why didn’t you go inside with her?” he asked, carefully watching her reaction.
“Answering a question with a question is really annoying,” she said, scrunching her nose in displeasure. “But other than the very likelihood that you’d beat my ass when you found out, it was a pretty big step. There were a lot of strange men there, and they made me a little nervous.”
“That’s the exact reason why I didn’t take you back. You went through a lot in St. Petersburg, and I had no desire to go without you. I can add a nice little interrogation scene here at the house with you tonight. You’ve been quiet since I took the boys back to Linda’s and could use the distraction.”
“Your club is having a party tonight,” she said quietly. “Did you know that? It’s going to have costumes and everything.”
“That’s because next week is Halloween. It’s an American holiday where children go around knocking on doors and getting free candy from total strangers, but adults like to dress up like idiots and go to parties, too.”
“I’m guessin
g that clear lack of enthusiasm means you don’t want to go,” she said sadly. “Liam and Galena are both going to be there.”
“I’m not against the idea, but a big party isn’t going to be like it was when it was just the two of us at the club. There will be at least a hundred or so people there and most of the subs won’t be wearing much of anything except a mask.”
“I bought a mask today when Galena got hers,” she said excitedly, jumping off the couch to retrieve a big shopping bag from the kitchen counter. “Look at it. Isn’t it adorable?” She looked at his expression and slowed down dramatically. “That is, if you approve of it, sir.”
The black fabric would cover her cheeks and her forehead, but the fake gemstones and glitter sparkled almost as much as her excitement. The mental image of her beautiful body, nude in front of a crowd and under his control was almost as exciting as her willingness to participate in a public scene, demonstrating how far she’d come in trusting him.
“What else do you have in that bag?” he asked, keeping his face stern.
“I… I, uh, bought a dress today,” she said, staring at the floor. “It’s more expensive than what I usually buy, but Galena said it looked amazing on me and that every girl needed a nice black cocktail dress in their wardrobe.”
“Look at me, Zoya,” he demanded, trying to hide his smirk. “Show me the receipt.”
She reluctantly lifted her gaze and handed him the long piece of paper, revealing a price that was so reasonable, he thought that it was a joke. He’d been encouraging her to spend more money on herself for weeks, and the skimpy black dress would reveal a sexy hint of her full cleavage and seductive bare shoulders.
He tossed the dress to her. “Go put this on, and be ready to leave in twenty minutes. I wouldn’t want you to be late for your first American Halloween party.”
“Thank you, Pavel!” she said with a wide smile, throwing herself into his arms. “I even bought a new bra and panties to go with it. You’re going to love them.”
Sold To The Russian Page 17