Page 1 of Lethal Saint

CHAPTER 1

VASILISA

Twenty-five thousand. That’s how much I was worth.

No, that’s how much my pussy was worth. The rest of me had been sold in marriage for a completely different sum. I wasn’t supposed to know my fiancée had negotiated a reduced price for his would-be wife because of tonight’s events. The night my father had been counting down the days for since he auctioned my virginity.

Like I was a product, a sum of parts. At best a spectacle. Not a person.

It didn’t matter what I wanted, didn’t matter if my skin crawled and my stomach roiled with deep, burning sickness. I’d never been given the right of an opinion. I swallowed the words on the tip of my tongue, choking them back like bitter, toxic pills, and stood like a posable doll on the podium for scrutiny. As my dad considered my appearance before the big event, I stared emptily across the small dressing room connected to our house’s huge ballroom.

Warm lighting made the whole room gleam, the mouldings on the sage walls golden and rich, the dressing table and mirror glittering like falling stars. I wished a real star would crash into the dressing room and save me. I wanted to run, but I’d tried running and my bones had been broken, reset, and broken again. The only way through this alive was to listen, obey, and do whatever Dad wanted.

“Turn,” he ordered in Russian, his shrewd eyes narrowed on my body as I stood in the middle of the room, scrubbed and plucked and shaved like a turkey on Christmas Day.

I swallowed a splash of bile and turned on the spot, hating his assessing eyes, hating the calculation I knew far too well. His eyes ran over my blonde hair—perfectly straightened—the light makeup on my face—pink and soft and girly—and travelled down my body. I supposed I should have been grateful he’d never looked at me with the dark, hungry gleam others did. Even my brothers’ eyes lingered on my body, dark plans flickering behind their eyes.

“Where’s your bow?” Dad demanded, his critical brown stare lingering on my hair.

I swallowed a new rush of sickness and hurried to grab the pastel blue bow from the dressing table, choking back every coil of disgust and hatred as I clipped it in my hair. I wanted to live, so I’d do whatever he told me. The alternative was death, and I remembered it so clearly that I flinched.

“None of that,” Dad muttered, displeasure tightening his mouth. “You’ll only act scared if Olivier wants you to be. Understand?”

Olivier. The highest bidder. The man who’d bought my virginity. Not my innocence—that was stolen ten years ago—but the right to shove himself inside me before any other man.

Memories rose with brutal clarity, reminding me what would happen if I fought.

A flash of light, a thunderclap so loud I didn’t understand what it was. I didn’t know why Mum’s knees fell out from under her, or why she hit the rug in front of where I played with Pluto, the kitten Mum and Dad got me for Christmas three days before.

She didn’t move once she collapsed onto the rug. Pluto’s hackles raised; he hissed high, kitten threats, realising what happened before I did. I was nine then. I should have known better, should have realised the darkness I felt whenever I overheard male voices in Dad’s office would bleed out to the rest of the house.

He shot her in the head.

Now, I kept my gaze low and nodded. “I understand,” I murmured in Russian.

Boris Ivanov, my father, nodded, a barely satisfied grunt in his throat as he skimmed a cold finger along my jaw. “You don’t need me to remind you what will happen if you mess up tonight, do you, Vasilisa?”

“No,” I breathed, trying so hard to keep my voice steady when my heart slammed against my ribs. It beat so violently he’d be able to see it if he only looked down.

“Good,” he said, releasing me from the statue I became whenever he touched me. Those hands had hurt me countless times. They killed my mum, murdered so many others, and I knew one false move and I’d be next. “Your training has gone well; there’s no reason why tonight shouldn’t, too.”

My stomach turned over. Mytraining.

He said it like he’d done me a favour, like he’d adequately prepared me for being trapped on a bed in the middle of a ballroom while fifty people watched, because he’dsold tickets.My body was an object to be owned, my mind a wild beast to be shot at any moment, and my virginity was a show.

Like he didn’t charge all the men whotrainedme, too. I took a slow, dragging breath, all my focus pinned to my dad ashe circled, doing one final check. I couldn’t think about the way hands had pawed at me, some hurting, others caressing, others still turning my body against me until cries tore from my lips.

I knew why they did it. Why those men paid to touch me even though they had limitless power and a hundred different women at their disposal. They knew I had no choice, knew Ihatedit, and that gave them power. I had to pretend to like it even when I wanted to throw up, and theylovedthat.

There was something seriously wrong with my dad and his ‘friends,’ like he’d collected the worst humanity had to offer into a single room. I resisted the urge to swallow, my nerves beating against the inside of my ribs and my heart trying to escape.

All those other times, during mytraining,there’d only been one man in the room. Tonight there would be fifty, plus Olivier, and my father. Maybe my depraved brothers, too. Would Dad finally give them the nod to unleash themselves on me? I saw it in their eyes across the kitchen at breakfast and over dinner in the evening—they wanted to hurt me.

I jumped when cruel fingers gripped my chin, dragging my attention up. Dad held me with enough force to scare but not enough to bruise. He wouldn’t want to damage his product now it was time for the big show. He could do nothing about the scars peppering my body, but bruises would stand out where scars were white against porcelain and easily missed.

“Olivier paid for your first fuck, but we have VIPs in the audience tonight, and I don’t want to see you causing trouble when they take their turns.”

Oh god.

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