Page 45 of Ivory Ashes

“Of course you think so. Because this world is a toxic stew of violence and status and bloodrights. It’s medieval. I’m the daughter of a don and I couldn’t even make my own choices about who I got to marry.”

“You mean with Trofim?”

“Yeah. But even before that.”

Anatoly leans in closer. “Who did you want to marry before?”

I don’t owe him an explanation. I don’t owe anyone my life story. But having someone in Mikhail’s inner circle who has some sympathy towards me can’t be a bad thing, right?

“His name was Matteo.” I swallow down the emotion that bubbles up every time I think of my first love. “He was the son of one of my father’s maids. He picked her up from work a few days every week. While he was waiting for her, we would talk.”

Matteo had big brown eyes and an even bigger heart. He talked about the world like it was full of possibility. Anything he wanted, he could have if he worked towards it: a college education, enough money that he could take care of his mom… and me.

“Matteo and I weren’t stupid. We knew that my father wouldn’t like us being together. Even his mom tried to warn him against it. She was afraid she would lose her job, but…” I shake my head, blinking away a fresh wave of tears. “I don’t think either of us really understood the risks we were taking.”

Anatoly moves to sit on the end of the bed. He curls one massive leg up on the mattress to face me. “What did your father do?”

“He told me to stop seeing him, but I refused. When he forced me into agreeing, I kept seeing Matteo secretly. We were going to elope.” I chuckle humorlessly, remembering the night I crawled out of my window with a white dress tucked under my arm and ran to Matteo’s car to meet him.

Except he wasn’t in the driver’s seat.

My father was.

The next minutes and hours are a black spot in my mind. The memories are locked away and I’ve never tried to access them. I don’t want to relive what I know happened.

“Your father killed him,” Anatoly guesses.

I swipe my sleeve across my cheek. “In front of me. Yeah. ‘My duty was to the family,’ he said. What I wanted didn’t matter. Who I wanted didn’t matter. I wasn’t my own person; I belonged to the Giordano name. And I… I don’t want that for Dante.”

A new wave of tears burns at the backs of my eyes. Hopelessness crushes my chest worse than any claustrophobia attack I’ve ever experienced. Because now, I can’t just open a door and leave.

I’m trapped here.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “This life is no walk in the park, that’s for fucking sure.”

The words pull me out of my self-pity spiral. I glare at him. “Yes, what a hard life you lead,” I sneer. “I saw you at enough fundraisers and parties to know all about your many burdens. Being the son of a pakhan has been horrible for you. Is all that meaningless sex with people who only care about your last name becoming tedious? It must be so hard.”

Anatoly’s face hardens for the first time. I’m aware of exactly how big he is and exactly how alone we are. If he wanted to crack me in half like a glowstick, he could.

“Keeping the Novikov family name and a place in the Bratva is the prize Iakov awarded to me after he let your ex-fiancé slaughter my mother in her bed,” he snarls.

I gasp. “Mikhail?”

“I thought he wasn’t your fiancé?” Anatoly taunts with a raised brow. He shakes his head, blowing out a long breath. “No, Trofim.”

“Trofim killed his own mother?” I whisper.

“He killed my mother. Iakov’s mistress. One of them, anyway,” he mutters. “She got pregnant while Iakov was only courting Trofim’s mother. Trofim wasn’t even a fetus yet. But Iakov didn’t offer to marry my mom. He was interested enough in a waitress to get her pregnant, but not interested enough to marry her and protect her from this fucked-up world.”

“Why?” I breathe, too horrified to speak above a whisper. “Why did Trofim kill her?”

“To make sure Iakov wouldn’t change his mind and marry my mother. It had been decades. Iakov was never going to change his mind, but Trofim was too power-hungry to see it. He wanted to make sure I’d never have a direct line to the leadership he was born into.”

Anatoly isn’t a legitimate Novikov. Not in the ways that count.

Like Dante.

“This world is dark and brutal and fucked up at times.” Anatoly turns to me, sympathy etched into every line of his face. “But not all of us are that way. Some of us try to do the right thing.”

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