Page 85 of Disguised as Love

My father emerged from the shadows of the curtained stage with a dozen men on either side of him. They had guns as big as the ones in the room.

My heart leaped at the sight of him, tears stinging my eyes and pulse pounding. My father was alive. I hadn’t wanted to let the hope I’d felt yesterday at his coffin become real, but I’d known. I’d known it wasn’t Papa lying there but some twisted mirage they’d wanted us to believe was him.

The jeers and pounding fell away, a stunned silence taking over.

“Petya!” Mama sobbed just as I cried out, “Papa!”

Mama fell to her hands, trying to crawl toward him, but the man behind her pulled her back. “Petya…is it…are you really…here?” Her voice was cracked with hope and tears and anguish.

“Let her go!” my father commanded.

The man behind Mama looked to Rurik, and Rurik shook his head.

Three of the men with Papa stepped forward, aiming guns at the man holding her. One grunted out, “He said let her go.”

The man released Mama, and she sprang up with a speed I wouldn’t have expected and raced on bare feet to my father. He wrapped her in his arms, kissing the side of her head and saying softly, “I’m sorry, moya printsessa. I’m so sorry you suffered.”

She sobbed and then pounded his chest before looking up and slapping his face.

Silence filled the room again.

“How dare you!” she screamed and then collapsed into him, crying once more.

Rurik stepped toward them, fury written over his face. “Yes, how dare you, old friend.”

My father was in a suit as expensive as Rurik’s, and even though he was shorter than Rurik, in some strange way, he seemed mightier. As if there was an aura surrounding him, demanding he be recognized as the true leader in the room, regardless of the throne Rurik had sat on.

“How dare I?” my father demanded, fury in his gray eyes. “How dare I?” His voice lowered and shook with emotion. “Shall I tell the men in the room about the poison you paid the waiter to deliver to my soup? Or shall I tell them about the hundreds of betrayals you’ve committed? The proof of which lies on the SD card in the locket you tore from my daughter’s neck?”

Rurik’s eyes narrowed. “Lies. I would never betray any of you. I would never kill a friend.”

Father laughed. “The locket and the waitress say otherwise.”

Papa looked behind me, and a young woman was pushed forward. She was barely more than a teen, dressed in black pants and a white top that many waiters wore like a uniform. She looked like she hadn’t changed in days. Her hair was ratty, and her skin was pale, causing her eyes that were as big as saucers to stand out like a ghostly apparition. Rurik took a step back upon seeing her.

“It required some time for me to find her,” Papa said in a deadly calm. “Too bad she believed you’d pay her handsomely when, really, you were just waiting to send her to the States with the next round of women you’re trafficking.”

Distaste was evident in every word my father spoke. He would never be involved in human trafficking. He hated that more than the drugs he refused to let Malik involve them in. Rurik glared and turned to the men who’d surrounded the dance floor, waving his hand at them.

“Kill them. Kill them all!” Then, he fled with Damien toward the back.

“Get the locket!” Papa growled to his men just as a loud explosion shook the building from above.

The roof above the stage came tumbling down in a pile of fire and wood and metal. I was thrown to the ground as the earth trembled, and the man who’d been holding me landed on top of me. Before I could even breathe, Cruz had freed himself of the men holding him, shoved the man off of me, and pulled me up, running with me toward the front door.

I turned, trying to find my family?the father I’d just gotten back from the grave, my traumatized mother, and the brother I didn’t really know. They were on our heels, ducking as pieces of the ceiling collapsed around us.

“Ilia!” I screamed, catching sight of my bodyguard’s broken body just as a disco ball crashed to the ground next to him.

“Get her out of here. I will have my men get him,” Papa told Cruz as I struggled to go back to the man who’d been tortured and beaten because of my family.

Cruz lifted me with ease, threw me over his shoulder like he had the day before, during the bombing, and ran. As we reached the front door, a second bomb went off from the back of the building, causing the earth to shiver and the frame of the club to groan. Glass shattered around us as we burst into the sunlight.

“Take them to the palace. I have a helicopter coming to pick us up there,” my father commanded his men, Cruz, and whoever was listening. “I must get the locket.”

He started off at a dead run toward the back of the building. An action I’d never seen my father do in my entire life. Malik hesitated for all of two seconds, and then he followed our father.

“Petya!!! Don’t you dare leave me again!” Mama scratched and fought, trying to get away from the men who were dragging her toward a series of black cars that had shown up after we’d gone into the club.

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