Page 6 of Disguised as Love

“Your father is dead.”

It took a moment for what he’d said to register, but when it did, the breath left my body. Every muscle and organ seized, making it impossible to inhale the oxygen I needed. Of all the things I’d expected him to say, that was not it. My father…dead. It couldn’t be. He was larger than life. Above the law. Beyond reach. Loved and feared all at the same time by the same people. No one in the bratva dared touch him, and he had no health issues. On the contrary, he was the healthiest sixty-eight-year-old man I’d ever met. Fit and strong. Obsessed with eating well in the same way some men were obsessed with vodka and women.

“You lie,” I finally squeaked out. I reached into my pocket for my phone before realizing I’d left it at the house. I couldn’t call Mama or Malik to confirm this man’s story. I couldn’t call Georgie for reassurance and support. I couldn’t call Ilia for protection...

I was alone.

With a man who could easily do whatever he wanted to me.

And for the first time in a really long time, I felt truly afraid.

Cruz

DISARRAY

“Struggling between the facts and fiction.

I’m alone,

But I’m alive.”

Performed by Lifehouse

Written by Jason Wade

Turned as it was into the streetlight, Raisa’s beautiful face was easy to read. And what I saw was raw pain coupled with doubt and anger before insecurity scuttled across it. As if she’d finally realized how vulnerable she was out on this street, alone with a man three times her size.

When I’d arrived at her door and seen her feisty defiance, I’d been surprised. I’d expected to find her sad and crying as Manya had been in the video. After all, she’d been raised the princess of the family. The golden child doted on by everyone, but especially by her father, as if she was some damn china doll. Except, this doll was going to change the world with her technology?photovoltaic nano cells so small and flexible you could literally put them anywhere and have them fuel houses and cars and entire manufacturing plants.

“The official report says he had a heart attack,” I told her, trying to ignore the sparks traveling over me from just her gaze.

Her body sagged, and I caught her around the waist before she fell. Her reaction to my touch was the same as it had been when I’d grabbed her elbow at the house. She jerked as if I’d burned her and backed out of reach.

She shook her head. “No. No way. He’s healthy.”

I raised a brow. “It’s the official report.”

We both knew that it only took a juicy bribe for a corrupt medical examiner to put down whatever it was the person paying wanted.

“What actually happened?” she asked, her voice seeming to get smaller and her Russian accent drifting back in when normally you’d never know she hadn’t been born and raised in the States.

“Poison.”

“Why…” She was clutching a locket at her neck with one hand and waving the other as if she couldn’t breathe. As if the air had been knocked out of her. “Why…everyone loves him…”

I highly doubted everyone loved him. Besides the dozens of agencies around the globe who had him at the top of their international crime list, he had to have crossed some of the other mafiya leaders at some point. No one could have lasted at the top as long as Leskov had without pissing on someone else’s territory, no matter how good he was at negotiating.

She took two steps back toward her house and then crumbled. I had her in my arms like some damsel in distress before I could even think. The heat of her seared its way through me as if we were wearing nothing instead of layers of leather and cotton. The fact that her ass was lined up along my forearm as I held her with her knees flung over my elbow was like a flashing neon sign to my groin. Her long strands of blonde hair fanned out along my bicep and shoulder, glinting like a gem in the streetlight. Lightning zapped its way through my chest. An instant reaction I couldn’t stop.

Her lids were shut, keeping the stormy fire that existed in those brown eyes from my sight. It took me a second to realize she’d actually fainted. Fuck.

I strode back down the street to my rental car. She was a feather. Soft and downy and yet brightly colored in red. Like the tiny crimson sunbird that had flitted its way through my hotel room in Indonesia. But this one was trapped in a gilded cage. A bird I couldn’t afford to admire.

I fished in my pocket for the car remote, unlocked the car, and set her down in the passenger seat. As I leaned across her to strap the seat belt on, I made the mistake of looking into her face. Black lashes layered against white skin. Her wide, full lips were colored a soft pink, barely a shade over their natural color, but they looked soft. I could imagine what they’d feel like against mine, plush and wet and demanding, but I wondered if they’d taste like she smelled. Like cotton candy and cinnamon. Like being at a summer fair as all your best Technicolor memories were being made.

Her eyes fluttered open, and the anguish inside them carved its way into my heart.

My body ached to soothe her in any way possible.

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