Page 10 of Beautiful Villain

We’ll be landing soon. Our island doesn’t have its own airstrip large enough for a jet of this size, so we’ll be landing on the mainland and then boarding one of our light airplanes to take us home. Normally we vary our arrival and departure methods, using planes, helicopters and boats, but unconscious women draw attention, so for once we’ll be flying straight to the island where a vehicle will be waiting to take us back to the house.

All three of us were born in Russia, but it’s been a long time since we left, after our families were exiled. Our grandfathers and fathers sought and failed to get revenge on the man who sent us all away, but Lev, Dimi, and I know better. Revenge is a lifetime wasted. Instead, we strove to be better, stronger, and more powerful than our families’ enemy, that’s the greatest revenge that can ever be claimed and Ali is the final piece in that puzzle.

I don’t know how long I sit by her side, but I startle when Lev touches my shoulder. “We’re landing, you need to take your seat.”

Standing, I lift her legs and slide onto the sofa beside her, bringing her legs back down to rest over my thighs. Dimi sighs, like I’m annoying him, but I ignore him, looking down at her feet in my lap.

The jeans covering her lower half are tight, but worn, like she’s washed them a hundred times until the denim is soft to the touch. Her shirt is a plain black tank that someone—probably Ali— has taken a pair of scissors to, shredding the bottom to shorten it in an attempt to make it look like it’s deliberately ragged, not just old.

Her feet are clad in Doc Marten boots, which Dimi watched her pull out of a dumpster one day. She’d been elated when she’d gotten home, taking the time to clean the scuffed leather boots and then threading them with red ribbon instead of black laces. It was the first time Dimi almost broke, he demanded we take her then and there, even though we weren’t sure if anyone else knew about her.

Eventually we talked him down, even though he almost ordered her new shoes every time he saw her wear them. Once we get her home, she won’t ever wear thrift store clothes again. We’ll bathe her in diamonds and gold and as many pairs of boots as she could ever want.

The plane jolts as the wheels hit the ground, the brakes slowing us and making Ali slide across the sofa. Placing a hand against her waist I keep her in place, until the plane slows to a stop and the sounds of ground staff bustling around seep into the cabin.

We always keep the jet fueled and ready to go, although we have no plans to leave the island any time soon. Our home is a tiny island about a hundred and fifty miles north of Ilha de Boipeba, a tourist hotspot off the coast of Brazil.

We bought it on a whim during a drunken night out to celebrate making our first billion. Our families left Russia disgraced and ruined, but even as small children, we knew how to hustle and make sure we never starved.

Much like Ali, we did what he had to do to survive. We ran drugs for small-time dealers, worked as muscle in protection rackets when we were in our teens, and then diversified into the gun for hire sector in our early twenties. While we made money in the shadows of the back alleys, we worked in the light to legitimize our public personas. I graduated from MIT, Dimi from Harvard Law, and Lev with an MBA from Yale. We used our grimy, dirty, blood money to fund purely legitimate businesses, then we sold them, and made more money than anyone could imagine spending in a lifetime.

By the time we were thirty, we’d done everything we could think to do. We’d proved we were successful by anyone’s definition, and we found ourselves bored. Lev and I dipped our toes into the criminal tides once again, occasionally taking a job or two, just to make sure we still had the skills, but even killing people lost its appeal.

That’s when we found out about her.

Alabama Delany—Born Alena Polakoff—is the illegitimate daughter of Grigoriy Polakoff, also known as the Pakhan of the Russian Bratva. We weren’t looking for it, but when the sweetest revenge found us, we couldn’t resist.

CHAPTER 7

alabama

Inhaling deeply, I stretch, feeling like I’ve been asleep for days, even though I know it can’t be for more than a few hours.

My limbs crack as I lift my arms over my head before rubbing at my dry lips. Pointing my toes, I arch my back as I slowly wake up. My eyes are still closed, but I can feel the warm air coating my limbs, and I wonder if I left the window open.

My body doesn’t want to wake up. I feel sluggish and a yawn slips past my lips when I try to force my eyes open. I must fall back asleep again, because the next time I wake up, some of the lethargy has gone, and this time when I stretch, my muscles feel refreshed and not heavy.

Inhaling, my nose fills with an unfamiliar floral scent and blinking my eyes open, I look around me. It takes me a moment to make sense of what I’m seeing.

Natural wood paneling runs along a wall that leads to a huge bank of floor to ceiling windows. No, they’re not windows, they’re those doors you see on the TV that slide all the way back, like the entire wall just opens on its own. Except these doors aren’t moving on their own, they’re being pushed by a man. A man I don’t recognize.

Pushing up onto my elbows, I notice the fabric beneath me. I’m lying on a cream couch, the kind you see in fancy department stores and interior design shows. Opposite me is a couch that looks like it’s made of the same fabric, and sitting on it are two more men I don’t know.

The guy who was opening the doors walks toward us and sits down in a chair beside the other couch, and all three of them turn and look at me.

I know I should be scared. Inside, a voice is screaming at me to get up and run away, but my body still feels too tired to move and my brain is too foggy to feel the fear I should be feeling right now.

“Where am I?” I ask calmly.

“You’re on an island a few hundred miles off the coast of Brazil,” one of the men says calmly, like he’s mirroring my tone.

All three guys have dark hair and sharp, intense eyes. The one that’s speaking has full lips that I struggle to look away from as I try to process what he said.

“Where?” I croak.

“Brazil, it’s a country in South America, a little over three thousand, eight hundred miles from Georgia,” another of the guys says.

“Why am I in Brazil?” I still sound calm, but as sensation starts to come back to my body, so does the awareness of how fucked up this entire conversation is.

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