Page 1 of Claimed By Desire

Chapter 1

Natalya

Playing piano naked is weirdly liberating.

I didn’t start the day thinking I’d strip and start hammering at the keys. No, I woke up, desperate for a little optimism. It’s been a really hard, isolating year, and I told myself I was going to finally get my shit together instead of moping around inside. This morning, I stared at the ceiling of my tiny Paris apartment and thought:now’s the time to get out into the world and to stop being so depressed.

Then I made breakfast on my tiny single burner and fell into my old routines instead.

Running away to Paris sounds glamorous. At least, it did when I bought the plane ticket, desperate to escape from the man I was supposed to marry.

Valentin Zeitsev, thepakhanof the Zeisev Bratva, isn’t such a bad guy if you can get past the whole vicious mobster and emotionally stunted psychopath thing.

However, I couldn’t, and so I made a very stupid choice.

I disappeared to Europe. I rented out a little flat from an old Parisian man that rolls his eyes whenever I speak English, which is all the time since I don’t know much French, and begged him to leave the ancient upright piano in the living room. I spent a week wandering the city feeling lonelier than I’ve ever felt before in my life, on my own for the first time ever, disconnected from family, friends, any semblance of normalcy, adrift and terrified that I’d be discovered at any second.

Then a week turned into a month, which turned into six months, and now I’ve been here for over a year with nothing to show for it except a slightly better grasp on the local language and a serious addiction to espresso.

I have no friends. I talk with Jacque, my landlord, maybe twice a week at most. Sometimes the old woman that lives below me bangs on the ceiling and shouts at me in French to stop playing the piano so loudly and so poorly.

Otherwise, my days are the same. I wake up, tell myself I’m going to get out and do something with my life, only to fall deep into the same gray-and-numb depression I’ve been trapped in for a while now.

Which is how I find myself here, naked, unless the panties make me somehowdressedwhich I think is debatable, playing a song I’ve been working on for the last week.

It’s a slow, pretty melody, the sounds that come into my head whenever I force myself to walk down the street to get some coffee.

The music of deep isolation, even surrounded by people.

Sweat rolls down my back. It’s summer in Paris and my apartment is on the third floor, which means it’s brutally hot inhere during the day. I spent all my extra money on a window AC unit, but that broke down last week, and until I work up the nerve and the energy to earn some money to replace it, I’ve just been spending the sunlight hours without any clothes.

I’m so intent on my playing, and so deeply wrapped up in my own misery and my crippling loneliness, that I don’t even notice when a man enters my apartment.

Playing piano is the only pleasure I have these days, and the funny thing is, this piano sounds like crap. I don’t think it has ever been tuned, not like the gorgeous little baby grand in my father’s house, the one my mother bought for my older brothers. But they never played much, too busy with their boy things, and so the piano was passed to me.

Now here I am, sweating, mostly naked, and bashing at the keys of this beat-up old beast. This morning it sounds like a bomb’s going off over the strings, the thing’s playing so loud.

Which is why I almost don’t hear the man in my apartment when he says my name.

But then he says it again, and I slowly realize there’s a person behind me and my brain’s not just malfunctioning at the moment.

I cut off my playing and whirl around, my arms flying to cover my breasts.

And there he is, standing in the hallway, the last person in the entire world I’d want to walk in on me right now.

“I haven’t heard you play in years,” Alex says. He leans against the wall and crosses his arms, which has the effect of making his already impressive biceps even more incredible.

I have about a second to enjoy his physique before I shriek and look around for my shirt.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I say, snatching it up from the back of the couch and cover myself with it. I’m still in just panties at the moment, but that’s like being in a bathing suit, right? That’s not such a huge deal?

Except for the way he’s looking at me.

I’ve known Alexander Sorokin for a very long time. He’s been best friends with my oldest brother Stepan since they were little kids, and I practically grew up with Alex constantly lurking around the house.

Brutal, vicious, handsome Alex, the shining star of the Bratva, the man with such a bright future ahead of him.

Hating his stinking guts has to be one of my oldest memories.

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