Page 53 of The Russian Retribution

I blink and the memory is gone, leaving my heart to skip nervously in my chest.

“Come on, Anastasia,” I murmur softly to myself, closing the door. “Don’t jump at ghosts.”

I need information on the Yegorovs, if there is any that even exists.

I don’t recall my father ever joining with another family, for business or otherwise, which is why it’s alarming to me that he had some kind of business partner for the sickening advancement of his precious business. The fact that Tatiana has come to make a deal fills me with a quiet concern I can’t share with anyone.

Is she here because she really wants us to work together on the condos like she said, or is it for another reason? Does she want to be close to me in any capacity because she or her husband are that partner my father was working with, and she wants whatever he left behind?

I need to check before my suspicious mind ruins what could be a crazy good deal for me.

My father’s filing cabinets line the right-hand wall behind his desk. As I make my way toward them, it’s difficult not to notice all the little things about the office that made it one of the worst places from my childhood.

Countless hours sitting on that hard leather sofa waiting eagerly to show my father something cool I did with my tutors, only to be met with anger that I was even in there. Even more hours were spent waiting outside, hoping for a glimpse of my father beyond the silence at dinner if he ever turned up.

Outside, the rain lashes against the window with enough force to make the glass panes shake. The wind howls down the chimney, escaping through the fireplace with a loud whistle as if trying to blow out the nonexistent flame.

I pause and skim my hand along the wooden mantelpiece to a small chip in the edge of the wood from where my forehead bounced off it as a child. My father had slapped me so hard in anger that I lost my balance and almost fell into the fire. In a bid to stop myself, I had tried to fall away from the fireplace and ended up cracking my forehead against the wood, chipping the antique, much to my father’s further anger.

The chip has smoothed with age, but the memory still stings.

Turning, I step around the small leather seat next to the drinks table and walk over a rather ugly olive-green rug. Just glancing at it makes my gut clench and my hands throb in memory.

I’d tried to act like a grown-up and had been so excited about how fancy and elegant I felt holding a wine glass. Until I got too excited and spilled the wine all over the wooden floor. My father had been furious and made me scrub for days to clean up the stain with unknown chemicals that merely burned my hands and stripped the wood of all color.

The chemical burns on my skin took weeks to recover, and even now, extreme temperatures make them ache and throb. My father took some twisted glee in watching me suffer while berating me the entire time about the destruction I'd caused.

If I could, I’d burn this entire fucking office to the ground.

I make it to his desk and hesitate.

The filing cabinets are a few feet away, but I’m suddenly rooted to the spot. I close my eyes, and I’m right back in that moment with his dead body slumped back in his chair and the scent of death in the air.

The very last conversation I had with my father wasn’t one of love.

It was an argument.

He called me in here, and like every other time he did, I stupidly got my hopes up thinking that finally, this was the time when I would get to do something useful. That he would finally see my potential and realize the terrible, abusive way he'd treated me all these years was just part of some twisted training to harden me into someone who can survive in this world.

I was wrong.

He made me stand in front of his desk while he drank and gleefully told me that I was to be sold off. Not engaged. Not married.

Sold.

I was a money sink, in his words. I had no worth. No use. No family was worth marrying into because no family would want someone like me.

I was a bad deal waiting to happen and he couldn’t stand it anymore. He didn’t have time to worry about what I was up to when he had more important things to focus on, and he wanted nothing more to do with me.

So he was selling me.

He held his drink up and laughed that he would probably need to be the one spending money and paying someone to take me off his hands.

I thought he was drunk and joking, but when he listed all my failed engagements to much smaller families, something clicked in my mind. He had only ever tried to wed me to smaller, insignificant families because he didn’t want a union with a family that could become a threat.

In some ways, he saw me as a threat. His own daughter. The one he beat and berated, blamed for the death of my mother while she was in childbirth, the one who only ever just wanted to be seen. Something snapped in me that night and I argued back.

I told him I knew all about his plans to traffic children and that I was going to stop him. I was going to go public and present the foul change to the other families so that he would finally know what it felt like to feel like the whole world was against him.

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