Page 3 of The Bratva's Arranged Virgin Bride
Chapter 2 - Nat
As soon as I stepped out of the shop, I looked up at the sky, the sun trying its best to shine through the smog. The flat tops of the surrounding buildings made a jagged outline. A billboard peeked through a gap from several blocks away, bright colors and a shirtless hunk enticing people to see the latest movie release. Several women brushed past me into the upscale boutique I just left, a beefy, burly man trailing somewhat discreetly behind them with a poodle tucked under his arm.
God, it was good to be back in LA.
Or, at least, I kept telling myself that. My own discreet bodyguard stepped out of the shadows around the corner and took the pile of bags from my hand. My Aunt Mila hurried out with her own armload of packages, brushing off his offer to take them with a toss of her long blonde hair. Now, if anyone belonged in the Beverly Hills shopping scene, it was Mila. Effortlessly graceful, decked out in the latest fashions and dripping with jewelry, it was a wonder she deigned to be seen with me in my oversized cream top and simple dark jeans that were,gasp, from two seasons ago.
“On to the next one,” she said, grinning at me hopefully.
“Yep,” I agreed, forcing false cheer into my voice and praying she didn’t pick up on it.
She did, she had to. Even though she was my aunt, she was only a year older than me, and we were as close as sisters. But she let it slide, and I kept up the ruse that the shopping therapy was doing the trick.
It wasn’t. And being with Mila was strained ever since her marriage. Neither one of us would admit it, which was part of the problem. She thought I didn’t get it, but I did. I really did. Shewas madly in love with her husband and would rather tear her own arm off than go against him in any way. That was normal.
What wasn’t normal was that, until a few months ago, her husband had been our family’s worst enemy.
Arkadi Mikhailov had caused a great deal of damage. A hell of a lot. My father and uncles, Mila’s older brothers, all still refused to accept him as one of us. That had to hurt, and I probably would have been just as hurt as Mila was because she was on the outs, too. Arkadi wasn’t invited to any of our family dinners, which hardly ever touched on business, and certainly wasn’t invited to any of the meetings, which did, and because of that, Mila felt like she needed to stay away, too.
Since she wasn’t just a family member, but one of my best and closest friends, I wasn’t about to give her up. Let any of my uncles or my father try to stop me from seeing her. Which put me smack in the middle of our family feud, a very uncomfortable place to be.
Every time we met, it felt like we were keeping a dirty secret, even though we were out and about in public. While my father would never tell me flat out I couldn’t see Mila, he’d warned me not to talk about anything to do with our Bratva dealings, as if I was informed of any of that anyway. Hanging out with Mila used to be one of my favorite things, and now it felt like I was treading dangerous ground every time we were together.
It was so unfair how my uncles and father were treating her. Their own sister! Especially since Arkadi was trying so hard to make them see he was no longer a threat. He hadn’t done a single thing out of line since he and Mila returned to LA.
I wanted to discuss it, make a plan to get her and Arkadi back in the family’s good graces, but at the slightest hint ofbringing it up, she shut it right down. As far as Mila was concerned, if they didn’t trust her husband, they didn’t trust her.
That alone was enough to make me want to put my credit card to work and try to get the swift and heady rush of buying something new and useless to blot out my family woes, but I had an even deeper problem gnawing at me.
It was something I had shared with Mila when it first happened a couple of months ago. At first, she’d been eager to help me out, but now she kept encouraging me to drop it. Get over it. Move on.
Oh, I tried. She was definitely right that it would be better for my mental health to forget what happened to me in Milan, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get over the fact that I’d been swindled.
Not just out of a few bucks, either. More like half a million, which might have been a drop in the bucket to my uncles, but it was huge to me. Still, it was only money, and I wasn’t exactly hurting for that. The giant treasure trove building up in the back of my car during our shopping expedition could attest to that.
Yes, I suppose I could get over the money, though it still felt so wrong to have to accept it was all gone. Worse than losing everything I had in my bank account, my pride was badly dented, something that had never happened to me before.
I still got red in the face when I thought back to how I believed I was on top of the world, then it was all just gone. In such a humiliatingly undramatic fashion, too, making me see just how blind I’d been the whole time.
Money gone, pride badly injured, and my heart? Well, I really couldn’t think about that. That part of it was all on my own side and too inconsequential when compared to having to shutmy beloved gallery down. It wasn’t like I could keep it open when it had been completely cleaned out, just like my bank account.
I worked so damn hard to find the perfect spot, spent every last dime of my own money to get it off the ground. Things were going well. Great, really. After I graduated from my art program, I meant to stay in Milan and cultivate the gallery, along with the new side business.
Damn that side business. And damn the much too handsome man who flirted his way into getting me to agree to it. Oh, it had been a ton of fun until I was the one getting scammed. Now I was pissed off all the time, consumed with finding the piece of crap who burned me so badly.
“You getting sick of jewelry?” Mila asked, interrupting my most recent bout of barely concealed rage.
I looked up from the array of glittering gold and diamonds under the glass in front of me, barely aware we’d wandered into a fine jewelry shop. She was trying on a necklace, and I tried to arrange my face in a way that wouldn’t make her suspect my mind was elsewhere, plotting the piece of crap’s demise.
I couldn’t bring it up to her because she believed it was better to move on than dwell on vengeance. But it was easy for her to think that when she was blissfully happy.
“I think I might need a caffeine hit,” I said, really just wanting to call it a day.
I should have been able to move on, and I wished I could, but not even being back home in LA and surrounded by my family was enough to make me give up my desire for revenge. Nobody could hide forever, could they?
It might have been easier if I had utilized the vast network I had at my disposal, but there was no way I could risk any of my uncles or especially my father, ever finding out. They could never, ever know. For one, I’d be in trouble for doing something so stupid, even at age twenty-one. For another, my all-powerful father would end up finding the piece of crap first and take away all the joy of making him suffer.
It was like they hated for me to have any fun at all, which was most likely why I went behind their backs and took part in the art scheme in the first place. The only people who knew were Mila and Arkadi, and while I could trust them to keep my secret, I wasn’t about to follow their sage advice and get over it.
