Page 88 of City Of Thieves
“Only happens when I’m four whiskeys down.”He holds up the letter. “And your mother never told you about any of this?”
I shake my head. “Not until yesterday.”
“Who else knows?”
“My dad, Seb…” I sit up slowly. “She only discovered she was Andrei Petrov’s daughter after she met my dad. But she renounced her ties to Russia immediately.”
“So, this is all just a fucking treasure hunt for Belov?” He sits down on the bed next to me and rakes a hand through his black hair. “Put it to me straight, sweetheart, because my history is all shades of screwed up, along with my appreciation of paintings.”
“Do you remember what Ivan said to us in London when I was appraising the ‘Atonement’ before the auction?”
“Not particularly. I was too busy deciding whether to have your ass or your pussy for lunch.”
Giving him a small smile, I lean forward and wrap my arms around my knees. “He was talking about how the Nazis stole loads of art during the Second World War,” I prompt gently. “Well, they stole from my family, too. They stole from Petrov’s ancestors and gifted them to another Russian family for being—”
“Betraying, murderous, Nazi sympathizing fucks,” he finishes, taking an extra-long swig of whiskey. “Yeah, I read that part.”
I choose not to question why he’s drinking this hard at five in the morning.
“Forty years later, my grandfather, Petrov, tracked the family down, killed a lot of people, and took the whole collection back from them. Their name was—”
“Belov,” he finishes, darkly. “So, you and your daughter are the collateral of an eighty-year feud.”
I pause, reflecting on this for a moment. “Do you think Konstantin planned to make me his revenge toy, or do you think it was a chance meeting and a shitty fate?”
“Does it matter? The fucker will be dead soon anyway.” Placing the bottle and letter on the nightstand, he pulls me into his arms.
“Petrov made the whole collection disappear before he died. He told everyone it was destroyed in a house fire. He knew the Belov family was obsessed with it, and that they’d never stop hunting it. In today’s market, it’s priceless... He left that note to my mother with instructions on how to find the collection. He’d written a letter on the back of ten different paintings which, together, spelled out a location in Russia. After that, he had them sold at auction and scattered them to the wind for her to find.”
“But Kostantin found out about the note.” He guides me back down to the bed and gives me a lingering kiss.
“Seb’s been flooding the market with fakes, while my mother and Ivan have been quietly acquiring the originals.”
“Does your mother have all ten?”
“She does now.” I frame his face in my hands as I bathe in his whiskey breath and strength again. “Thanks to you, I was able to give her the final one last night.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Renzo
Sex and intimacydon’t belong in the same sentence, at least they never used to for me. Then a raven-haired empress took a paintbrush and splattered color all over my perfectly fucked-up gray world.
Sex.
Intimacy.
Since meeting Tatiana, those two words have become so entwined I know I’ll never be able to separate them again…Because I don’t want to.
She fell back asleep after we talked. I’m watching her now, with the white bedsheet tangled around her slim waist, her small breasts rising and falling with each steady breath.
I’ve never had anything that was all mine before. As the oldest, Nero was automatically given stuff first, and as the youngest and the only girl, Rosalia had an entire armada of shit all her own. My father is one of the two most powerful men in New Jersey, yet somehow, I always fell between the cracks of the ‘hand-me-downs’ and the ‘buy-it-your-own-damn self’ categories.
But the woman lying next to me is mine.All fucking mine.And there’s not a man in this world, or in the next, who will take her from me.
Mine.
Whiskey and determination cement the word inside my head, driving a vicious beat straight to my cock. It swells at the memory of her taking my gun in her mouth and leaks when I remember how sweet her pussy tastes.
