Page 61 of Ruinous Need
“They all wanted her, and it almost started a brawl, right in the box after the show finished. Then Semyon proposed a game.”
“Oh God.”
I flop back against the couch and pinch the bridge of my nose. I know Semyon’s games.
“Whoever could secure the ballerina’s hand in marriage, he said, would be king of the city. And everyone would agree to let him run the new shipments of cocaine through New York. Everyone shook on it, the heads of every mob, that night.”
It sets my teeth on edge. That these grown men saw Lisette, achieving her greatest dreams for the first time as an eighteen-year-old ballerina, and decided that was the end of her being her own person. She would just be a prize in some fucking childish game of capture the flag.
I roll my shoulders in an attempt to loosen the tension that’s built up over the course of this conversation.
“He announced he would marry her the following week. Everyone thought he’d rigged the competition somehow. And now, there’s a manhunt on.”
“Everyone wants that prize.”
Obviously. We’re talking billions of dollars in future revenue. That couldmakeone of the smaller players like the Albanians.
This makes Lisette a target for virtually every mob in the city. This is so much worse than I could have imagined.
“We just had a meeting about it,” Merc interjects.
“About what?”
“Well, the meeting was about her.”
“What?” I grit the word out.
“Her whereabouts. The strategy we could use to capture her.”
“We told them nothing,” he says quickly. “We wouldn’t sell you out like that. Or Lisette.”
“But we don’t think you’ve got long.” Ben’s face is serious. “Romeo knows Semyon has Lisette locked up somewhere. The Irish are on the trail, too. I think you’ve got to move fast, Viktor, or they’re going to try and take her.”
“And we… Didn’t think you’d like that,” Merc adds, as if it needs to be said.
“No shit.”
I’m deep in thought for a second. They study my face carefully.
He’s trying to start a war. That’s the only thing that makes sense with this story. He’s given every powerful, violent man the same object to aim for and made sure that he’s the only one in possession of it.
And that object is Lisette.
It churns my stomach, the way he’s using her. But it makes everything that’s been feeling off click into place. Protecting Lisette isn’t about her, really, it’s about Semyon.
I thought it was because he was infatuated with her. It’s because he’s using her.
This sounds precisely like the kind of competition Semyon would have cooked up when we were children. And then he would have rigged it, to make sure he would win.
I wonder how he did it. He’d probably already researched Lisette, gotten to know about her mother’s illness, then planted the idea with the rest of those idiots.
Because the Bratva have the hospitals, the Bratva can wipe the medical bills, the Bratva have the one thing that Lisette would have done anything for: her mother’s health.
This all falls into place with a sickening crunch. Lisette isn’t just being hunted by the Irish. She’s being hunted by everyone.
These are not enemies of Semyon’s. They’re enemies of Lisette’s.
And now, enemies of mine.
