Page 6 of Twisted Secrets
Keira laughed. “Please. You’re not our father, and you can’t tell me what to do.” She shoved past him and wobbled down the stairs, bumping into the wall as she went. Cillian inhaled sharply.Vodka. That’s what he smelled on her breath.Drugsandalcohol. Shit.
“Keira!”
But she was gone, disappearing toward the back of the house—the better to sneak out without an escort.Fuck. He started to go after her, but his legs chose that moment to remind him that he was still shaky from the stupid goddamn panic attack. And what the hell was he going to do? He couldn’t help her. Hell, he could barely help himself.
He couldn’t just let her go by herself, though. He already had the blood of one sibling on his hands—another one might actually kill him. Cillian fished his phone out of his pocket and texted Liam.Keira’s headingout the back door.
A few seconds later, it chimed.On it.
Cillian sighed and walked to his room, managing not to run into anyone else. He stripped, leaving the clothing wadded up on the floor as he headed for the bathroom. He’d given up a lot of things since everything went to hell, but his suits were one thing he still clung to. There was nothing on this earth that could fool him into thinking he was in control like shielding himself in a perfectly fitting suit.
He turned the shower as hot as he could stand it and stepped beneath the spray. The shock of it hitting his skin centered him, which only made it clearer just how off-balance he’d been since he left Jameson’s. He wished he could blame it on Olivia and that goddamn sex. It wasn’t the truth. The snarly bartender, the panic attack, and his run-in with Keira were just the icing on the shit cake.
It didn’t matter.
Tomorrow was a new day, except nothing would change and he’d just be going through the motions all over again. Sometimes he felt like he was in a particularly brutal version ofGroundhog Day, stuck in a wheel that would never stop spinning.
***
Olivia climbed out of the cab in a daze. She couldn’t believe she’d just gonetherewith Cillian O’Malley. She licked her lips, still tasting apple juice and him, and shivered.It was a onetime thing. It’ll never happen again.
As good as it was, he was the kind of trouble she couldn’t afford, even if she was in the market. Which she wasn’t. She nodded to herself and headed for the stairs up to her apartment. She had otherpriorities.
She was so tired, she almost missed the shadow detaching from the wall across from her apartment door. Olivia froze. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see you.” Sergei’s low voice with his thick Russian accent used to make her feel safe. He was just as big and blond and brutal looking as he had been when she’d fallen in love with him, his nose broken one too many times to be rakish, his face that of a warrior. His sheer size was something that had attracted her to him in the first place, a wall between her and the speculative looks she started getting from Andrei Romanov’s men as soon as she turned eighteen. Sergei was the only one who’d looked at her like she was a person, and a special one at that. He made her feel like more than the bastard daughter of the patriarch of the Romanovs—what was left of them.
She’d been such an unforgivable idiot.
She crossed her arms over her chest, shifting so she could get to the gun in her purse if necessary. “Why don’t we try that again? What are you doing here, Sergei?” She went ramrod straight, all the lingering looseness in her body from her encounter with Cillian going up in smoke. “He sent you, didn’t he?”
“Your brother is worried about you.”
“Half brother.” A vital distinction. They might share the same father, but Olivia would never be a Romanov. The old hurt rose, the feeling of having no place of her own, but she forced it down. She wasn’t in that life anymore, and she wasn’t about to be dragged back in because Dmitri suddenly decided to remember that they were related. The Romanov name came with more strings attached to it than Pinocchio. She’d dodged a bullet by her father never officially acknowledgingher as his child—and she fully planned to keep on dodging it for the rest of her life.
She had to figure out what Sergei—and by association, Dmitri—was here for so she could get them both back out of her life. “For the last time, what do you want?”
“You know what I want.” The look on his face said it all.Her. But that ship had sailed two years ago, and it wasn’t coming back—ever. He knew it. He had to know it. He might pretend he could go back in time and regain her trust, but it wasn’t happening. Olivia had been fooled once, but she’d never put him in the position where he could hurt her like that again. From his muttered curse, he read that knowledge from her expression. “I want to see Hadley.”
No way. Notmydaughter.
Olivia stopped short, clamping her lips shut around the instinctive denial. Hadley washers. Where had he been for the last year while she’d been struggling to make ends meet?Off with Dmitri, probably torturing small animals and beating the crap out of helpless people.
Okay, that wasn’t fair, but she wasn’t feeling all that fair when it came to Sergei. She had no doubt that he loved their daughter as much as he was able, just like she had no doubt that he’d loved her, too. She also knew that he’d put a bullet in both their brains and throw their bodies into the river if Dmitri commanded it. Sergei might—might—feel bad about doing it, but he’d do it all the same. The Romanovs were his end-all, be-all, and nothing could compare to that.
If he was really here to see Hadley, he wouldn’t be showing up at one in the morning. “She’s sleeping. Her bedtime is eight.” Olivia hesitated. Every instinct demanded that she do whatever it took to see the last of himonce and for all, but she was afraid that washerhurt talking. Like it or not, he was Hadley’s father. She cleared her throat. “If you really want to see her, you can come by in the morning.”
“I will.” He looked away, his Russian accent getting thicker. “But I am not here only for you.”
Of course he wasn’t. She should have known better than to think he’d shown up after twelve months of silence just to say hello. “Tell Dmitri to leave me alone. He doesn’t want me in the damn family any more than I want to be there. He needs to let it go.” Maybe if she said the words enough times, he’d actually listen. She wasn’t holding her breath.
“He can’t do that and you know it.” Sergei still didn’t look at her. “He is not a patient man, Olivia.”
She knew that. Hell, she knew that better than most people. “I left all that behind when I moved away from New York.” She didn’twantit—any of it. She didn’t care that Andrei got terminally ill and suddenly had a change of heart about the bastard daughter he’d spent the last twenty-two years ignoring. She had no desire for a position within the Romanov empire or any of the so-called perks that came with it. The only thing Andrei had done that was less than despicable was making sure she had a roof over her head and didn’t starve while growing up. The bare minimum for survival. She didn’t owe him anything, and she sure as hell didn’t want any of his guilt-driven gifts.
Was she being stubborn? Hell yes. She and Hadley were doing just fine without touching the money Andrei had put in an account for her—especially since she couldn’t touch it without agreeing to everything else he’d wanted from her before he died.
“I don’t want the money, and I don’t want anything to dowith the Romanovs.”
