Page 83 of Immaculate Deception (Romanoff Bratva)

I’ve lived with all three of those emotions every second of every day of the last six weeks.

I wake up and I hate the people who brought me here. I want to claw their faces to bloody ribbons and scream with pure rage. But I fear what would happen if I put so much as a toe out of line.

I’ve seen the consequences firsthand. Witnessed what happens to the girls who don’t listen, who don’t follow orders.

They get hurt. Badly.

Some of them never return.

My roommate, Rose, is probably the only reason I’m still alive. The first day I arrived, when the burly goons who ran the auction dragged me into this house, bound and cuffed and gagged, her face was the first one I saw.

Red hair, vibrant and alive. Smooth alabaster skin with a smattering of freckles. Pretty, petite—and so haunted that it took my breath away.

She looked like she’d seen the worst humanity has to offer. And that sight had seared itself into her retinas in a way that was unforgettable. It had scarred her to the core.

But there was sweetness in there, too, despite the horrors she’d endured in the home of the man who’d bought us both.

“His name is Taras Kreshnik,” she explained to me that first day, helping me to a seat on the thin twin mattress that would become mine. I was trembling so bad I could hardly breathe. She held my hands. Shushed me. Stroked my hair until I finally managed to draw in a gulp of air.

“Who—who is he?” I’d managed to gasp.

“The devil,” she answered in a quiet murmur. “He’s the goddamned devil.”

She was right about that.

More specifically, he is an underboss for the Albanian mafia. A key player in the hierarchy. The men who are cackling like hyenas right now in the drawing room are his underlings, his runners, his capos. They come here regularly to pay fealty. To beg for support. To negotiate for cash, guns, drugs—

And most of all, for women.

To anyone passing through, it looks like all of Kreshnik’s slaves move freely around the house. We aren’t kept in chains. We aren’t being whipped. Our chains and whips are invisible.

Well, mine are—for now.

That’s not quite the case for the women who serve Taras’s intimate needs personally. Those chains are very much real. They’re just kept locked away until night falls.

For six weeks, every night when the sun sets, there is a knock at the door. Rose always answers it. And every night, standing on the other side is Taras.

Some nights, he is dressed up in a suit, fingers flashing with jewelry and a haughty look in his eyes.

Other nights, he is in a bloodstained undershirt and drunk off his ass.

Either way, the end result is the same.

Rose goes with him silently. For an hour, the house quivers with her pained moans and pleas for mercy. And then she comes back, battered and worn, and collapses onto her bed.

Rose said Taras is the devil. The longer I’ve been here, the more I think that might’ve been too generous.

Even the devil was an angel once.

Taras Kreshnik has never been anything but a motherfucking animal.

One of the men in the drawing room glances up and catches me peering in through the open doorway. He frowns, but before he can say anything, I’m gone. Scurrying back to the tiny quarters I share with Rose.

She’s in the room when I get back. Lying prone on her bed, face in the pillow. She doesn’t look up as I enter, but she mumbles, “The doctor came to see you.”

I freeze in the doorway. “What did he say?”

“That he’d be back in a half hour,” she says, voice flat. “That was fifteen minutes ago.”

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