Page 6 of Corruption

Playing in my house with Alik playing the piano alongside me for our audience of no one will have to do.

It’s nowhere near the same high as standing before a crowd of people applauding after playing a masterpiece, but Alik and the mind-blowing sex were a fantastic trade off. I wouldn’t trade my love for anything. Not even my first love of playing the violin. Still, sometimes I miss it. Sometimes I wonder what could have been in a perfect world where I was allowed to have both.

After finishing our selected piece for the evening, I set my violin down on the piano, not bothering to put it away yet since no one ever comes in here besides Alik and I.

“Ready to go meet our future sister-in-law?” Alik asks as he stands from the piano and offers me his arm.

“Let’s.”

It’s been impossible to find out anything about this girl and her old life and what it could have been before Adrian Fantoni decided to pass her off as his daughter. But I’ve only been looking three days, and I would have been disappointed if I had been able to find anything on the girl in that time. I also would have had to let the Fantonis know that their people were slacking in their jobs and my admiration for the way the Italians handle their business would have dropped a few pegs.

What my inability to find anything on the girl means, though, is that we’ll have to uncover her secrets the old fashioned way. Through observing and talking to the girl herself.

We’re silent on the ride over to my brother-in-law’s home. The home he inherited from his father when he died and the man’s seat was passed down to him. The home that Alik was supposed to inherited but forsook in exchange for my life.

“Behave tonight, Nadezhda,” Alik warns.

“I’ll try.”

“You won’t try. You just will.”

I scoff and say, “Forgive me if I find it hard to grin and bear politely in front of the man who was going to marry me and then decided to forget all that when letting me be killed served his ambitions better.”

“So are you saying that I’ve been unsatisfactory all these years? Do I have reason to be jealous?”

“If I answer yes to those questions will it make you kill your brother?”

Alik laughs and presses a kiss to my mouth as the car comes to a stop.

“Behave. Or there will be consequences.”

It takes all the self-control beat and fucked into me in our playroom over the years to prevent myself from shuddering in anticipation of what the consequences will be if I do decide to misbehave. But there is a time and place to misbehave and in front of the Fantonis tonight is not it.

He doesn’t wait for an answer as he slides out the car when the door opens and then helps me out. We walk up the dimly lit path to the enormous house, walking under the stone archway, through the courtyard and to the front door of the house which is already being held open for us to enter.

In the large, expansive foyer, Vaughn is already waiting. But to my surprise, he’s alone save for—

“Aunt Nadia,” Isaak says in Russian, rushing to hug me.

I instinctively want to kneel down to hug him just like I used to when he was only a little boy. But at thirteen-years-old, he’s well beyond the height where I would have needed to do that anymore.

“Hello, my love,” I say, very pointedly ignoring the way Vaughn is frowning at Isaak and I behind my nephew. Then I add, “Look at you. So handsome already. You’re going to be taller than me soon. And you sound like a grown man now with that voice.”

He grins and says, “It’s been like that for months now. You’d know that if you came over more often.”

“Nothing is stopping you from coming to my house either.”

That’s a lie, and I’m not sure if Isaak is aware enough of his father’s darker deeds to be aware of that yet.

Isaak shrugs sheepishly and says, “I’ve had a lot of school work to do. And I’ve been shadowing my dad.”

“All the more reason for you to come to my house instead. We’d have more fun.”

Not to mention that I come to Vaughn’s home without Alik when only absolutely necessary. Because there’s a chance that without Alik I’d somehow befall some tragic accident and end up dead. But I’m supposed to be behaving tonight.

“No greeting for your uncle?” Alik asks.

Isaak smirks and rolls his eyes but grabs Alik’s hand and hugs him in greeting.

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