Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 79326 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 397(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79326 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 397(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
He’s not bringing her back to Paris. He’s taking her to Turkey. The Rostovs probably have a palace there. He’s bringing her somewhere he can lock her up tight and keep me away.
“Oh, Istanbul, that’s right. Oh well. I will get address. Spasibo.” Zoe ends the call.
“Good job, Zoe,” I say.
The front door swings open, and Lili rushes in. “Oh my God, Baron. What happened? Leo texted me to come over.”
I make a mental note to punch Leo later when it won’t hurt so badly to move. As I give her the shortest recap possible, Leo makes a video call on his phone, and Phoenix brings an icepack for my face.
Leo’s dad, Maxim, appears on Leo’s screen. Sasha, his mom, leans into the screen with a big smile.
“Leonid! How are you?”
“Uh, okay, Mom, but can I talk to Papa in private for a minute?”
“If you promise to call me tomorrow.”
“Promise.”
“Okay, love you.” Sasha blows kisses as Maxim walks away from her.
“Hey, Papa.” He angles his phone to show my beat-up face for a second then turns it back to him. “Can we conference with you and Uncle Ravil?”
Maxim swears, and his camera jostles as he walks out the door of his penthouse and over to my parents’. “Was it Rostov?”
“Yeah.” Leo props his phone up in the window sill, and the bratva heirs gather around. Phoenix and Anders hang back, out of the picture.
“Okay, give me a minute, so you only have to update us once.” A moment later, he video calls us from my father’s desk. Maxim, Dima, and my dad look back at us.
By now, I’ve had time to think it through. To run scenarios in my head. I have a half-baked idea for rescuing Lara.
“Are you all right, Ben?” my dad asks.
Am I? Not even fucking close. And it’s not just because I had the shit beat out of me. It’s because Lara’s gone. I had one job–to protect her–and I failed at it.
Worse than that–I hurt her. All I wanted to do was win her love and trust.
I thought I was there, but my misstep demolished everything I’d worked so hard to build.
“Lara’s gone,” I say. Admitting my failure has a bitter taste. “Brash had a spy at Thornecroft who was involved in an assault on Gabe Tracy’s daughter. It was meant to bring me and Baranov House down. They drugged her and brought her to a hospital where the spy must have had contact with her. I’m guessing while she was drugged, she told him something I shared with her in confidence about my arranged marriage, which was that it was made urgent because Lara had interest from another party.”
My friends all stare at me in surprise. They weren’t privy to the conversation I had on the lawn–they just witnessed it from the windows.
“Brash used those exact words–the ones I used with Melinda–when he showed up tonight. Oh, and in case you didn’t know–Adrian didn’t trust Lara with the truth, so she showed up here believing our marriage was actually arranged from birth, and I was the asshole. A heads’ up on that would’ve been nice. So anyway, Lara was understandably upset about being manipulated, and she left with him.”
“Also, they showed up with AK-47’s, so Baron couldn’t go after her,” Anya interjects.
I continue, “He’s got her on a flight to Turkey right now. I’m going to fly in solo, go in, and take her back. Could you arrange a plane for me?”
My father stares back at me impassively. We share the trait of keeping our expressions inscrutable while processing complicated situations. “Do you think she’ll go with you?”
The pain of hurting her floods to the surface, raw and fresh. Will I find the words to make her forgive me?
No, wait. That’s irrelevant. Her choice to love me or not is less important than her safety.
Like her father, I would choose her safety from Rostov over her forgiveness any day.
“I’ll be persuasive,” I say.
Zoe and Lily give me dubious looks. They must hear the resolution in my tone. The certainty that I’ll take Lara back whether she wants rescuing or not.
“The Rostovs have a property in Istanbul. There'll be ten times as many guards there as came to pick her up. How will you get around them?” Maxim asks.
“I’ll go in quietly. Like a secret ops mission. That way we can avoid a war.”
My father’s face still shows nothing. He considers me for what feels like an eternity. “Okay,” he says at last. “She’s your wife. You should be the one to go in.”
Relief rushes through me. I was afraid he would try to protect me and hold back his assistance to dissuade me from going. “You will wait until Adrian and his team are in place as backup or for extraction in case things go wrong.”