Chapter One 

Elena

I’d always had a not-so-secret weakness for Italian luxury.

Still—to be spoiled like this on a summer day—it’s impossible not to feel like the luckiest girl in the world.

Under the pale wash of a Chicago summer sky, August sunshine glinted off the custom cherry-red paint job of my graduation present, a Maserati Levante X Class. As I wove through traffic, the V8 engine purring and the cream leather wheel soft under my fast turns, heads spun as I flew by. I couldn’t help but giggle. It was a ridiculous vehicle, all sleek lines and precise handling, as though it had been dropped off from the future and not my father.

Daddy pulls it off with the big presents, I thought to myself, trying to hold onto a feeling of warm affection and not trepidation, as I swung down the tree-lined street that led to his industrial park offices on the edge of the city. My father hated austerity and the glitz of modernism, so he purchased several acres in western Chicago and spent a fortune on landscaping to create a green oasis. The massive stone walls in front of his squat office building, however, screamed Soviet architecture.

Knuckles rapped on my window as I pulled the car to a stop and the hulking brute on the other side scowled until the tinted window rolled down enough for Yegor to see me sticking my tongue out at him.

“Blyat,” Yegor crowed as he laughed. No fucking way. “Little Fedulova, gluppy.” He smiled as he called me silly. “I should’ve known. Who else would drive ital’yanka candy?”

“Exactly,” I said, fighting back a laugh at Yegor’s rumbling disdain when he’d said ital’yanka. Italian. “Do you like it? It’s my favorite color.”

“Dramatic,” he said. His deep North Russian accent seemed to get thicker as he continued. “Glitzy. I’m surprised shef would buy you such bright automobile.”

A faint chill went over me at the use of “shef.” Meaning “boss” or “old man,” it was a title that only the most senior and loyal Bratva got to call my father, regardless of rank.

Just another reminder that here, Viktor Fedulov was shef or Boss first and foremost.

He was my dad one day a month.

If I’m lucky.

That was something I’d never had any choice but to go along with as a “Bratva brat.” Never mind how I’d come to understand my father’s organization over the years—how, despite being less organized than their Mafia counterparts, the Bratva considered themselves ten times more loyal and ruthless than the Sicilians. Or from one glance, I could tell the placement of a man on the Fedulov food chain, from the lowest vor or “thief,” to the brigadiers or “captains.”

I bit back a sigh. I’d let myself forget about this world and what it meant to come home over the last few years in California. The scrape of the metal gate as it opened, Yegor’s smile gone as he looked around the street with cold calculation, and the men swarming forward, hands resting on their holstered guns or holding massive rifles were all enough reminders.

Yegor must’ve caught something on my face, because his expression softened and gave me a quick grin as I drove forward and obediently parked in the spot that a frowning Shestyorka, or “security” of the Bratva, pointed to.

The door was opened before I could turn off the engine and I hastily tried to grab everything as Bratva swarmed my car, checking it over for bugs and bombs, while the Shestyorka by my door tapped his foot and clicked his tongue, continuously glancing at his heavy gold watch.

I knew there was no point in telling my father’s men that they were wasting their time even though no one in Chicago knew who I was. No one knew I’d been in California, never mind that I was now back in Chicago employed as a remote consultant for tech start-ups.

Most people had no idea that Elena Fedulova existed.

Moreover, even on the slimmest and most improbable chance they did know who and where I was, no one in their right mind would come near the daughter of the “silent pakchan.” Especially since most people thought the silent Russian “boss” was nothing but a sadistic urban legend floating around Chicago.

No one would believe that such a man could have a daughter, least of all me.

I shivered as a question whispered through my mind.

If the father’s a phantom, what does that make the daughter?

“Little Fedulova, you must move,” the Shestyorka urged, and I snapped back to reality.

Apologizing in clumsy Russian, since I’d always been better at understanding it than speaking it, I slipped out of my car and hurried to the door. My heart pumped faster; in mere minutes, I’d be with my father. I knew I had to take what little time he could afford me, even if over the years, I felt greedier and greedier for every second.

He likes going out with me, I reassured myself. It’s a nice break.

Taking a deep breath, I went to go inside when I remembered that I’d left my overpriced iced coffee sweating in the cupholder. Dammit.

As much as I didn’t want to wade through Bratva muscle and the twitchy Shestyorka, I didn’t want to let it go to waste or risk it getting spilled on the interior.

Before I could turn around, a deep and familiar voice, called out, “There you are, lisitsa.”

A flash of irritation and amusement went through me as I turned. Only one man called me “she-fox,” in his deep voice, with that edge of “city-boy” Russian, as the other Bratva called it.

He offered me a familiar smirk as he approached. “Forget something?” He held up my coffee and my irritation faded as I returned his smile.

“Thank you, Erik,” I said as Erik Dernov stopped in front of me and gazed down, then slowly extended the coffee toward me. I pretended not to notice his deliberate teasing and instead smiled at him. I took a sip from the cup, the caramel and espresso bursting on my tongue. “Were you outside the whole time?”

“Yes, imp. How dare you not say hello?” Erik reached out and pinched my cheek, just a little too hard. We’d been sort-of-friends, sort-of-family since my father brought him from Russia almost nine years ago, an intense and whip-thin boy who was nothing but high cheekbones, floppy ice-blonde hair, and burning green eyes.

Only his eyes remained the same. Everything else had filled out in cords of muscle and steel, his sharp jaw covered in a neat beard, his ice-blonde hair shaved down almost to the bone, and his boots lending him almost a foot and a half on me.

“How could I see you in that mob?” I nodded at the Bratva still swarming my Maserati.

“You and your Italian fixation,” he teased. I rolled my eyes. “Hey. Knock it off or I won’t tell you how much I missed you.”

“Didn’t you just do that?”

“Did I?” He slung his hands in his pockets. “Probably not as much as you missed me, though.”

“Oh yes, very true,” I said glibly, with a small and painful pinch of guilt.

As always, when I was with Erik, I couldn’t shake the sense that our friendship was nothing but geography. We were in each other’s orbit and the same age, both indulged by my father, as much as a man like my father could be indulgent. Beyond that, it was so hard to say. Was I an obligation more than I was an actual friend to Erik?

Or was it vice versa?

Because while Erik and I had kept in contact over the past five years that I’d been in school, I’d forgotten about him more often than not. It had nothing on the agonized separation between me and my bestie Clara. We’d kept up a fervent, near-daily text chain, calling and facetiming each other for hours on end, whether to chat or watch a movie or do homework together.

“Hmph.” Erik got that slightly superior look on his face and narrowed his gaze at me from behind his glasses, made from a thin, almost invisible metal frame. “Not as much as Clara, huh? I’ll have to make sure to change that.”

“Sure,” I said with a laugh and quickly spun on heel. “Well, my father’s expecting me.”

Erik said something, but I missed it because I was already through the front doors and on my way to the elevator bank. Only there was a quick, heavy sound of boots behind me, and Erik reappeared by my side, his eyes now narrowed at me, and he was about to speak when his name was called, causing him to slow down.

“Lisitsa, wait,” Erik commanded in a soft voice.

My shoulders stiffened. No one bosses me around. I cast a glance over my shoulder and when his stern and annoyed gaze met mine, I stuck my tongue out.

Erik’s mouth thinned into an invisible line, but someone grabbed his arm, speaking in urgent Russian, and I heard something that sounded like, “…fucking Scorpion, do you know what this means? Erik, you have to—”

The elevator dinged and I hopped on. As the doors closed, I caught a quick glimpse of Erik and the man speaking to him, who’d lowered his voice. I noted that the cords in Erik’s neck were standing out like he was a boxer being held back in a ring from tearing some guy’s head off.

Can’t tell me what to do, not sorry, I sang out in my head.

Just as the doors were about to close, Erik shook himself and glanced over in time to see me flash a smirk and the peace sign, then I was zooming up to the top floor.

I left my thoughts about him on the ground floor and instead began to think about the coming hours spent with my dad. First, we’d head to Moth Hill Stables, exclusive stables tucked against a river to the north, riding our favorite horses on our favorite trails. After, we’d split up briefly to go to the spa, indulging in a steam or a soak, then meet back up for a lunch at the restaurant. Later, we might drive to a little town in the middle of nowhere and dig through a thrift shop, which was a secret weakness of my father’s. He found it hilarious how Americans were such cluttered, extravagant capitalists.

If he was in a really good mood, he might tell me stories of North Russia and the horses he rode on the plains, the way the light hit the winter snow and the open, windy skies. He hadn’t lived there long, but it still made an impression on him and sometimes if I caught him staring into space, I thought he was back in the tundra, trying to race toward freedom and avoid the bloodied Bratva destiny that his family had already decided for him.

For, in a cruel twist of fate, the Fedulov family sent young Viktor to the country for the first fourteen years of his life, only to abruptly remove him from the only world he knew to be trained in cities across Russia before being shipped to America to join a father he barely knew.

Or is that just the story he told you? Whispered a husky voice in my ear as the elevator smoothly pulled to a stop and the doors slid open. What did I always tell you? I hurried off as though I could escape it, but it kept going, dropping to a hiss.

Don’t let him fool you, daughter.

I stopped dead and rubbed at my forehead, glancing out the window to the waving green and sparkle of a little pond behind this hulking building. There was a memory out there, waiting and flickering, and I tried to only remember the bright spots.

My father with his white shirtsleeves rolled up and his gray suit jacket tossed onto the grass. His big and capable hands tearing off chunks of bread to hand to me so I could feed the ducks. Then, catching me up in a hug and laughing, making me squeal as he tossed me toward the blue sky and caught me before gravity could even catch up.

No more. A sharp burst of pain went through my temple. I didn’t want to remember the rest. It had been one of the few times that my mother and I had come to this office to visit him.

Why am I thinking about her? I asked myself angrily, and a little helplessly.

For the most part, I’d done a good job tamping down her voice, but in times of stress or sleep deprivation—of which I’d had neither recently—my mother’s poison returned in full force.

I’m displacing my anxiety about seeing Daddy, I told myself and shut my eyes, swallowing against a sudden tightness in my throat. That’s all.

Stop lying to yourself, Elena, she snarled in my ear and a burning sensation rose behind my eyelids. I was going to scream, I was—

The elevator dinged behind me, and I jumped, moving out of the way and toward the window, when Erik’s drawl wrapped around me like a metal net.

“Ah. I see you’ve figured out your father doesn’t want to see you.”

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