I never asked for this brutal criminal captain in my life, nor his insistence on me calling him ‘father’ when his love is rotten and full of maggots. A man I hate with all my heart, so much so, that even as I’m sitting at his dining table and eating his food, I’m daydreaming about picking up my dinner knife and stabbing him in the chest with it, just so I can watch his blood pour fast and hot all over his roasted lamb.
I may call him ‘father’ to his face, but in my head, he’ll always be a stealer of dreams. The happiness thief.
“Ada,” he roars suddenly, his mocking Irish brogue thundering down the table at me. “Stop staring at your fucking food and eat it!”
Dutifully, I start cutting up my lamb into neat slivers, keeping my eyes cast low in the way he expects from all the female members of his so-called family.
I know my role here. I don’t speak, even when I’m spoken to. Unless he commands it. I exist purely to pay a debt and to give him future business leverage, while he exists purely to subjugate and conquer what little remains of the girl I used to be.
He’s the true definition of a bully. A person who “seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.” I looked it up in the library once after he broke my arm for talking back to him not long after I arrived.
I was just a child then. My vulnerability was still a living breathing thing. But with time comes concessions. Vulnerability turns to survival. These days, I’m more obedient than his perma-snarling bulldogs that are slobbering at his feet under the table and begging for scraps of meat.
“Easy, Cian,” I hear Kirill Semenov purr, his strong Russian accent less intimidating but no less dangerous. “In my world, women are only considered beautiful when their hearts and bones are exposed. You should be encouraging her to eat less food, not more.”
I eye the fork in my other hand, resisting the urge to stab my second most detested man with it and make it a murder buffet tonight instead of a sit-down endurance.
Kirill Semenov is the pakhan of the Bratva chapter in London and a close business associate of O’Sullivan’s. He’s also the man I’m betrothed to—a killer who plans to wed me on my eighteenth birthday, which is only four weeks from now.
Four weeks.
O’Sullivan’s wife, Roisin, loves to tell me that I’m nothing better than the spoils of war. That I’ve been raised like prized cattle, only to be slaughtered at the altar of O’Sullivan’s ambition.
She’s wrong.
I’m a prisoner of war, and all I desire is my freedom.
The hush after Kirill’s casual rebuke stretches into minutes. Cutlery is discarded, and the lamb forgotten. My ‘father’ has the kind of temper that murders on a whim, as well as breaking the arms of innocent ten-year-old girls.
“Bones, eh?” He lets out a rare bark of laughter and bangs his huge fist down on the table, making all the plates jump. “Orla,” he thunders at the sour-faced housekeeper hovering by the door. “Take Ada’s dinner away. She won’t be eating anything else tonight. Bread and water only for the next few days.”
I sit very still, not betraying a single emotion, all the while feeling the heat of the Russian’s stare as my plate is whisked away. It’s as if he’s daring me to lift my eyes to him—to challenge him for making my existence even more miserable—just so he can take up the mantle of my punisher four weeks ahead of schedule.
I imagine him licking his lips at my cowering submission while he thinks up even more brutal ways to hurt me once he takes possession of my name and my body. My maid, Anika, is Russian. She told me all about men like him. Bratva soldiers only know how to take and take until there’s nothing left to give.
He makes my skin crawl.
He looks like a giant slug with his big bald head and no neck. The rest of him is just a straight column of hard muscle and tattoos, and there are things crawling behind his jet-black irises that make me cower and flinch.
When I look at them, I don’t see an escape from O’Sullivan’s house…
I see a darker brand of pain in my future.
CHAPTER 4
ADA
For the rest of the meal, I sit with my head bowed, and my hands resting lightly in my lap. O’Sullivan has filled his dining room with his best men tonight, including his clan chief, his chief enforcers, and his quartermaster… He’s gathering his war council together, and these are the conversations I pay the most attention to.
For the last seven years, the Irish and the Semenov Bratva have maintained a majority rule over most of the criminal organisations in London. Kirill’s dark obsession with me has proved useful to him in that respect. In turn, any truce with the British crumbled long ago, and they’ve been testing his patience ever since.
I know this because I listen out for hidden keys in conversations. Keys unlock knowledge, and one day, they’ll help me fly away from this hellhole.
Roisin and Mikhail Sidorov, Kirill’s favourite Brigadier, are making up the numbers. Roisin’s pissed as usual, staring glassy-eyed at the half-empty hundred-pound bottle of Château Latour in front of her. She knows the rules, just as much as I do. A broken jaw, and a week-long private hospital stay ingrained them for her on her honeymoon. She’s only ten years older than me, and most of that is resentment and spite.
Once dessert is over, O’Sullivan and his guests move to his study while Roisin and I sit there like statues until everyone has left. The minute the door closes, she rises from her seat in a swish of floral-print Balenciaga silk.
“Enjoy the diet,” she sneers, her pretty face hard and unkind.
Enjoy the depths of your misery, I reflect silently, as the door slams shut behind her. O’Sullivan stole her too, from a junior soldier of his, three years after he took me. The next day, the man she loved was found face down in the River Thames. It doesn’t matter that we trod the same poisonous path to this house. She’ll never see me as an ally. She’s the kind who views every female in a five-mile radius as a mortal threat.
I stay sitting in the empty room, long after her heels hit the stairs.
It’s quiet.
Too quiet.
I’m not allowed music, so I cast my mind back, listening to the notes from my memories instead. Every night before I went to bed, my mother would find a music station on the radio, and we’d listen and dance. Listen and dance. I remember the softness of her skin, and the way her hair smelled of the watermelons that she sometimes bought from Spitalfields Market as we filled our tiny living room with twirls and laughter.
She never sent me to ballet lessons, unlike all the other girls in our neighbourhood. She once told me that dancing didn’t need to be taught, that it was instinctive, like breathing. Some steps would be jagged and uneven, and some would be deep and smooth. If you messed up, it didn’t matter because one person’s slip-up was another person’s pirouette.
I’m so lost in the past that I don’t hear the door opening.
“Ada.”
My head snaps up, fear washing over me. How can I have been so stupid? Up until now, I’ve taken every precaution not to be left alone with Kirill. I don’t remember a time when his heavy gaze hasn’t followed me around, hungering for something he’s running out of patience waiting for.