Olivia checked her bag for the twentieth time. It had everything she could possibly need—which meant it had the majority of her and Hadley’s possessions in it. Without her daughter’s favorite toys scattered around the living room, the apartment looked dull and lifeless. It was almost enough for her to call the whole thing off. Maybe she was overreacting. Hell, she’d handled things herself before. She could do it again.
Except her version of handling it had bought her less than a year. Sure, she hadn’t been trying to disappear completely, but there was no reason to think that if she ran again she’d be any more successful. If it had been just her, she wouldn’t have hesitated.
But it was a whole lot easier to gamble with her life than it was to gamble with her daughter’s.
She moved to the window and checked the parking lot again. The hour Cillian had given her was almost up, so he should be showing up at any time. He wasn’t who she was watching for, though. The fear that brought her back to the window again and again over the last hour was that Sergei would appear. It wouldn’t be Dmitri—she knew that much. He wasn’t above getting his hands dirty, but he was a big fan of using the best weapon for the job. For this job, that weapon would be her ex.
She’d given up regretting her relationship with Sergei right around the time her daughter made her appearance in the world, but that didn’t mean she was willing to forgive and forget. He’d already proven that he would choose the Romanovs over her. When she needed him the most—when she thought she had a chance to finally slip her leash—he’d let her believe he was leaving town with her…and then turned around and hauled her back to the Romanov residence, which resulted in her being under lockdown for the last four months of her pregnancy and the first two months of Hadley’s life. Until Andrei died.
Her heart thudded at the memory. She’d barely waited for his death to be announced to leave, and that time she hadn’t given Sergei a heads-up. She hadn’t told anyone, though she’d seen her mother on her way out. The woman hadn’t even glanced at Hadley, too wrapped up in playing the grieving mistress in her impeccable black couture dress.
I wonder if Dmitri showed her the door as soon as our father’s body was in the ground.
She shook her head, letting go of the small shred of satisfaction that thought brought. There were bigger things to worry about right now—like Sergei showing up at the same time Cillian did…
Oh God. She’d brought Cillian into this. She’d never forgive herself if something happened to him because of her. She hadn’t even considered that as a possibility when she called him. All she’d been thinking was that she needed help and he was the one man who had the means to give it to her—and who might not hold it over her head for the rest of her life.
She checked on Hadley, but her daughter was sleeping soundly on the couch where she’d laid down with her favorite blankie while Olivia hurried around and packed their suitcase. Thank God for small favors. She grabbed her phone and dialed Cillian again.
He picked up almost immediately. “Did something else happen?”
“No. I just…” She braced herself. He was helping her because he was a better man than she could have dreamed. It wasn’t fair to drag him into her mess. “Cillian—”
“Hold that thought.”
A knock on her door had her spinning around. She approached the faded wood like it was a poisonous snake and leaned in to peer through the peephole. A gorgeous tattooed man in a three-piece suit stared back at her. “You’re here.”
“Open the door, sweetheart, and let’s blow this joint.”
“This was probably a mistake.” She realized how stupid it was to be having this conversation on the phone when he was on the other side of her door, but she couldn’t quite make herself unlock it. Not yet. “I would never forgive myself if something happened to you because of me.”
“I’m a big boy, Olivia. I can take care of myself—and you and Hadley in the mix.” He put his hand on the door, and she could almost feel his touch if she concentrated. “But if it makes you feel better, you can tell me everything. If I think it’s too much after that, I’ll turn around and bring you guys back to Boston.”
Crazy as it was, that did make her feel better, even if she suspected he was just telling her what she wanted to hear. But that was a rational response—he’d hear her out and then he’d decide. She took a deep breath and unlocked the door. It was only when she opened it that she realized she still had the phone pressed against her ear. “Sorry. I’m just…rattled.”
“It’s okay.” He waited for her to step back before he walked into the apartment. He glanced around, but then focused solely on her. “Where’s your bag?”
“Here. And we should hook up Hadley’s car seat before I pick her up. She’ll probably sleep through the whole thing, but it will minimize the chance of a tantrum.” Her daughter reacted to being woken up about as well as Olivia did.
He picked up the car seat and the suitcase. “Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”
She started to volunteer to help—hooking up the damn car seat sometimes felt like it required a degree in rocket science—but stopped. She couldn’t leave Hadley alone. Sure, she’d be right there and have a direct line of sight to the apartment entrance…but she couldn’t make herself do it. Dmitri’s almost-threat was too close to the forefront of her mind. Her fear might be irrational in this situation, but it wasn’t irrational in general. So she nodded. “Okay.”
Then she stood and watched him from the window as he put her suitcase into the trunk and went to work on the car seat. It took him a few attempts to get it figured out, but he hooked it in faster than she had the first time she’d tried. Once she was sure he’d gotten it, she picked up Hadley and tucked the blankie around her. It was quick work to lock her door behind her, and she paused, part of her wondering if she’d ever see the shithole apartment again.
“Olivia?”
She turned to find Mrs. Richards peeking into the hall. Mrs. Richards. Shit, she’d forgotten to contact the woman. Oh lord, I forgot to call Benji, too. The latter would have to be dealt with on the way out of town, but she could take care of this now, at least. “We’ve run into some trouble.”
The old woman frowned. “Trouble in the shape of that ex of yours, if I don’t miss my guess.”
“Yeah.” She shifted Hadley into a more comfortable position. “I’m going to go out of town for a while until things calm down.” If they ever did calm down. Dmitri could be dogged when it suited him, and she didn’t see him letting go anytime soon. If ever. “If anyone comes looking—”
“Don’t you worry about a thing, dear. I don’t need to know where you’re going—just keep that beautiful baby girl of yours safe.” She walked out of her apartment and pressed a quick kiss to the top of Hadley’s head. “Try to call and let me know you’re safe once in a while.”
“I will.” Her eyes burned, but she blinked past it. This wasn’t forever. She had a life here and, while it might not be particularly glamorous, it was hers. She’d fight tooth and nail to keep it. She just wasn’t dumb enough to ignore the threat dangling right in front of her face. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Good. Now don’t let me keep you. Go.”
She went. Cillian met her at the bottom of the stairs. He did a double take at the sight of Hadley in her arms, but then he was next to her, his hand resting on the small of her back as they crossed the parking lot. She watched him out of the corner of her eye. He was too busy watching everything else to notice, surveying the area for a threat.
He really came. He didn’t demand an explanation. I called, and he showed up.
It was a whole hell of a lot to wrap her mind around. She’d hoped—of course she’d hoped—but she hadn’t really believed he’d come through for her, no questions asked, until he’d done just that. Trust issues much, Olivia?
Only totally.
With her track record, who could blame her? From Andrei right down the line to Sergei, not a single person had ever once dropped everything and come to her when she was in need. There were always conditions and power plays—if they even came at all.
She hooked Hadley into her seat, and then they were in the car and driving away from her place. She glanced back, but they’d already turned the corner, and the building was no longer in sight. Olivia sat back in her seat with a sigh. It’s not forever.
It sure as hell felt like forever.
She shot another look at Cillian, but he was relaxed in the driver’s seat…as long as she didn’t pay attention to the way he watched the review mirror. “You think we’re being followed?”
“No, but I’ve recently graduated into the ‘better safe than sorry’ mind-set. Going the roundabout way isn’t going to hurt us any, and if we are being followed, it should throw them off.”
“Oh.” She pulled her knees to her chest, feeling seriously out of her element. She’d been so damn naive to think she’d left this life behind her. “I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.” But he said it gently. “If I didn’t want to help you, I wouldn’t help. The offer to disappear still stands, by the way.”
God, he was seriously too good to be true. She’d heard his conviction on the phone, but seeing it in person only drove that fact home. He wouldn’t hesitate to give her a stack of cash and a set of papers and send her on her way. So eager to see the back of me? She shut the thought down. It was petty and downright wrong.
He was here…taking care of her. Shouldering part of the burden so she didn’t have to go it alone. Her heart beat too hard at the realization. It was nice to have someone she could lean on—actually lean on—who would show up when she needed them, and was so damn capable while doing it. Because he wanted to be here. If he didn’t—or didn’t want to deal with her special brand of bullshit—all he would have had to do was tell her to fuck off.
As if reading her mind, he said, “I’m here because I want to be. No one held a gun to my head.”
Because Sergei wasn’t here to see us make our getaway.
She was just a little ray of sunshine today, wasn’t she? Olivia checked on Hadley—still sleeping—and settled into her seat. “Let’s get this Q and A out of the way so you know what you’re getting into.”
“It can wait.”
“No, it can’t.” She already felt bad enough about bringing him into this mess. For him to do it without knowledge of exactly what the threat was would be unforgivable. “You remember how I said I have an ugly history?”
“I remember.” He turned onto the turnpike, heading west.
“Well, I might have underrepresented that threat.” The panic she’d been fighting ever since Dmitri left tried to close her throat, but she forced herself to breathe past it, even though the effort left her light-headed. “You ever hear of the Romanovs?”
His hands went white-knuckled on the steering wheel, but his voice was still just as calm as it had been since he picked her up. “Out of New York? Run by Dmitri Romanov? Those Romanovs?”
“The very ones.” Of course he’d be familiar with the family. People like him had to be aware of the threats around them, and Dmitri was nothing if not a threat. The next part was harder to get out than she’d expected. “Dmitri…He…” She took a shuddering breath and started again. “We share a father. He’s my half brother.”
“Half brother.” That calm in Cillian’s voice didn’t waver, but his hands also didn’t relax their grip. “I’m surprised he let you move to Boston.”
“He didn’t have much choice. I’m not exactly one of the inner circle—up until my father died, I was nothing more than a nuisance that he wasn’t quite willing to turn out onto the street. But he wasn’t too keen on interacting with me, either. It was an arrangement that worked out well for both of us.”
Andrei had spent the first twenty years of her life doing an admirable job of pretending she didn’t exist. He was too busy running his empire and raising Dmitri to be everyone’s favorite sociopath. But, bastard or not, she was his blood, and he hadn’t quite turned her out. She had a room in his obscenely large house and she never went hungry. Growing up, she’d been so damn conflicted over whether it would have been better to actually be his daughter—or to never know he existed. That half acknowledgment drove her to do some truly questionable things over the years.
Like Sergei.
It wasn’t until Andrei had been diagnosed with lung cancer that he seemed to change, to focus on family more than his empire. He started requiring that Olivia attend weekly dinners with him, which she’d resented the hell out of. She hadn’t needed a father in her life for the first twenty-one years, and she wasn’t ready to fall at his feet in gratitude now that he was dying and decided she was worth a damn. Too little, too late. Except maybe it wouldn’t have been if he’d lived longer. He wasn’t exactly the warmest man on the planet, but a part of her couldn’t help wondering if he’d have convinced her to come around given enough time.
And then she’d remembered the way he’d treated her mother—and herself—for the last twenty-one years.
Daddy issues, thy name is Olivia.
She realized she’d been silent too long. “When I was eighteen, I hooked up with one of his generals. It wasn’t an intentional ‘fuck you’ but it came across that way.” Cillian still didn’t say anything, so she kept going. “It also wasn’t a great love affair. Sergei was…I don’t know. Uncomplicated. He wanted me, and I confused that with being in love with me. I was young and stupid and desperate for attention.” Maybe she still was. Otherwise, why would she have let herself get so close to an O’Malley? “It was on again and off again for a few years, but when I got pregnant, I wanted to leave New York and everything Romanov behind. My half brother probably would have let me go, but Andrei seemed to take the whole thing as a sign that it was time to officially make things right. He wanted to formally adopt me and bring me into the fold.”
“I take it you weren’t a fan.”
Understatement of the century. “Would you have been?”
Cillian glanced at her. “After being ignored for my entire life, it’d be a slap in the face.”
“That’s exactly what it felt like, though it was more than that. I might not have been involved in the inner workings of the Romanov enterprise, but I saw enough to know I didn’t want my daughter raised that way. I told Andrei to take a long walk off a short pier, and made my plans to get out of town. Sergei came to pick me up, and it seemed like I might actually make this work.”
It still hurt to think about, the words like shards of glass in her throat. “And then he drove me to the Romanov residence and basically carried my screaming, pregnant ass inside. I was under house arrest for the four months it took for Hadley to make her way into the world.” And every day she’d had to deal with Andrei’s forced shared meals. He’d talked about her mother, though she never graced them with her presence. It hurt to know that he’d seemed to truly love her mother, and that she loved him in return. Olivia didn’t want to understand either of them, didn’t want to know her mother was capable of loving another person more than she’d ever love the daughter she never stopped resenting, not when they’d put every other aspect of their lives before their daughter time and time again. It was almost a relief when he’d finally given in to the cancer and died, because it meant she wouldn’t have to have the past neither one of them could change thrown in her face.
“Jesus.”
“When Andrei died, Dmitri was so focused on stabilizing the power structure that he just wanted me out of his sight.” Or maybe he didn’t like the constant reminder of the fact that his father had seen her pregnancy as a deficiency of Dmitri’s since he hadn’t started a family of his own. “He didn’t care that I was moving out of town, and so I hopped a train up here when Hadley was less than a year old.” She hadn’t had much in the way of savings, but it was enough to get her started at the apartment until she was able to find a job.
“So what changed? If he was fine with you leaving, you’d think he’d want to forget you even existed.”
“If only.” She picked at the hole in her jeans over her knee. “Andrei was obsessed with making things right, and for whatever reason, he decided that making me a Romanov was the way to go. He set up an account with a truly ridiculous amount of money that will be mine once I officially change my name and take my place in the family.” He’d left her mother a villa in the South of France, which would have made a normal person happy, but all her mother had ever wanted was an official place at the Romanov table, and seeing Olivia granted that option—and rejecting it—was the final straw. She was under strict instructions never to contact her mother again—as if she was in danger of ever doing that.
“Except you don’t want it.” He didn’t sound judgmental one way or another—just stating a fact.
“No, I don’t want it.” Maybe her life would be easier if she could just fall in line like a good little soldier, but that had never been her way. There might be more money than she could wrap her mind around waiting for her if she did what Andrei had wanted, but the strings that were attached with it were legion.
And those strings would pass down to Hadley.
Even if she was willing to take the hit for herself and choose a comfortable material life in exchange for…everything…she couldn’t do that to her daughter. Hadley deserved to grow up in a world where she was able to make her own mistakes, without being used as a political pawn or exposed to the darker side of organized crime. That kind of thing was all well and good in theory or fiction, but the reality was that even on the outskirts, Olivia had seen things she wished she could wipe from her mind. She couldn’t imagine how much more she would have experienced if she’d been treated like Andrei’s actual daughter.
No, thanks.
The silence stretched on as they passed mile marker after mile marker. Finally, Cillian said, “So what changed? You’ve been in Boston for about six months by my count. Why are things going sideways now?”
She watched his face in the growing shadows, the lights of passing cars playing off his cheekbones. God, he’s too gorgeous to be real. It’s not fair. And she was heading off into the country with him. She called and he came, no questions asked. That made him even sexier, if that were even possible.
Down, girl.
She wasn’t supposed to be lusting after her savior. She was supposed to be explaining the situation so he could change his mind about taking on her mess. Olivia studied his expression, but he gave her nothing to go off of. He wasn’t freaking out, and he wasn’t totally dismissive of it. It kind of blew her mind. If she’d found out that a person she thought was just an average Joe was actually connected to one of the most powerful crime families on the East Coast, she’d have at least muttered a few choice words under her breath. Not Cillian, though.
But then, he was a member of a family that could be classified in the same way. Maybe this was all in a day’s work for him.
She looked out the window and settled back into her seat. Or tried to. Her muscles were so tense, she could already feel a headache starting at the top of her spine. “Before our father died, Dmitri gave his word that he’d see it done. He won’t break it.”
Cillian snorted. “He has no problem breaking his word.”
It sounded like he had personal experience with that, which lined up with the comment Dmitri had made when he showed up to threaten her. Part of her wanted to know what the O’Malleys had done to earn his enmity, but most of her was just so damn tired. It never ends. “You’re wrong.”
“No, I’m not.”
She sighed. “Look, I don’t like Dmitri. I actually kind of hate him, but once he gives his word, he doesn’t break it.” She hesitated. “But he’s as slippery as they come when it suits him, so it’s possible that he manipulated the situation to meet his needs.”
“That’s as good as lying.”
“I’m not arguing that.” She went back to picking at her jeans. “But whatever his faults, he loved Andrei. He’s going to do whatever it takes to see his last wish fulfilled, regardless of how I feel about it.”
“Are you sure he doesn’t want you back there because he actually cares about you?”
She snorted. “Dmitri can barely stand me. I’m like an itch he can’t manage to scratch. It irks him.” And here was the part that would make or break how Cillian felt about her. “He came to visit me today. Somehow he found out about us—though it’s kind of too soon to call this an ‘us’ I think—and he…he wanted me to spy on you.”
Cillian didn’t look over. “It makes sense. Through me you’d have information on all of the O’Malleys’ inner financial workings. It’d be enough to give your half brother a golden bullet to hit us where it would hurt most.”
“I would never do that.”
“I know.” Again, there was no doubt in his voice. It was enough to make her wonder how the hell he was so confident about everything, because she felt like she was standing on a narrow cliff and there were earthquakes shaking the ground beneath her feet. He reached over and took her hand. The contact grounded her, his skin warm against hers, a reminder that she wasn’t facing this alone. “He didn’t like your answer, I take it?”
“No. He didn’t threaten—Dmitri never threatens—but he made it clear that if I didn’t fall into line at least on this, he was going to prompt Sergei to take Hadley.” The fear that had her calling Cillian in the first place rose up and choked her. “I won’t let him take my baby. I’d die first.”
“I’m here, Olivia. You aren’t alone.” Cillian squeezed her hand. “We’ll figure out a way around this.”
She wanted to believe him. She really did. The problem was that Olivia didn’t see a way around it. Every road led back to Dmitri being the one in power and taking what he wanted, just like he always did.