Page 16 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

Diplomatically backing out of business where money flows toward you is more difficult than the other way. “I’m not sure now is a good time for such a deal.”

The faintest smirk creased Volkov’s gray eyes. “There’s never a good time for it. Trust me on this. You do it anyway.”

Extricating myself from Michel’s promises was not going to be easy. “I’m not sure this is suitable for us. I have prior commitments.”

Volkov barely shrugged one shoulder. “That’s never been a problem, for us or your ancestors. You were baptized Russian Orthodox, weren’t you?”

What a weird line of conversation. Perhaps Volkov was very religious and only did business with other Russian Orthodox Christians, though that seemed unnecessarily restrictive.

Most Russian mobsters were devout but not finicky when it came to business.

“Baptized and chrismated as an infant, yes. Orthodoxy is generally not negotiable in my family, what with forcing generations of Prussian princesses to convert the day before they married us.”

Demyan Volkov didn’t crack a smile. “Your family has been estranged from Russia for many years.”

“It wasn’t our idea.”

Volkov looked at the table under his hands and shrugged as if the February Revolution had been a minor inconvenience. “You aren’t involved in politics.”

“Absolutely not.”

“But you are interested in Russia.”

“I wish Russia well, but I have no interest in it. My entire family are private citizens now, nothing more,” I recited.

“But you speak Russian.”

“Da,” I confirmed, and then continued in Russian, speaking with the same accent Volkov had. “I speak enough Russian for little conversation, even though there’s no reason for me to speak it, ever.”

He squinted at me a little. “You sound like you’re from Sankt-Peterburg.”

He knew I hadn’t lived in or even visited the city of St. Petersburg.

It would have made headlines.

And probably my obituary.

“One of my teachers was Petersburger,” I admitted, continuing to speak in Russian.

“That explains it. It’s more cultured than Muscovite accent.”

I didn’t answer. Disparaging any Russian accent was asking for trouble.

“It’s good that you speak Russian,” Volkov said. “My daughter thinks it’s important for children to learn their mother tongue.”

A Russian mobster who listened to what his daughter thought was unusual, and the comment seemed out of place in the conversation. “Certainly.”

“If you could come back to Russia, to live there, would you?”

“I have no interest in Russia,” I told him again. It was vital he understood that.

“But if you could, if someone was making sure it was safe for you to go there, would you want to live in St. Petersburg?”

“I don’t waste time considering impossible things.”

Michel had been watching us, looking back and forth between us as we spoke. “What’s going on?”

My uncle didn’t speak Russian, being from my mother’s Scandinavian side. “He asked if I would want to visit Russia if it were safe for me to do so.”

“No, I asked him if he would want to live there,” Volkov said.

Michel turned in his chair to Demyan Volkov. “Yes, of course, he would want to return. Russian blood runs in his veins.”

Annoyance pricked my patience. “I am quite sure that less than five percent of the blood in my veins is Russian, with the Swedes and French the last few generations and the Prussian and German princesses before that. Queen Victoria appears twice in my family tree.”

Volkov’s head whipped toward me. “But you do not have the bleeding disease or carry gene for it.”

Yeah, Russians were very sensitive on that subject. “Victoria is an ancestor in my father’s line. That particular gene for hemophilia is a sex-linked trait. Males can’t carry the gene at all. Males either have the disease or we don’t, and I don’t.”

“And your parents?”

This line of interrogation was becoming uncomfortable. “They both bled to death from multiple large-caliber bullet wounds, not hemophilia.”

“Good to know,” Volkov said.

“Why is it good to know?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “That your health is good. I am glad to know that your health is good. Let’s drink to your health.”

He poured more vodka into the glasses clustered in the center of the table.

Oh, dear saints.

I raised my shot glass, pinching it between my thumb and one finger. “And to your continuing good health.”

I slammed back the shot, sliding it down my numb throat like a bodybuilder gulping a raw egg. The floor was beginning to undulate under my feet.

“So, this deal that Michel has negotiated between us—” I started.

“You will like my daughter.”

His non-sequiturs blurred as they dissolved in the vodka in my head, and I huffed a chuckle at him. “That sounded like a command.”

He chuffed a laugh but didn’t smile. “Maybe it is. I would not like to think she is married to someone who didn’t like her.”

Wait— “I beg your pardon?”

“My daughter, you will like her. She’s a good girl, a good Russian girl. She won’t clean your house, but she will hire good housekeepers to make sure it’s clean.”

“I wouldn’t expect your daughter to clean— what are we talking about here?”

Demyan Volkov squinted first at my uncle and then at me. “We are talking about when you marry my daughter.”

Centuries of regal manners kept my demeanor calm. “I believe there’s been a mistake.”

Konstantin had also fallen into our family’s emotionless default mode, though his glacier-blue eyes were a little wider than usual.

“No mistake,” Volkov said. “Michel Pictet said we would negotiate. Tambovskaya Group will make significant investment in your family corporation business, and we’re now negotiating how much.”

My uncle said, “Nicolai, it’s something to consider.”

Even though a thick vodka mist swirled in my skull, this was not happening. “ No. No, absolutely not.”

“What? It is just business arrangement, like all of life,” Volkov said, shrugging.

“Just hear him out, Nicolai.”

When I glanced at my brother on my other side, Konstantin’s eyes widened more, like he was stretching his eyelids at a crime scene.

He said, “We Romanovs haven’t arranged marriages for centuries, like since the eighteen hundreds.

And even then, there was always an expectation that either party could refuse.

Our marriages have always been love matches, not for treaties for land or anything. ”

“Yes, yes. Love matches, you had,” Volkov mocked. “When you drag three sisters from Austria to St. Petersburg and pick one, and then she converts and marries you the next day, that is love.”

I leaned forward over the table. “I’m not in the market for a wife.”

“So be in the market.” He leaned back and peered at us, his gray eyes appraising Konstantin and me like we were lobsters in a restaurant fish tank.

“Our family has significant cash flow, but people of wealth and status won’t do business with us because they see us as still criminals.

You have legitimate business connections. This is good deal for all of us.”

Shit, and I’d thought Michel’s shady business connections were my biggest problems. “I apologize that my uncle misled you in thinking that I would ever, ever, agree to marry for money.”

“Is not for money. Is for connections. My daughter went to elite girls’ boarding school in England, but those English girls snub her.

They are Lady This and Lady That and featured in Tatler, but my girl is no one there, even though I pay same tuition plus make donations.

My grandchildren will be princes and princesses, not peasant nobodies.

English lords and ladies will have to pay attention. ”

“We are stopping this discussion right now. I will not discuss this further.”

“Why is such problem? I married my wife to combine influence with Pskovskaya bratva, and she was pretty. We get along, have common interests, good at business. My daughter is beautiful woman, and smart, too. She read economics at Oxford. You will like her.”

Again, his last sentence sounded more like a command than a recommendation. “I cannot stress enough that I will not marry your daughter.”

Volkov frowned. “I do not like you refusing deal.” He shook his head a little like he was clearing it. “Come, we will drink until we understand each other.”

He picked up the bottle and topped up all the shot glasses on the table with clear liquor, sloshing a little down the sides.

Not enough vodka in my bloodstream was not my problem. “No, thank you.”

The pudgy guy sitting next to Volkov, veins spiderwebbing his inflated nose, swayed in the booth seat. His eyelids drooped.

Volkov stared at me, his eyes narrowing. “I said, drink.”

This Russian mafia pakhan wasn’t accustomed to being defied, but he didn’t usually consort with emperors.

No one fucking told me how to conduct my business or who I was going to fucking marry.

“We can discuss a business deal, but I am not contracting to marry anyone. No disrespect to you or your daughter, who I am sure is lovely and intelligent, but absolutely not.”

“Then how you will find a girl to marry, huh? You will go to Royal Ascot horse races, The Proms, and polo matches, and you meet blue-blood women there. People like you. Princess This and Lady That. Maybe twenty women who are like that, you meet in your whole life, and you choose one of them. It is not so different from old days when the dowager Empress, your mother, would write letter to cousins and find two suitable princesses who would come to Sankt-Peterburg to audition in front of you.”

“That’s not how it is at all,” I sputtered, keenly aware that Volkov’s description was exactly how it was.