Page 31 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors

“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 tolivethere,” 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 ofthe blood in my veinsis Russian, with the Swedes and French the last few generations and the Prussian and German princesses before that. Queen Victoria appearstwicein 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 onthatsubject. “Victoria is an ancestor in my father’s line. That particular gene for hemophilia is a sex-linked trait. Males can’tcarrythe 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.