Page 1 of Lash

prologue: a deadly game

Tatiana

"Drive around the block, please, Georg."

"Yes, Ms. Juric."

I am not my father's daughter; I am my mother's daughter. That said, I was still half-raised by the man, despite my mother's best efforts, which means I'm always alert and aware, constantly scanning my surroundings, which is how I pick up the blacked-out Mercedes SUV that's been following us for the last several miles.

As Georg, my driver, makes a right-hand turn on Vukovara, I remain twisted in my seat, watching the G-Wagen as it slides out into traffic behind us, three cars back. It’s a pimped-out ride, as the Americans would say, with oversized spinning chrome rims, thin tires, blacked-out windows, and after-market LED light bars.

I sigh. "Idiots."

"Problem, Ms. Juric?" Georg asks, glancing at me in the rear-view mirror.

"Yes," I snap, annoyed at this ridiculous delay to my tight schedule. "We have a tail. G-Wagen three cars back."

Georg's eyes flick away from mine, scanning our backtrail; his brow furrows as he spots them. He cuts aggressively acrosstraffic and makes a sharp, tire-squealing left turn against the light, eliciting a chorus of honks. He guns the engine at the last second, and the powerful motor sends my BMW 8 series rocketing forward. Another left, weaving around slower-moving cars, and then a sharp, fishtailing right, and then a sudden tap of the brakes and stomach-churning slide puts us underground in a parking garage. Georg slows, then, winding down to the bottom of the garage, backing into a space in the farthest corner.

We sit in silence for ten minutes or so, waiting.

"I believe we are clear, Ms. Juric,” Georg says.

"Very well. I have a meeting with Draga and Tomas…" I check my Bulova watch. "Ten minutes ago. Dammit."

I slide my phone out of my crocodile Birkin and ring Draga. She answers on the third ring. "Draga, yes, it's me. I've been delayed—my apologies."

"Not at all, Ms. Juric. Tomas and I have been reviewing the numbers. If you wish, we could have the meeting now. Your physical presence is not strictly necessary."

"Excellent—I have another meeting across town in an hour. Put Tomas on speaker, please."

"Yes, Ms. Juric…here we are." A pause and the rustle of papers as Draga gets situated. "Now. Our numbers this quarter have been excellent…"

I put the tail out of my mind and focus on Draga's and Tomas's reports, digging into the details of my company's latest quarterly reports.

I’m immensely proud of what I've built—I took a quarter-million Euro loan from my father when I was twenty, and over the last eight years, I’ve grown my business into ten million Euros per year, with year-on-year growth of twenty-seven percent. Not bad for a girl without a university degree. I did poach my father’s second-favorite business advisor—Martin hasbeen indispensable to the process, teaching me much of the fine details of running and growing a profitable business.

When Tata first heard my pitch, he called it silly—the grasping of a bored little girl with too much time and not enough business sense.

My company buys top-shelf couture from around the world a season or two post-trend and resells it in pop-up boutiques, utilizing flash-sales strategies and aggressive pricing to move products, prioritizing stock movement over price tag; we utilize social media as the driver of our primary sales—most of my inner circle executives are social media, marketing gurus. We push heavily on IG, TikTok, and YouTube, resulting in a young clientele with lots of money and huge followings—our growth is as much due to social media word of mouth from our loyal followers as any traditional advertisements. Our pop-up boutiques last for seventy-two hours, with the specific location only revealed via our official socials posts at the last second—the lead-up to the reveal is a bread-crumb trail of hints and clues that eagle-eyed followers can decipher, share, and discuss.

We host clusters of pop-ups in a specific area of a specific city over the course of a month and then move to different cities and start all over again. This has developed a devoted cadre of fans who follow our zigzagging across Europe, following clues and competing to be among the first thousand clients who receive a bonus gift bag filled with collectible pop-up specific swag.

My mind is racing as we shift from numbers to the details of our next pop-up campaign, back here in our hometown of Zagreb, where we began.

Georg glances at me. "Shall we head to your next meeting, Ms. Juric?"

I nod, covering the mouthpiece. “Yes, Georg, thank you. Just keep an eye out. Probably someone connected to Tata thinking they can use me to get to him."

Georg snorts. "You think they'd know better by now. Your father's methods of dealing with such antics are well known at this point, I should think."

"You would think, yet every year, there's at least one attempt. After Tata took care of the last one so publicly, I had imagined I'd get at least a few months off before the next one."

"Shall I call him, ma'am?"

I shake my head. “Not yet. Perhaps it was simply an opportunistic attempt."

"Perhaps, ma'am."