Page 5 of Twisted Play

Sweat dripped down my back, my polyester shirt doing me no favors.Yes, I’d do anything to protect my father.

“You don’t have a choice,” he continued. “My dear child, you’re not going to be able to pay me back by batting your eyes or even on your back. You’ll work for me. You’ll spy for me. When I want something, you’ll deliver. And when I tell you to destroy my son’s hockey career?—”

My phone pinged. Instinctively, I reached for it.

“I wouldn’t,” Carter said. His smile never slipped, but the threat was clear all the same. My mind raced, seeking and discarding alternatives to his proposal. If I got caught, I could lose everything—my scholarship, my shot at med school, my chance to pay my father back for all the sacrifices he’d made for me.

“What if I get caught?”

He shrugged. “Don’t.” After a long pause, he continued, “But that’s hardly my problem.” He handed me an off-brand smart phone. “My number’s the only one programmed into it. Keep it charged with prepaid credit.” He smiled, cold andsatisfied. “And, Eva? If you tell anyone about our arrangement—if anyonefinds outabout our arrangement—not only will your father pay the price, but I’ll hand you over to my men to use and abuse until you understand how valueless your cunt truly is.”

2

ALEKSANDR

Dmitri

Have you selected your medical assistant for the year yet?

I stared at my phone,pain shooting through my knee. Sixteen years of silence, broken only by Dmitri’s occasional attempts to drag me back into the life I refused. I’d walked away instead. Chosen hockey over the brotherhood. Over revenge.

This wasn’t my cousin’s first attempt at contacting me. He’d done so over the summer as well, forcing an invitation to a socialite wedding on me—one of his mafia friends—so that I’d be forced to acknowledge him. It’d been a trap then, and it was a fucking trap now.

Dmitri

Take a second look at the applications.

I had. And a third look. And a fourth. Any of these utterly bland and interchangeable students would make fine assistants.

I leaned forward anyway, shaking my mouse until my computer screen illuminated. Moments later, I scrolled through the list of applicants, only to shove myself away from the desk as if burned. A new application sat at the top of the queue, added after the deadline. I clicked through. Dion Hall, the athletic director, had added it with a note:Excellent academics, medic experience, stellar recommendations—you’ll like her.

“Eva Jackson.”Blyat.I stared at the photo attached to the application, her father’s green eyes staring back at me from a heart-shaped face surrounded by long red curls that begged for a man’s fingers to tangle in them.

Conrad’s daughter had teased at the periphery of my awareness as I let my thirst for vengeance cool into icy hatred. I’d known she was at Yorkfield University, and that she interned with the athletic program, but I’d otherwise ignored her existence. On purpose.

My hands trembled with rage as memories crashed over me.

Conrad Jackson destroying my knee with a metal pipe in that dark parking lot.

The crack of bone.

His silence as I screamed.

“Shoulda’ kept your nose out of hockey scores that don’t concern you,” he’d said quietly, his Irish accent barely discernible.

But I hadn’t been able to look away. I’d been twenty-two and stupid and hated the corruption poisoning the game I loved.

The doctors said I’d never play again. Six surgeries and a lifetime of physical therapy had proved them wrong, but by then, my shot at the NHL was gone. I’d crawled my way back to university coaching instead and built a new life for myself.

When I’d begged Dmitri to help me destroy Conrad Jackson, my cousin had given me an ultimatum. “Only if you come home to the bratva.”

Even then, I’d known it was a test I was meant to fail. If Dmitri had truly wanted me, truly loved me like family, he wouldn’t have forced me to choose. But I’d never been enough for him—not Russian enough, not brutal enough, not willing enough to give up my dreams of something more than violence.

I’d resigned myself to a life of solitude. My cousin, my brother in every way that mattered, hadn’t loved me enough, and women ran when they discovered what I really wanted—total control, complete submission. The ones who stayed wanted the fantasy, not the reality of belonging to a violent and vengeful man who needed to own every piece of them.

I hated Dmitri for reminding me of my loneliness, but I hated myself more for indulging in the maudlin emotion of want.

What game was he playing? Sixteen years of refusing to help me destroy Conrad Jackson, of watching me struggle through recovery and rehabilitation while that bastard lived his fucking life, and now he was handing me the perfect weapon?