It had taken very little effort to discover that she was shacking up with her usual type in what amounted to a fortress in Mayfair: some dissipated son of a too-wealthy sheikh with an extensive and deeply bored security force, the dismantling of which would no doubt be as easy for Nikolai as it was entertaining—but would also, regrettably, cause an international incident.
Because Nikolai wasn’t a soldier any longer. He was no longer the Spetsnaz operative who could do whatever it took to achieve his goals—with a deadly accuracy that had won him a healthy respect that bordered on fear from peers and enemies alike. He’d shed those skins, if not what lay beneath them like sinew fused to steel, seven years ago now.
And yet because his life was nothing but an exercise in irony, he’d since become a philanthropist, an internationally renowned wolf in the ill-fitting clothes of a very soft, very fluffy sheep. He ran the Korovin Foundation, the charity he and his brother, Ivan, had begun after Ivan’s retirement from Hollywood action films. Nikolai tended to Ivan’s fortune and had amassed one of his own thanks to his innate facility with investment strategies. And he was lauded far and near as a man of great compassion and caring, despite the obvious ruthlessness he did nothing to hide.
People believed what they wanted to believe. Nikolai knew that better than most.
He’d grown up hard in post-Soviet Russia, where brutal oligarchs were thick on the ground and warlords fought over territory like starving dogs—making him particularly good at targeting excessively wealthy men and the corporations they loved more than their own families, then talking them out of their money. He knew them. He understood them. They called it a kind of magic, his ability to wrest huge donations from the most reluctant and wealthiest of donors, but Nikolai saw it as simply one more form of warfare.
And he had always been so very good at war. It was his one true art.
But his regrettably high profile these days meant he was no longer the kind of man who could break into a sheikh’s son’s London stronghold and expect that to fly beneath the radar. Billionaire philanthropists with celebrity brothers, it turned out, had to follow rules that elite, highly trained soldiers did not. They were expected to use diplomacy and charm.
And if such things were too much of a reach when it concerned an ex-wife rather than a large donation, they were forced to subject themselves to London’s gauntlet of “hot spots” and wait.
Nikolai checked an impatient sigh, ignoring the squealing trio of underdressed teenagers who leaped up and down in front of him, their eyes dulled with drink, drugs and their own craven self-importance. Lights flashed frenetically, the awful music howled and he monitored the crowd from his strategic position in the shadows of the dance floor.
He simply had to wait for Veronika to show herself, as he knew she would.
Then he would find out how much of what she’d said seven years ago had been spite, designed to hurt him as much as possible, and how much had been truth. Nikolai knew that on some level, he’d never wanted to know. If he never pressed the issue, then it was always possible that Stefan really was his, as Veronika had made him believe for the first five years of the boy’s life. That somewhere out there, he had a son. That he had done something right, even if it was by accident.
But such fantasies made him weak, he knew, and he could no longer tolerate it. He wanted a DNA test to prove that Stefan wasn’t his. Then he would be done with his weaknesses, once and for all.
“You need to go and fix your life,” his brother, Ivan, the only person alive that Nikolai still cared about, the only one who knew what they’d suffered at their uncle’s hands in those grim years after their parents had died in a factory fire, had told him just over two years ago. Then he’d stared at Nikolai as if he was a stranger and walked away from him as if he was even less than that.
It was the last time they’d spoken in person, or about anything other than the Korovin Foundation.
Nikolai didn’t blame his older brother for this betrayal. He’d watched Ivan’s slide into his inevitable madness as it happened. He knew that Ivan was sadly deluded—blinded by sex and emotion, desperate to believe in things that didn’t exist because it was far better than the grim alternative of reality. How could he blame Ivan for preferring the delusion? Most people did.
Nikolai didn’t have that luxury.
Emotions were liabilities. Lies. Nikolai believed in sex and money. No ties, no temptations. No relationships now his brother had turned his back on him. No possibility that any of the women he took to his bed—always nameless, faceless and only permitted near him if they agreed to adhere to a very strict set of requirements—would ever reach him.
In order to be betrayed, one first had to trust.
And the only person Nikolai had trusted in his life was Ivan and even then, only in a very qualified way once that woman had sunk her claws in him.
But ultimately, this was a gift. It freed him, finally, from his last remaining emotional prison. It made everything simple. Because he had never known how to tell Ivan—who had built a life out of playing the hero in the fighting ring and on the screen, who was able to embody those fights he’d won and the roles he’d played with all the self-righteous fury of the untainted, the unbroken, the good—that there were some things that couldn’t be fixed.
Nikolai wished he was something so simple as broken.
He acted like a man, but was never at risk of becoming one. He’d need flesh and blood, heat and heart for that, and those were the things he’d sold off years ago to make himself into the perfect monster. A killing machine.
Nikolai knew exactly what he was: a bright and shining piece of ice with no hope of warmth, frozen too solid for any sun to penetrate the chill. A hard and deadly weapon, honed to lethal perfection beneath his uncle’s fists, then sharpened anew in the bloody Spetsnaz brotherhood. To say nothing of the dark war games he’d learned he could make into his own kind of terrible poetry, despite what it took from him in return.
He was empty where it counted, down to his bones. Empty all the way through. It was why he was so good at what he did.
And it was safer, Nikolai thought now, his eyes on the heedless, hedonistic crowd. There was too much to lose should he relinquish that deep freeze, give up that iron control. What he remembered of his drinking years appalled him—the blurred nights, the scraps and pieces of too much frustrated emotion turned too quickly into violence, making him far too much like the brutal uncle he’d so despised.
Never again.
It was better by far to stay empty. Cold. Frozen straight through.
He had never been anything but alone. Nikolai understood that now. The truth was, he preferred it that way. And once he dealt with Veronika, once he confirmed the truth about Stefan’s paternity, he would never have to be anything else.
* * *
Alicia Teller ran out of patience with a sudden jolt, a wave of exhaustion and irritation nearly taking her from her feet in the midst of the jostling crowd. Or possibly that was the laddish group to her left, all of them obviously deep into the night’s drinking and therefore flailing around the dance floor.
I’m much too old for this, she told herself as she moved out of their way for the tenth time, feeling ancient and decrepit at her extraordinarily advanced age of twenty-nine.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent a Saturday night anywhere more exciting than a quiet restaurant with friends, much less in a slick, pretentious club that had recently been dubbed the place to be seen in London. But then again, she also didn’t like to look a gift horse in the mouth—said gift horse, in this case, being her ever-exuberant best friend and flatmate Rosie, who’d presented the guest passes to this velvet-roped circus with a grand flourish over dinner.
“It’s