Sold to the Hitman: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance Novel (5 page)

I miss him already.

Fighting back tears for the millionth time today, I straighten my shoulders and try to look radiantly happy as my mother opens the chamber door and pushes me out. My father is waiting nearby to take my arm and lead me down the aisle.

Everyone swivels in their pews, all eyes falling on me. I feel nauseous, gulping back a sob as Daddy smiles down at me and begins to walk me down the aisle to my fiancé, standing at the end of the walkway. The stranger is tall and imposing, towering over everyone, even Father Harrison.

The same dizziness that shook me before threatens to take me down now. My father senses my weakness and braces himself, subtly leaning into me as we approach the front of the church. My heart is galloping in my rib cage, beating so fast and so loudly that I wonder how nobody has noticed it yet. Finally, we are there. I’m standing at the marital podium next to my daddy and Father Harrison, looking up at…

My new husband.

He is just as scary as I remembered in my hazy memories of the other night. He is startlingly handsome. Frighteningly good-looking. He has hawk-like, watchful dark eyes, a long, straight nose, sensuous lips, and cropped black hair. His cheekbones are so high and sharp I think they could cut glass. And of course, even his fitted, immaculately-tailored black suit cannot hide his bulging muscles. I glance between Daddy, Father Harrison, and my fiancé — the latter is by far the biggest one.

I am so caught up in cataloguing the gorgeous, terrifying features of my future husband that I totally zone out during the ceremony! Father Harrison is droning on and on about the duties of a Godly woman to her husband, explaining what I already know from years of education: that my sole purpose in life is to serve my father… and then my husband.

“Do you, Cassandra Bethany Meadows, take Andrei Abramovich Petrov to be your lawfully wedded husband, to love and to serve as ordained by our formidable God?” Father Harrison asks of me, taking my hand and lifting it up.

I am shaken by the sudden realization that this is the first time I’ve heard his name. Then it hits me that I have to respond.

“Y-yes. I do,” I say quickly, my voice sounding a little thin.

“And do you, Andrei Abramovich Petrov, take Cassandra Bethany Meadows to be your lawfully wedded wife, to guide and to protect as ordained by our formidable God?”

Andrei, my new husband, looks at me deep in the eyes. I feel a sharp stab to my gut as though his gaze is physically piercing my body. I try not to flinch.

In a deep, velvety voice, he replies: “I do.”

“
Y
ou may now kiss
the bride.”

I can practically feel her heart beating furiously through the palms of her hands as we hear those words, and she looks up at me with wide, anxious eyes. She puts on a strong show for these people, and I’m impressed by how well she’s kept herself together all this time.

Most women envision their wedding day to be the most magical moment of their lives, but I can only imagine the fear in her heart before my looming figure. She must feel alone and backed into a corner, her parents selling her off like a commodity, the rest of her cold family expecting her to perform like a doll today, and I just know she looks at me and sees me for the criminal I am.

But through it all, she looks angelic. Where she looked exposed and vulnerable up on the auction stage, she looks now like she should be in her element — a heavenly figure clothed in an immaculate dress.

After a brief pause, she offers a shy smile, fear still written in her eyes, and we lean into each other, our lips pressing together.

It’s a chaste kiss, but I feel her draw breath as she’s pressed up against my face, and her hands tighten in my grip as she feels the warmth of my mouth. Is this really her first kiss?

We break after only a moment, the poor girl too dazed by the whole ceremony and the rush of what’s happening to her to savor the moment. Even as I give her hand a squeeze, she blinks and looks confused, but not displeased as the audience begins to clap for us and the organ wedding music starts up.

“Brothers and sisters of the church, Mr. and Mrs. Petrov.”

A few moments later, we’re walking down the aisle towards the door, the rest of Cassie’s relatives smiling and bobbing their heads at us, many of them in poorly-fitted suits and reeking from an overuse of perfume. Many of their faces are stony even as they clap, as if this were a grave ritual rather than a cause for celebration. It’s all too familiar to me, though I can’t quite place why.

I feel like I’m guiding my shaky bride through the underworld as we pass through all these people she seems to know only tangentially. I see a lot of simple colors all around — the wedding was obviously thrown together at the last minute, but for that, I can’t blame anyone but Cassie’s parents.

We come out the doors of the chapel as man and wife, a Bratva assassin and his wife who’s never so much as spent time alone in a room with a man. As we’re ushered into the reception shortly after, that much and more becomes clear to me.

T
he reception hall
is a wide room dotted with round tables, and after an arduously long prayer session in which everyone in the room was asked to link hands and bow their heads, the rest of the guests begin to eat while Cassie and I sit side by side at the table in the center of the room, where we’re victims of all the passing-by relatives.

A number of them stop by to try to make conversation with me, but while Cassie is seated quietly to my left, her parents have taken up posts to my right, fielding most of the prying relatives’ questions.

“So, are you a friend from Cassie’s home church?” an older man with patchy, white hair inquires. The term itself is foreign to me.

“No,” Arnold Meadows, Cassie’s father, interjects. “He and Cassie met over business, actually. Andrei’s father is an entrepreneur, you know, very well-traveled man, self-made. Never able to stay put anywhere, so the poor man couldn’t make it, but Andrei’s been handling the business on his behalf here in the States, and well,” Arnold pats me on the back as if I were a nephew or something, “he just fit right into the family!”

The old man seems satisfied, and he and Arnold chat a while as I peer around at the rest of the room, only half paying attention. The lies that roll off her father’s tongue are easy and practiced, like someone who has been lying his entire life. He very likely has, to get to the point where he’s willing to sell off his own child to a stranger at
that
auction.

I hear the family chattering about who knows who from where, what “denomination” this part of the family has defected to, who’s acted wrongly against whom in the family, and so on. It all sounds remarkably like the kinds of things the Bratva discusses at big, informal meetings, I realize. This whole ceremony has felt a lot like that, with just as many falsehoods being spun.

There was nothing like this back home in Siberia. As a boy growing up in an orphanage, I remember very little interaction with the Orthodox Church, and I rarely heard anything about it. It was simply outside my sphere of life, and as I grew into a man who had to do what he had to to get by, it was almost out of my mind entirely.

Being surrounded by a group of people whose entire life is clearly oriented around this institution is strange, but not incomprehensible. This is all clearly about relations, and as a man nearly bound to the Bratva, it isn’t too unfamiliar.

But this isn’t even like the Churches I know of here in the States. There’s an air of secrecy and deception thick in the air, not just from her father, but from the others as well. They all ask questions expecting a coded lie, and respond in kind.

I turn to my bride, and I find her picking at her food uncomfortably.

“Do you like it?” I ask, and she jumps a little, enraptured in her own world.

“Oh, yes, it’s...it’s good. I think one of my aunts made most of the food.”

An awkward pause lingers between us. I can only imagine the fear that’s binding her, but just as Oskar had promised, she seems intent on pleasing me and all the people around us. I clear my throat before swiftly changing the subject. “So, you know most of these people well, yes?”

Cassie shifts in her seat and looks around, pursing her lips. “Kind of.”

I wait for her to say more, but nothing else comes. She only looks at me for a moment as if she too were waiting for me to say more, but she averts her eyes and takes a drink after half a moment. She’s still shaken up. I can’t blame her, after everything she’s been through in the past few days.

Arnold’s voice catches my ear again, and I glance over at him, catching part of his conversation.

“Oh no doubt,” he’s saying to another man about his age, “a young girl her age can’t be going out to dances like that so late, that’s a ticket to trouble. I’ll bring it up at the next PTA meeting, and I’ll be praying for her in the meantime, brother.”

“You know, I said the same thing to her youth pastor, but these young people just can’t keep their hands off each other, even with chaperones,” the other man says, and I tune out of the conversation, figuring it’s going to go on like this for a while.

I realize I have a level of growing contempt for Cassie’s father. Arnold reminds me of Sergei in too many ways. He’s all smiles around other men who hold the same power as he, but when it comes to handling himself in private, I can smell the brute of a man he really is.

Every now and then, Cassie’s mother Jan tries to get a word in edgewise in the conversation, but Arnold is quick to interrupt her. After some time, I notice her resignation and how she keeps her eyes on her food.

I wonder how monstrously he must treat his wife and daughter at home. A man who would be willing to sell his daughter into debt must be twisted beyond comprehension to be able to sleep at night.

As the two men drone on in their conversation, I hear Arnold repeating a point Jan had made almost verbatim. Feeling exhausted just by being in the proximity, I speak up.

“Jan said that a moment ago.”

The two men stop at my sudden interjection, and Arnold raises an eyebrow. “Pardon?”

“What you just said about your church’s youth program providing women’s social groups — Jan brought that up a few minutes ago before you interrupted her.”

Arnold starts to go red, while the middle-aged man speaking to him clears his throat. “R-right, must have missed that. Anyhow, I’ll see you around, Arnie. Enjoy the food.”

He and Arnold exchange a nod, and before he turns back to his food, Arnold glares daggers at me while Jan pretends she hasn’t heard any part of the exchange, her cheeks bright. I can’t help but smile a little at the man’s embarrassment, and I dig back into my food with a little more vigor.

Cassie is paralyzed by the subtle exchange. I imagine that challenges to her father’s authority must not be common in the household.

I know already that Arnold won’t like me. Even if I wanted to be cozy with that
govnosos
, I’m an outsider here in every respect. I can feel it in the way everyone here regards me. This is a tight-knit community already, but as a Russian who knows nobody, this cold, cordial kindness is the best they’ll be willing to muster.

The rest of the dinner goes uneventfully, and after dinner, the time comes for me to drive my bride back to my home in Brighton Beach.

The family gives us both stiff goodbyes, and I exchange names with and receive business cards from a staggering amount of people I have no intention of seeing ever again. I can tell they hope the same, even as they keep up appearances.

There’s a certain finality to the goodbyes Cassie exchanges with her closer relatives, a few cousins who she might have known better than others. I’m reminded of what a foreigner I am to these people, and I realize that this ceremony is cutting Cassie off from these people altogether. She seems most upset about her brother, who’d fallen asleep earlier in the evening, but whom she went to kiss goodbye anyways, after asking my permission.

She’s being given to me, and in this community, the husband dictates how the new family will be run — where we go, what we do, and how we behave. In marrying Cassie off to someone like me, she’s getting sent away for good, and many of the family sense it, but none dare question it.

I can’t decide if it’s for better or for worse for her.

But then I see her father embracing her, hugging her tight to him, but there’s no love in the embrace. His eyes meet mine for a moment as he hugs her, and I realize this man is little better than a jealous ape giving away what he sees as one of his possessions. Cassie’s tearful embrace with her mother is the only one of the night that seems to have some emotion to it.

Finally, we’re walking out the doors for the last time, her hand in mine as I guide her to my car, a sleek black corvette I keep for special occasions. I didn’t let anyone decorate it for the event.

Rice is thrown at us as we make our way down, and a few times, I feel Cassie’s legs start to wobble as she loses her balance.

We finally reach my car, and I hold the door open for her, helping her into the sleek leather seats, tucking all of her long white gown in before shutting the door.

A moment later, I get in on the driver’s side, and we pull away, leaving those strange people behind us as we drive south.

Once we’re a ways down the road from the church, I feel like I should say something, to try to make small talk about the big night, how she must feel in all the rush, or something along those lines, but I can’t bring myself to see such words as anything more than cruel and unnecessary. So we sit in silence.

I glance over at Cassie as we get onto the highway. She’s looking out the window, her expression unreadable, but now that she’s far away from the claws of her family, her beauty seems to jump out at me all the more.

Against the cold black color of the car’s interior, Cassie couldn’t contrast more. Her white wedding dress, blonde hair, pale skin, and blue eyes that sparkle in the setting sun make her look like a diamond beside me.

A feeling of satisfaction rises in my chest as I look back to the road. Cassie is the most pristine woman I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I’m taking her away from a group of people unworthy of her. The world is cruel to women like her, and she’s been dealt an even more oppressive hand.

The least I can do is protect her from everything else she’ll have to face, living with a man like me.

As we drive the three-hour trip to Brighton Beach, I notice Cassie nodding off to sleep in the silence. I personally enjoy the quiet the trip affords, being used to the city noise and the thrum of clubs as I do my work, and I hope Cassie can take some solace in gathering her thoughts in relative privacy.

But the thought of what will happen when we reach my apartment keeps coming back to me. Cassie has curled up into the seat, sleeping gracefully with her arms wrapped around herself as she dozes.

I can’t deny that I desire her. Even as my impulse was to protect her, I desire her. But I know she expects me to take her as my property, to use her however I please the moment we step into the bedroom. With such an upbringing, it’s doubtful she was even told that she has the ability to say ‘no’ to such things.

So what will she think when we reach my home — our home? I think for a wild moment that I could just give her some money and send her on her own way, to be independent, but I realize that would only send her back home. She doesn’t know how to take care of herself out there.

I will have to be her protector, no matter what she desires.

Somehow, I feel a hint of warmth at the idea in my heart. I don’t know what her desires will be when we cross our marriage threshold, but that doesn’t change the fact that this lovely young woman is my responsibility, regardless of how I’d like to claim her as mine with all the hot-blooded passion she’s been able to stir up in my heart in such a short time.

What have I gotten myself into?