The Bastard's Betrayal (Scandalous Scions 1)

Dante pulled open the passenger door and looked at her expectantly. It wasn’t until she’d climbed in, and he went around to the driver’s seat that he answered. “How you feel about the trees? We’re of the same mind. I prefer the city to the country.”

She relaxed back into her seat and watched the garage door rise. “Then why have a cabin in the woods?”

“Sometimes the quiet is nice.”

She supposed she could see that, even if the tunnel of green they started down made her skin crawl. Getting to the cabin would be the stuff of nightmares, but she supposed the actual cabin itself was nice enough. “We don’t have anything like this back home. My grandparents on my mother’s side have a house out in Connecticut, but I’ve only been there a few times. My mother isn’t close to them, and my father hates them.” She frowned. “Though it’s definitely mutual.”

“Your grandparents are cut from the same cloth my uncle is.”

“Da.” No use denying it. There was a reason they weren’t overly close with any of her aunts and uncles, and it had to do with how her grandfather attempted to move them around like chess pieces on a board only he had control of. Once her uncle Aiden took over the family business, things shifted, but no one forgot the bad old days. They didn’t seem overly inclined to forgive, either. She couldn’t blame them for that. “Not my parents though.”

“Aren’t they?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, Dante, they’re not. And if you quote the marriage to Romeo at me, I might throw myself from the moving vehicle. All leaders make sacrifices. I’m not special in that regard. I went into the choice with eyes wide open.”

“Would you have had to make the same choice if you were a man?”

She opened her mouth, but no words came. “That’s not fair.”

“It’s a valid fucking point, and you know it.” He picked up speed until they were bouncing along the dirt road leading from the cabin.

She’d planned on taking careful note of their surroundings in the event that the worst-case scenario played out and she ended up back here, but Rose quickly got bored of the unrelenting green. The dirt road turned to gravel and then pavement, and still the green persisted.

She hoped things were going okay back home. It had only been…four days? Less than a week for things to change so drastically. Except they hadn’t changed at all. Dante was still the enemy. She would still marry Romeo when she finally got back to New York. They would still have…

“Why would Jovan Romanov’s people be joining in the search for you? Is that something your father would have coordinated?”

Dante’s question jarred her out of her dark thoughts. “What?” She twisted to face him. “Why are you asking about Jovan Romanov?” He was another cousin of her father’s, though more distantly, and now the patriarch of the greater Romanov family. They all paid allegiance back to Russia, but those ties had spun out over the last generation. Something Jovan wasn’t too pleased about.

“Answer the question.”

A sliver of alarm went through her. She spent a moment debating continuing to push for answers but finally said, “No, Papa wouldn’t have called them in, even if it was an emergency. Especially not in this situation involving me. My father has done several things over the years that pisses them off, including naming me his heir instead of marrying me off to one of his men so they can lead the family. They would be only too happy to use this as proof I’m not suitable.” Her parents had always supported her as heir and trained her as such from the time she was a teenager. Jovan was like Dante’s uncle, like Rose’s grandparents, in how he viewed anyone who wasn’t a man. As in, they weren’t suitable to lead.

Dante drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “They are not allies, then.”

“They’re family.”

He shot her a look. “You’re not naive enough to think blood ties will protect you if they decide you’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

No, she wasn’t. She’d played a very careful game for her entire adult life. Entertaining her “cousins” from Russia when they came to visit with obvious agendas while never agreeing to anything. She’d gotten very good at dancing on the knife-edge between too strong to fuck with versus being too much a pain in the ass to be allowed to live. Her family in Russia was always hungry for more. More power, more territory, more money. It aggravated them to no end that her father eventually settled into something resembling peace with the scattering of other families in NYC and the surrounding area instead of crushing them beneath his heel in a bloody war.

Somehow, in all of this, she hadn’t considered that they’d get involved.