With This Ring

“You look like your mother,” she whispered.

“Thank you,” I whispered back. Tears threatened to choke me. Elena couldn’t have paid me a higher compliment. My mother was a great beauty queen. She had been crowned Miss America in her time.

“Your father is in his study.” I went to his door and knocked softly. He called me to come. I opened the door and I entered.

“Beautiful,” he declared with a nod of satisfaction. Then he moved forward and took my arm.

“How severe is the pain?”

“It’s much better now. It can be ignored, so no need to worry,” I said as we slipped into the back of his limo.

As the car slid smoothly out of the tall black and gold gates our conversation moved to his last trip to Peru. Cocooned in the comfortable interior of the car I began to relax. When my father decided to charm someone, there was no way they were not going to be charmed. I was charmed. I listened eagerly to his adventures and laughed at his stories until the car came to a stop and my father said, “Ah, we are here.”

I thought we would be going to one of my father’s usual super expensive haunts in the heart of Moscow, but we had pulled up in front of a set of iron cast gates I was all too familiar with. I turned to my father with a look of betrayal.

“What are we doing here?”

“Having dinner.”

I turned my face away. “I’m taking a taxi home.”

He didn’t say a word and that was worse than if he had bothered to tell me off. I sat stiffly, fuming inwardly, my face turned away from him until we arrived at the front of the splendid Ivankov mansion. The door was pulled open for me, but it was not by the Ivankov’s butler, but Bianca herself. She was grinning widely and seemed filled with a child-like excitement to see me.

“Freya,” she called out merrily, and for a moment I was so stumped to see her I forgot I was meant to be furious at my father’s deception. The next thing I knew, I was being pulled into the house by the hand. Bianca pulled me through the house right into the kitchen where there was a flurry of activity. She pulled me through it all towards a long table filled with too much food. She picked up a tiny square of toast with caviar on it.

“Do you love caviar?” she asked excitedly.

I was too bemused to tell her caviar was not special to me. I could have eaten it for breakfast every day of my childhood and I had always chosen cereal instead. I took the tiny toast offering and popped it into my mouth. Bianca snagged two flutes of champagne from the tray of a passing manservant and held one out to me.

Her eyes were sparkling almost as much as the golden liquid in our glasses when she clinked her glass with mine and said, “To us.”

I echoed her words and took a sip of cold bubbles.

“You look really beautiful,” she said.

“So do you,” I said sincerely. Her hair was pulled back just like mine, with golden stray strands framing her lovely face. Her silver dress was superbly cut, sleeveless, and hugged her body exquisitely.

“What’s the occasion?” I asked.

“Maxim’s father is in town, which apparently hardly ever happens so they wanted this to be a sort of introductory dinner between the two families.”

“Hmm…” I mused sarcastically. “An introductory dinner, for a marriage I have countless times said I am not interested in.”

Her happy smile broke and I felt sorry for always pulling her into the midst of my anger with the Ivankovs. I actually liked her, and given different circumstances, we might have even become friends.

There was something I did wonder about though, and couldn’t hold it back any longer. “You love Levan a lot, don’t you?”

Her eyes softened and she smiled. “I do.”

I concluded then she wasn’t well versed in the horrors of being married into a Russian mafia family, especially one as dangerous as our two families. I drained my glass and chose not to say anything. Who knew? Maybe I was wrong and she was right. Her love would be strong enough to weather all the storms coming their way.

She however knew exactly what I didn’t want to say. She reached for my hand, held it in hers, and said, “I owe everything to Levan. He and I came together out of tragedy. It’s a long story which I will tell you in detail someday, but basically, I was kidnapped by a madman and everyone around me suffered and nearly even lost their lives trying to get me out. My father, my best friend, Levan … and Maxim.”

My brows shot up in surprise at the mention of the last person.