Mafia Princess by Kennedy Slope

Chapter Four

Walking into the house, I couldn’t stop the scowl from forming across my face. Everything looked just as I had left it the day of my wedding, but I knew that things weren’t the same. There was a young woman upstairs who was my wife.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Blanchi,” Giovanna, my housekeeper, said. She took my suit coat as she always did when I returned home from a meeting.

“Where’s Sasha?” I asked. I couldn't stop myself. I had spent the morning at the warehouse with my brother Marco attempting to sort through the dowry of territory that her father had exchanged in our marriage agreement.

An agreement I had been staunchly against. Isaac had had to sweeten the pot, and while he did, I also knew that he hadn’t been happy about it, which is why I wanted my men looking through every document attached to every business and piece of land he gave me.

“I was just about to call her down for some lunch,” Giovanna said. Gio, as I had called her since I was a boy, had been my nanny growing up. When I became Don, she took over as my housekeeper. “There’s something you should know about her,” Gio said. Her voice was low, and she shifted her eyes upstairs.

I raised a brow. I had learned a good deal about my wife last night, especially when it came to what made her cry out in pleasure. I held a smile back as I remembered how quickly she had embraced the pain of my screwing her into the mattress as she chased her orgasm.

“She was snooping around the house, trying to get into your office,” Gio told me.

“Are you sure?” I asked. I couldn't imagine meek Sasha doing such a thing, but I also couldn’t ignore that the enemy was in the room down the hall.

Gio nodded. “She was trying to break into your office.”

I scowled. It seemed that Sasha wasn’t as mild-mannered as I thought. I gnashed my teeth together as I started making my way towards the dining room.

“Tell her to get her ass down here,” I told Gio. Some part of me knew that I was being irrational, but I was pissed that Sasha would go through my things. My feelings towards her family compounded that anger.

Pouring a drink, I contemplated what I was going to do next. I hadn’t thought much about Sasha in the days leading up to our wedding. After three years of negotiations, I had been too busy ensuring that her father would make good on his promises and not leave me high and dry.

Sighing, I took a sip of my scotch, enjoying how the alcohol burned the back of my throat. I wasn’t a heavy drinker. I didn’t like my mind clouded, but I needed something to take the edge off.

“Dominic!” Sasha’s soft voice rang out in surprise. It was clear that she hadn’t been expecting me. I wondered who the fuck she thought was ordering her to the table and why she complied so quickly.

“Take a seat,” I ordered. I tried not to smile when Sasha immediately complied. I noticed that last night. Sasha was much more malleable than any woman that I had ever known.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

I raised a brow. “Don’t worry about where I’ve been,” I told her.

Sasha’s eyes flared, but she said nothing. Instead, she folded her hands primly over themselves and leaned forward. I took a moment to admire my new wife, which I didn’t feel like I had done enough of last night.

Though we had screwed more than once last night, there had been something clinical about it, and it had kept me from truly admiring her.

“I guess I just expected you to be here,” she said. There was a bite to her voice.

I sighed. Sasha had been a virgin, and though I had never slept with a virgin, I knew enough to know that she probably expected some sort of flowers and breakfast at the end of everything.

“And I expected that you would be smart enough to know your place,” I told her.

This time she raised an eyebrow at me. I studied her closely. Her pale skin seemed even paler, making her crystal blue eyes appear more prominent in her face.

“I’m sure your maid told you I was snooping…”

“Gio is my housekeeper,” I corrected. She was also assigned to watch over Sasha when I wasn’t home. Sasha had finished high school several months ago, and as far as I knew, she didn’t have any friends in the city. I couldn’t imagine what she would be doing except sitting around the house, which is what it sounds like she did her entire life.

“I apologize,” Sasha said. “But you just had one of your goons drop me off. You can’t blame me for getting into trouble. I didn’t even know where the trouble was.”

There was truth in her statement. I hadn’t planned to send Sasha off on her own, but it had been unavoidable.

“Let’s set some ground rules,” I said. I tapped my hand against the rim of his glass with my ringed hand. It was odd to see the ring on my hand. Almost as strange as it was to see the thin diamond band on Sasha’s hand.

“Why do we need rules?” she asked.

“I like to keep things orderly in my life,” I told her.

Sasha bit her full bottom lip, and it was an erotic sight. I knew that she didn’t know what she was doing. Though I didn’t think that Sasha was my friend, I knew that she wasn’t some sort of vixen. It made her actions all the sexier.

“I suppose order isn’t a bad thing,” she told me.

“I’m sure that you know that as my wife, there are certain obligations you must fulfill.”

Sasha’s smile immediately turned downward. “Do you mean sex? Because what happened last night…”

“Will happen again,” I told her. Fucking Sasha had been the only good thing to come out of our marriage so far. I had decided that I liked the feel of her slick pussy gripping my cock, and her tiny nails digging into my shoulder blades.

Sasha sneered. “Are you going to rape me?” she asked.

It was the same question that had set me off before, and it pissed me off now. I suspected that she was trying to goad me, and I wasn’t going to give in. “Did I rape you last night, or did you willingly open your legs for me?”

Sasha moved back as if I had physically struck her. “What are these rules?” she asked.

I was impressed by the fact that she was rolling with the punches here. Sasha didn’t seem like she was just going to roll over and allow me to do anything I wanted.

“No alcohol or drugs,” I told her. “I don’t want a lush for a wife.”

Sasha snorted. “You don’t have to worry about that,” she said. “I’m too young to drink, and I’ve never done drugs in my life.”

I knew that. I hadn’t considered that I needed to lay down any rules, so I was making this shit up as I went along. I had seen enough women strung out on drugs that I knew that Sasha had never done them. I just wanted to make sure that she knew I’d gut her if she decided to snort a line.

“Good. Keep it that way.”

“Next?”

“No fucking anyone outside of our marriage.”

Sasha snorted. “Jealous?” she asked. At some point in the conversation, she had folded her arms across her chest and stared at me with a look of defiance in her eyes.

“Hardly,” I told her. “But I can’t have my heirs being questioned.” That was the truth of it, so I was able to ignore the hot anger that rose in my chest when I thought about someone taking what I considered already mine.

“So, you want children?” she asked.

Looking at her, I could see that the thought of children made her nervous. I couldn’t blame her. She had barely left high school, and now, she was expected to be a wife and a mother. When I had negotiated our marriage, I’d initially tried to marry her off to Marco. They were closer in age, and because he wasn’t Don, he could get away with certain things. But her father wouldn’t hear it. He wasn’t going to allow her little princess to be anything other than a queen.

“Giving the family heirs is my job just as much as it is yours,” I told her. It was the most diplomatic answer that I had.

“Are there any other rules?” she asked. I appreciated that she didn’t spend too much time harping on the kids thing. In truth, I wasn’t sure what I wanted or when.

“I expect you to conduct yourself properly,” I said. I tried not to snort at my own words. I didn’t know anything about what a proper girl should do. The girls I knew were anything but appropriate.

“You sound like my father,” she muttered.

Her words made my eye twitch, and I grabbed my scotch and downed it before I blew up on her. “The last rule is to stay the fuck out of my things,” I told her.

Sasha opened her mouth but closed it with a sharp snap. It was clear that she wanted to bite my head off, but she didn’t. “Now,” I said. “If you can follow those rules, then we won’t have any problems. We will be able to have a successful marriage.”

I was talking down to Sasha, but I wanted her to know her place. This wasn’t her father’s house where she could get away with anything.

“I have some requests of my own,” she said.

“I wasn’t making any requests,” I told her. “If you don’t follow these rules, I’ll be sure to make your life fucking hell. Your father might have made me marry you, but we both know that he isn’t going to save you.”

Isaac was desperate to stop the war between us. It was costing the Russians more and more money, and it had cost him his son. He’d been so desperate that he had sold me his daughter. Sasha looked at me with shocked eyes, and for a moment, I thought that she would cry, but she blinked those tears away.

“I want to enroll in college,” she exclaimed out.

“What?” I was surprised to hear her request. I had had a workup done on Sasha, and I hadn’t been able to find a great deal about her. I did know that she had been homeschooled her entire life, I assumed because her family had thought her too delicate for school with everyone else.

“I want to go to college,” she said. She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a piece of paper. “I was accepted into Columbia.”

She slid the piece of paper towards me. “My father wouldn’t allow me to attend. He’s old-fashioned. He doesn’t think a girl needs so much education.”

I said nothing, but I wanted to punch Isaac in the face. I barely knew Sasha, but I couldn’t imagine the type of father who would tell his daughter that she wasn’t good enough to attend college simply because of her gender.

“I won’t be able to attend as a student, but I can audit and reapply in the spring. It’ll give me something to do and keep me from snooping.”

I couldn’t stop the smile from forming on my face at the apparent jab.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I told her.

The surprise on Sasha’s face nearly made me laugh.

“You don’t need to go through any trouble,” she told me.

“I have contacts at Columbia. If you want to attend, it’s fine by me,” I told her, and it was. Unlike Isaac Petrov, I didn’t think that a woman was inherently lesser than a man. I knew a great many women who were formidable as hell.

Knowing a little more about Isaac made Sasha’s behavior more understandable. It also made me want nothing more than to correct the innocent Sasha her father had created.

“Thank you,” Sasha said.

I said nothing. I hadn’t expected to have a semi-cordial conversation with my wife. I’d hoped to tell her to keep her fucking hands out of my things.

“I’m going out,” I told Sasha.

“Okay,” she said. She was wringing her hands above the table.

I got up from the table. “And stay away from my office,” I told her.

Sasha said nothing, but I could practically feel her anger following me. I chuckled to myself as I walked out of the house. Sasha was proving to be much more enjoyable than I thought, and while I knew that I couldn’t trust her, considering that she was the daughter of my greatest enemy.

Sasha Petrov might appear to be meek and mild-mannered, but I wasn’t so sure that she was as innocent as she pretended to be, and I wasn’t going to allow myself to be caught unaware.

* * *

“Shouldn’t you be with your new wife?” my brother Marco asked.

“Sasha is fine,” I told him. “She’s at the house getting settled.”

“I’m surprised that you left her alone,” Marco said.

“Gio is with her,” I said.

Marco laughed. “I’m surprised you would subject her to that.”

I rolled my eyes at my brother. Gio had been particularly hard on him when they were growing up. I suspected it was because Marco was always getting into things that he shouldn’t have been sticking his nose in. As the youngest son, Marco didn’t have the same amount of responsibility as the rest of them.

“Did you have a chance to go through all of the paperwork Petrov dropped off? I don’t want us taking any of the property on until we know what we are getting ourselves into. I wouldn’t put it past Petrov to screw us over.”

Marco raised a brow. “You aren’t wrong,” he said.

I sighed. I knew that dealing with Petrov wasn’t going to be easy. His wife had come to me three years ago, shortly after her son’s death, and after I became a don, and begged me to ally with them. Somehow, she’d convinced both her husband and me to enter into an agreement neither of us were happy about.

“What did you find?” I asked.

“The territory he gave us is shit,” he said.

“What?”

Marco shook his head. He was trying to play it cool, but I could feel the anger radiating off him. He hadn’t wanted me to make a deal with the Petrov’s to join our two families together. He was there when the family killed our father and older brother, and despite it being several years ago now, he still wanted revenge.

“The territory isn’t lucrative. Keeping it will cost more than it’s worth, and I can’t imagine that anyone would want to buy it.”

This time, I became angry. I reached out and snatched the ledger out of my brother’s hands, scanning the numbers for myself. “Isaac knew about this,” I seethed. “The bastard made a note of every dime that territory made him, and he handed it over to us. He wanted me to know he was screwing me.”

I threw the book across the room. The pages flew as they hit one of the storage containers. “He played us,” Marco said.

I said nothing. I didn’t trust myself to speak. Part of the arrangement between us had been that the Petrov family would give me their most prized possession and some choice territory to sweeten the pot. I had mistakenly thought that Isaac would give me what I wanted.

“It’s bold of him to screw me over when I have his sweet daughter under my thumb,” I sneered. I had left the house with Sasha on relatively good terms. She had asked to go to college, and I’d all but said that I would make it happen. I hadn’t trusted her, but I hadn’t seen too much of a reason to make her existence miserable.

That was all about to change.

“Petrov doesn’t care about the girl,” Marco said. There was a hint of pity in his voice. “He sacrificed his son just to prove a point to us.”

“Sasha’s different,” I said. “You didn’t see him in the negotiations. It killed him to know that she was going to be my wife. I wasn’t sure that we would even make it down the aisle.”

Part of the fun of fucking Sasha the night before had been the knowledge that her father was probably drinking himself into a stupor, knowing that she was now in enemy hands. I wondered if it killed him to think about what I could be doing to her. While I made it a point to spare innocent women and children from the realities of my life, I had no issue taking my anger out on Sasha.

I was more than sure that a Petrov didn’t have an innocent bone in her body.

“We are still going through some of the businesses he handed over,” Marco said. There was a note of resignation in his voice, and I knew that Petrov found a way to fuck me there as well.

“Don’t waste your time,” I said. I was already contemplating all the ways I was going to make Petrov pay. We had agreed to a truce, and it was something that I would honor, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t ways for me to break him. “I’ve got other plans for Petrov.”

Marco looked at me for a second. His dark eyes scanned me up and down, and for a moment, they reminded me so much of my father that I felt an old familiar ache form in my heart. Marco was all I had left in terms of family, which is why I had taken the Petrov deal.

“Just be careful,” he said. “If we are the ones caught breaking the truce…”

He didn’t need to tell me what would happen. The consequences would be dire and deadly. Fortunately, I had no plans of breaking the truce.

“You don’t need to worry,” I said. “The truce will stay intact.”

Sasha Petrov might not.