Lexi? Legs was far more comfortable, more my style. Name shortening was just a habit, I decided. A running theme in our family. There was no intimacy or underlying meaning to it. Nothing to get frazzled over.
“He wants her away from the rising tension,” I went on. “He thinks things are on the verge of war around here and he wants her kept out of the line of fire.”
“Why the hell doesn’t he just send her on a fucking vacation to a secluded tropical island, then?” Luka exploded, clearly losing control on the reins of his temper.
I sighed, feeling a headache forming at the back of my eyes. “One, because he doesn’t want her to be alone. Two, because he knows of our reputation, and he thinks we can protect her. Not to mention, she’ll be in the States and away from all of this. The marriage is only temporary.”
“What does that mean?” Cris spoke up.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “It’s part of the deal. A show of good faith, you could say. Sergei signs over half of his shares if I marry Lexi and take her back to Brooklyn with me. Once Sergei has handled the situation over here and deemed it safe enough for her to return, he’ll sign over the rest of his shares, come collect her, and we can annul the marriage.”
“He’s taking out insurance that she’ll be kept safe,” Dad concluded.
“Exactly.”
“Jesus Christ, bro,” Luka grunted. “What the hell have you gotten us into? You know we already have enough shit stirring on the home front.”
My grip on my glass tightened. The lack of trust in my younger brother’s voice made me want to shatter the fucking thing against the goddamned wall. I’d never given them a whole lot of reasons to depend on me, in terms of familial responsibility. But I’d never given them a reason not to trust me when it came to the shit that really mattered. Like keeping my family safe.
“I’m handling this,” I growled over the line. “None of this is going to touch us.”
“The hell it won’t!” Ace snapped. “You’re bringing one of them back with you. The boss’s fucking daughter, of all people.”
I glared at the wall, pretending it was Ace standing right in front of me. “You really don’t want to be talking about fucking the boss’s daughter, do you, little brother?”
Since he’d been cavorting around with the daughter of an enemy family—now former enemy family—he really had no room to talk. Not that I was fucking the boss’s daughter. Hell, based on the little tête-à-tête we’d just had in the study, I’d say that day was a long fucking way off, if it ever happened.
Ace spat curses in the background as Rome cut in. “You’re taking a calculated risk, man. You sure about this?”
I’d never admit to anyone how spectacularly shitty their lack of trust made me feel.
You’ve done it to yourself.
“It’s already done,” I replied coolly. “I’ve gathered what research I could on my end, but Ace, I want you to run background checks on the list of names I’m going to text you.” The names that made up Sergei’s and Lexi’s personal security team. “And get every scrap of information on Alexia Kozlov that you can. I don’t want any surprises from my new wife.”
God, had that word just come out of my mouth?
I might as well have been speaking Russian because no other word had ever sounded so foreign on my tongue.
“You got it,” Ace agreed reluctantly.
What I’d already learned about Lexi Kozlov was sparse and superficial. Twenty-eight years old. Only child of a major Russian crime boss. She’d been an international super model in her early twenties. Like, top five most popular in the entire world. Posters of her on every fourteen-year-old boy’s wall kind of popular. And no wonder, with legs like that and that face. She’d modeled for all the top designers, and had been a regular fixture at every red carpet event back then.
Then she’d just dropped off the entire map for a while. No appearances, no photos, nothing. A few years back, she suddenly re-emerged on Instagram out of nowhere. She now had millions of followers and was still considered to be an international sex symbol by all accounts. I’d even read a few articles in the tabloids about her being frequently offered new modeling gigs, all of which she continued to turn down.
So, that’s what I had. Former model. Instagram star. Fantasy of men world-wide. Spoiled