The God (Bratva Blood #3)- S.R. Jones Page 0,79

money. Lots of it. Your mother went to Igor and asked him for the equivalent in today’s terms of around one hundred thousand dollars, give or take. Told him she had information he needed. She also did it because she needed to get away. She was in debt with some rather unsavory characters. Igor paid her the cash and sent you both to London. He also knew Jasper, vaguely, through the fact that Jasper liked to bring promising young girls over from Russia to Europe to dance. Not the sort of dancing you do, though, Dasha. I’m sure you understand what I mean.”

Jasper helped traffic girls? No. He might be many things, but not that?

“Jasper made his money and then got out of the game. He wanted to be respectable. Legit. And Igor told him about this dancer. A girl he would want to put on the best stages in the world, not the tawdriest. A girl who allegedly made grown men cry when she danced. Your mother, Igor, and Jasper planned your life from the very moment you landed in London. None of it was coincidence. You were his passport to respectability, but he kept some of his old connections via his lawyer.”

“Is he a danger to me now?” I ask.

Ilya shrugs. “I cannot say. From the point of view of whether he’s still got connections in our world, I would say no. He’s spent far too long trying to get away from it. Is he a bad person who would do anything to get what he wanted? Then yes, you might still be in danger.”

He takes my hand in his. “I don’t know Bohdan well, but I know K thinks highly of him, and so does Andrius. For Andrius to have let Bohdan be a part of this venture they are forming, he must trust him. See good in him. I know what he did was wrong, but he did it with good intentions, of that I am sure. Did your mother ever do anything with good intentions? I think probably not, and yet you forgive her time and time again.”

Then he stands, pats my shoulder, and leaves the room.

Over the next few days as I get ready to leave for the tour, Ilya’s words keep coming back to me. I miss Bohdan all the time. The thing is, though, every time I picture him, I see him watching me as I lay in garbage, and the most intense sticky shame coats my tongue. How do I move on from that?

The night before we fly to the first destination, I get a letter. It’s airmail from Greece.

He wrote to me.

In this day and age of emails and texts, it seems impossibly romantic to hold an airmail letter in my hands.

I open it and start reading.

Dasha,

I hope this letter finds you well. I hear from our friend Ilya that you’re about to embark on a final tour. You will be amazing, Dasha. Your dancing is the most inspirational and beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You move like liquid, heartbreak, joy, pain, and freedom, all contained in this amazing network of flesh and bone that makes you special.

When I saw you on the floor in that garbage, I was furious. Furious that Jasper could take something as precious as you. Something as rare and beautiful and wonderful as you and do that to you. That’s not how I think of you, though. I think of you as a dancer. As a daughter who loves her mother enough to forgive her time and time again. I think of you as an intelligent, fiercely talented woman who brought my friends to tears under the stars in Corfu.

I think of you as the girl who lit up the dark Russian nights for me.

I think of you on that stage in Paris, where you moved with a grace I’ve never seen before.

You have nothing to be ashamed of, Dasha. I don’t profess to know exactly what you feel, but I think maybe I understand some of it. You hate that I saw you like that, but you have to know that’s not how I think of you. You know my past, what my father did, and what he let his friends do. Does that change how you view me? I hope not.

You’re not an object of pity to me, Dasha. You’re an object of admiration. You are the girl I wrote this for.

I miss you.

I want you.

I love you.

Bohdan. X

I crumple the paper in