“How closely are you sticking around him?” my father asks.
“What?”
“If he took you to the club, he must be keeping you close by. Did you have to steal your phone back?”
“No,” I say slowly. “He lets me have my phone. He knows I won’t go anywhere, not as long as my daughter is still out there somewhere. If you could tell me where she is, maybe—”
“I can’t tell you that,” he cuts in. “I don’t know where she is. Where are you right now?”
He’s lying. “You must know something,” I say. “Maksim managed to track her down, but he won’t tell me anything about her. He didn’t pull the fact that she existed out of thin air. Someone connected to our family knows something. Who did you give her to?”
“Forget about her. Where are you right now?” he asks again.
“I’m not going to forget about her, Papa.”
“Cassie.” He sighs. “We’ll deal with all of this later. It’s not important right now. What’s important is that I know where you are. Are you being kept at one of their hotels?”
“I’m at his house,” I say. I stare at the door, trying to ignore the tornado picking up speed inside my chest. I may need my father’s help if everything goes south—it’s not a time to make enemies with him. “I’ve been staying here.”
“Is he tracking your cell phone? You wouldn’t call me if you thought there was a chance he could be listening to our call, would you?” His voice is nearly frantic. “I raised you better than that.”
“He’s not tracking it.”
“You’re certain? Is someone guarding you?”
He’s asking a thousand questions, but they’re all the wrong ones. What about questions like, Are you okay? Are you safe? Has he hurt you? Those are the kinds of questions that a father should ask his daughter in a situation like this. But Gianluigi isn’t exactly a role-model parent. Not unless you consider full-blown narcissism and a propensity for violence to be admirable parental attributes.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think. Not exactly.”
“So, you’re in his house without being monitored?”
“Yes.” I pull the phone away from my face, checking the screen—checking that I’m talking to my father.
“That’s perfect,” he mutters as I bring the phone back up to my ear. “That son of a bitch believes he has something over me. We can turn this around and use it against him.”
“Are you saying I’m not ‘something’?” I ask. It’s a weak attempt at dry humor. I know damn well where I stand in terms of strategic importance in my father’s eyes—low.
“No, of course not,” he says. “I’m saying that you can spy on him. If you convince him that everything is good between the two of you, you could get information out of him. He’s willing to keep information from you and you can take information from him. It’s a perfect setup.”
“I’m not going to be your spy,” I say. A torrent of guilt sweeps through me—I’m already spying on Maksim; it’s just for my career instead of my family.
“Cassie, we need this,” my father pleads. “You just saw what happened. They want us dead. They’re willing to use you to get to me.”
“How is that any different from you using me?” I hiss.
“Because I’m your father. You should know that I’d do anything for you, my daughter, so you should be willing to do the same. It’s how a family works.”
“I would do the same—for my daughter,” I say. “But you took her from me. You weren’t willing to do anything for me then.”
“I did what needed to be done,” he says. “I thought by now you’d be mature enough to understand that.”
“I understand everything just fine,” I say, the words slipping out through gritted teeth. “My daughter and I were liabilities to you. We were just—”
“Shut the fuck up,” he snaps. “You damn well know that’s not why I did it. I did it to protect everyone. I did it so this kind of scenario didn’t happen. I did it—”
“Then why didn’t you give me a choice?” I demand.
“You would have chosen wrong. You were a silly teenager, desperate to rebel—”
“You could have left the Mafia,” I say. “You should have prioritized your family. That would have protected us.”
“The Mafia is my family. And you were part of that until you decided to abandon your own kin.”
“I was never part of any of that.” I’m gripping my phone so hard, I can imagine the plastic cracking under my fingers. “Your men never treated me as anything more than something pretty to look at.”
“Maybe you should have done something impressive then, instead of falling in love with the first one who fucked you. I’m not going to have you reading me the fucking riot act while I have men in surgery. If you want to continue being a whore for the Akimovs, then fantastic—at least you’ll be able to keep doing the one thing you’re good at.”
The line goes dead. I keep holding the phone up to my ear, waiting for the anger to fade, but it doesn’t go anywhere. I’m more tired than before, but I know sleep will be more elusive than ever.
I close my eyes, laying my head back down. There’s a cold breeze as the door opens and the bed sinks as Maksim sits down beside me. I roll over to face him.
“Were you listening that whole time?” I ask quietly. I don’t want to look at him.
“No,” he says. “Only at the very end. But I didn’t need to hear any of it.”
“You knew I was going to call him. You let me.”
He nods. “Anyone could predict that you’d call your father and find out if he survived. Your father would want to find out how you survived the shooting and you’d tell him some information about our deal. Gianluigi, being an opportunistic piece of shit, wanted you to be his undercover agent. You refused because you hate people controlling
