3

Anatoli

The call ended with a definitive click.

Receiving the news that my daughter would be returning to me marked the end of an era. The end of an arrangement with my estranged child calling Moscow her home. Sixteen years had come and gone, and now she would come "home" to me.

Fuck.

I shook my head slowly, my mind numb and hesitant. Adjusting was imperative in my line of work. Usually, I could roll with the punches.

But this?

I grimaced, unsettled with this change.

Masha was coming here, to my turf, my rule, my kingdom.

It just didn't sit right with me. I couldn't see it going well.

Fuck it all.

While the anticipation of her arrival in New York City where I reigned as the boss of the Marcelli Family should've felt like a new beginning, my enthusiasm was slow to come.

Idle and vacant, I sat at my desk, staring at the opposite wall as I let the news sink in. No excitement came with the prospect of my absent teenage daughter returning to me. This state-of-the-art building in the center of the financial district wasn't her home. I had my late wife, Olga Volkov, to thank for that. I also had her to thank for the fact that I didn't even feel like Masha's father after not seeing her once, in the flesh, all her life.

There wasn't much I could be thankful for from the wife I had been forced to take thirty-two years ago. She'd protested the arranged marriage to me, a rule my father struck as his dying wish. That proclamation he'd issued on his deathbed had chained Olga to me, and me to her. And she'd used every second between our wedding and her death to resist being my wife.

Good riddance.

But Masha wasn't someone I could dismiss as easily.

"All these years..." I muttered to myself as I swiveled idly in my chair.

Since the moment my daughter was born—no, since she was conceived—I hadn't been present in her life. Olga visited me as requested, mistook me for a guard she wanted to fuck, flew home to live with her parents, and realized she was pregnant. That was how remote I was from my daughter.

I'd never known Masha as a baby or a child. Never met her or spoke to her. Pictures and a verified paternity test were sent to me in the beginning, but other than that, Olga banished me from Masha's existence.

Her parents did, bitter that their daughter had been forced to marry me, not Niko Popov.

Thinking of the sneaky bastard, I rolled my eyes. Then and now, I had few reasons to care for the asshole. Generations of rivalry and no trust wouldn't be changing the shitty connection we had anytime soon, either.

Back when I took Olga as my wife, I hadn't troubled myself with how the Volkovs wanted her to marry into the Popov family. And I didn't lose sleep about anything to do with Olga now. I'd ceased thinking about her since the moment she left me the first time, living across the country and despising the fact that I was alive.

Now, though, this news of Masha returning had to matter. She was coming "home" whether I wanted her to or not.

Sixteen years.

It felt like a lifetime, but it wasn't. All those years had come and gone with her over there, under the guardianship of the Volkovs since Olga killed herself three days after Masha was born. All that time, I'd been here, in the city I ruled, taking the Marcelli family to new heights of power and wealth.

Sixteen fucking years. And now I was expected to just take her in.

Masha was a distant memory to me. A minor thought tucked into the back of my mind. Yet, she'd soon be an inconvenience very much in my face.

Almost two decades of distance between us had been no doubt filled with criticism, judgment, and insults. Masha couldn't be coming here willfully or with glee. Olga hadn't lived with me as my wife. She'd been encouraged to go home since she'd done her duty by marrying me.

Honestly, it turned out fine for me. I didn't have to deal with her and she let me raise our first-born. That was the only reason I could ever be grateful to her—for my son. For the mere action of consummating her marriage with me, the marriage forced upon us by our fathers, she had given me my son.

With Gunsyn, I ran this city. In him, I had a legacy and a future to look forward to.

But Masha?

She was nothing more than a mistake, relocated to live with the Volkovs so they could poison her against me. Until now.

I groaned, rubbing my face and wishing I hadn't taken that call right then.

Masha wouldn't be my legacy after the years of her grandparents telling her how awful I was. Masha wouldn't contribute to my success after all that time of being brainwashed to loathe me, just like Olga had.