Payal had never been one to tell lies. It wasn’t right. But doing the right thing was what got her into this mess in the first place.

To come up with a lie … no, a whole assortment of lies for every possible line of inquiry—that too to convince a hardened criminal to marry her—was a tall order indeed.

The irony of the whole situation would have reduced her to bellyaching fits of laughter if it didn’t scare the living shit out of her. Growing up, she’d always believed being born American, having liberal desi parents, a top-notch education and a lucrative career would save her from the antiquated tradition of arranged marriage. Never in twenty-nine years did she imagine she’d wholeheartedly agree to a match brokered by her father. 

Not that there was anything remotely ‘traditional’ about this match. No one—not the family elders, not even her own mother—approved of it. The family she was marrying into didn’t have the right ancestry, or observe the right religion. Hell, they didn’t even live on the right side of the law.

They were bratva. Ukrainian mafia, to be exact.

Suffice to say, the condensation coating her Mediterranean Mule ’s copper mug wasn’t the only reason her hands were clammy. Eyes trained on the bar’s entrance, Payal’s heart jumped every time someone entered. She’d chosen a table at the back of the dimly lit establishment to give herself a tiny window of time to compose herself when her intended arrived. The last thing she wanted was for a mountainous, prominent-veined gangster man walking up behind her and taking her by complete surprise.

It was only once she’d drained half her Mule when she realised that her choice of table had left her no place to run in case of an ambush. Her breathing shallowed. A violent pounding in her ears drowned out the hushed chatter of the other patrons. She hunched over the table, struggling against an overwhelming urge to curl up into a ball. Wincing at how the fabric of her top scraped the coarse skin of her abdomen, her eyes darted around the bar for another table—one that could alert her of her future husband’s approach, and also allow her a clean escape.

You’re being paranoid.

She was. She knew she was. But thinking the thought didn’t make it any easier to calm down.

She kept looking. The other tables with a decent vantage of the entrance were taken. That was good, though. In a way. Even though it was early in the evening, there were still enough people at the bar and individual tables—enough eyewitnesses—to convince her she wouldn’t be harmed. Besides, her family’s chauffeur Nasir was on speed dial and parked a block away if she needed rescuing.

This was what her life had been reduced to. Payal Lohani, once a tough, go-getter New Yorker, was now too afraid to step out of her parents’ Scarsdale home and use public transport on her own.

A year and a half. She’d had enough of this bullshit. If a deal with the devil was what it took to buy her old life, her freedom and her safety back, then so be it. She had to put on a brave face. She could not chicken out of this.

Emptying her mug, shaking off her inhibitions along with the buzz from the vodka, she sat up straight, steadied her breath and resumed watching the door intently.

She had no idea what to expect. Oleksiy Karmazin was not on any social media. The websites for his fitness center and security firm didn’t have any photos of him either. The fact that he owned and ran an establishment called Channel Fitness gave her a few ideas though. She imagined Ivan Drago from Rocky 4, all blond and muscly; wearing a permanent scowl. Or maybe he resembled a Bond villain from the nineties, his head shaved, a crimson gash across a clouded eye the only color on his sickly pale face.

Payal had never seen the appeal of the proverbial bad boy. She was too smart to harbour any fantasies about ‘fixing’ a man. Rage, violence, abandonment, mommy issues—that stuff was for therapists, not girlfriends. And she most definitely did not have the time or patience to be near men who lived dangerously. Her past boyfriends had all been of the boy-next-door variety. Fresh-faced, suitably polite, charming, highly educated, career-minded, with a liking for cable-knit sweaters.

Not far off, in fact, from the tall, dark-haired man who had just strode in and ordered a Brooklyn Lager at the bar, mused Payal.

On second thought, none of her exes had ever been this handsome.  

Dressed casually in a crew-neck sweater, the sleeves rolled up to show off a large watch strapped to a correspondingly large wrist, he perched himself on the edge of a barstool as though he had no intention of getting comfortable and took a tentative sip of his beer. His features seemed chiseled with the utmost care: high at the cheekbones, straight up the nose’s bridge, jaw perfectly squared and proportioned so it didn’t splay out past his cheeks. His beard, neatly trimmed, somehow made his features appear more angular and blunted at the same time.

Despite his height and athletic frame, his easy-going demeanor, which Payal thought bordered on boyish sweetness, put the bartender in a chatty mood. How cruel the universe was, dangling this prime specimen in front of her when her fate was as good as sealed to a demon from the underworld.

A year and a half ago, she would’ve kept looking at him till their gazes met. Maybe bought him a drink as an invitation to her table. She might have even been brazen enough to walk up to the bar and take the seat next to him.

But that was a lifetime ago. She was getting distracted. Oleksiy Karmazin. He was the only item on her agenda tonight. Tearing her gaze off the handsome man, she rested her chin on her knuckles and projected all her focus onto the entrance, willing the gangster to arrive faster so she could get this over with.

The corner of her eye caught movement. Still perched on the bar stool, the handsome man was engrossed by the beer bottle he rolled in his palm but the rest of his body was angled towards her. A fraction of a second later, his eyes found hers.

Shit. Payal looked away. She swirled the ice cubes in her otherwise empty mug, trying her best to look oblivious. Uninterested.

His attention returned to his beer for a beat, fingers strumming against the brown glass in grave deliberation. Then, threading the bottle’s neck through his long, slender fingers, he was on his feet, advancing toward her like a panther going in for the kill. Gone was the boyish sweetness he’d shown the bartender. His pitch-dark eyes gauged her with a barely contained ferocity. Which could be interpreted as attraction, of course. The really intense, instinctive kind. But it could also be malice.  

It occurred to Payal that she might have to do more than turn him away.

She might have to make a run for it.

Shifting uneasily in her seat, Payal’s hand edged towards her phone. She felt him getting closer. Her chest hurt from her heart’s violent stammering.

There are too many eyewitnesses, she reminded herself.

Where the hell was Oleksiy Karmazin?

Maybe he’d change his mind and leave her alone if she looked like she was doing something important on her phone.

Hands trembling, her thumb stilled over her phone’s screen as a shadow darkened her table.

‘You Payal?’ he asked hesitantly.

Oh.

A muscle at the back of Payal’s neck smarted as her head snapped up. The way his sweater clung to his lean, well-defined chest and shoulders snagged her attention before she could go high enough to look him in the face. ‘O-Ole-eksiy?’

His eyes narrowed in his study of her, glinting with something resembling amusement that unsettled Payal. He chewed his bottom lip before pointing his beer at himself. ‘Yeah, that’s me.’

Payal struggled to keep her head above the paralysis taking hold of her. ‘Please,’ she motioned to the seat opposite to her, begging her self-control to return. Involuntary salivation was not something she was prepared to deal with in front of this man. Not tonight. Not ever.

Planting the beer onto the table between them, he settled into his seat. Payal found herself slumping under the intensity of his piercing scrutiny. Head tilted sideways, his lips pulled up in an incredulous, lopsided sneer.

‘You’re, uh—’ He looked away, chuckled under his breath with a slight shake of the head. Payal didn’t take it personally. This must have been as absurd for him as it was for her. He found his words in a thick Brooklyn accent. ‘When my father said you were an accountant—I wasn’t expecting you.’

For the blink of an eye, Payal thought he could see through her. Not just her clothes, but her secrets as well. Her hand reflexively shot up to her abdomen, making her breath hitch as it passed over the sensitive skin across her ribcage.

That was impossible, of course. Oleksiy was only saying what every other man said to her when they first met.

‘Well, you’re not exactly what I was expecting either,’ she said, mustering what little of her past self’s flirtatiousness she could. “I was on the lookout for Ivan Drago.”

His brows lifted in an unamused arch. The corner of his mouth curled with barely-contained contempt as he combed his thick hair back with a sharp tug. ‘Yeah, well. Sorry to disappoint.’

Immediately realizing her gaffe, Payal bit her tongue. Not only had she made the egregious mistake of lumping Ukrainian and Russian people together, but her mental picture of him—that of a light-haired, light-eyed brutish thug who spoke in monosyllables—was molded entirely on ignorant cultural stereotypes. The man sitting before her had attended the Stern School of Business, for God’s sake! She’d be irritated too if every stranger expected to see Priyanka Chopra when they met her.

She opened her mouth to apologise. To tell him how far from disappointed … how relieved she was that he was Oleksiy Karmazin. That the glossy hair he ran his fingers through, the stark black of it, complemented his complexion wonderfully and looked enticingly soft. That she had an unexplainable desire to feel the bristled tips of his beard against the sensitive, most secret expanses of her skin.

Stunned by the trajectory of her own thoughts, the apology slipped her mind. By the time she remembered, the moment had passed. Gulping down the saliva pooling in her mouth, she raised her glass to signal the bartender for another.

‘You want anything else?’ she asked Oleksiy, trying to appear nonchalant.

‘I’m good.’ He shifted in his seat, looping his right shoulder ever so slightly like he had a kink in his neck. His fingertips traced a line down the misted bottle.

Payal bided the ensuing silence, watching his teeth drag across his lower lip before he sucked it in and rolled it out. She was vaguely aware her jaw had gone slack. What was she so apprehensive about, again? For the life of her, she couldn’t remember. How bad would it really be to have those puckered lips pressed against her own? How bad could it be to have the burn of that beard seared around her mouth, down the column of her neck, on her collarbone, around her …

Clearing her throat, she forced herself to meet his eyes. ‘Is this sort of thing normal in your circles? Arranged marriages, I mean.’

Laughter glinted in Oleksiy’s black eyes. ‘Marriage isn’t exactly normal in my circles,’ he said, his voice soft but gravelly.

Payal’s heart stilled. He was trying to scare her. She refused to take the bait. Unblinking, she waited for more.

‘But yeah, when it’s sanctioned, it’s usually arranged. Loyalties are pledged. Assets change hands. Stuffa real fairy tales.’ He took a shallow swig of his beer.

Payal brushed off the note of resentment in his tone. Arranged marriages weren’t anyone’s first choice. It certainly wasn’t hers. But life had a way of throwing curveballs your way. ‘And are these marriages usually arranged within the umm … community?’

‘Not a lotta Indian brides, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘What, so no support groups for foreign brides of the bratva?’ she joked.

‘You’ll never fit in,’ he said coolly.

Payal’s pulse raced. She’d assumed the arrangement was a done deal. That the purpose of their meeting here was more to get acquainted before the big day. She hadn’t realised that the final decision was still pending. This was a job interview, one that could very well end in a rejection.

‘I’m very personable,’ she found her voice.

‘It doesn’t matter. The community’s inherently insular. Distrustful of outsiders, for obvious reasons.’

A waitress arrived with Payal’s second Mule.

‘That may be the case,’ Payal replied after thanking the waitress as levelly as she was able. She leaned forward. ‘But your father trusts mine. He wouldn’t have agreed to this if he suspected we posed a threat of any kind to the family business.’

Oleksiy’s eyes darkened, his jaw hard. Through gritted teeth, he said, ‘My father might know what’s right for the family business, but he doesn’t get to decide what’s right for me. I’m not in the family business. Or did he forget to mention that?’

Payal’s father certainly hadn’t mentioned it. When he said Oleksiy ran a fitness center and a security firm, she’d assumed they were Bratva fronts to launder dirty money.  

‘Then why’re you here?’ Payal asked, flushed with panic and frustration.

His face softened. ‘To ask you to say you can’t go through with it.’

The hell I will. ‘But I have no objections.’

‘You don’t want to marry a guy who’s in love with somebody else.’ He believed he’d won. The corners of his eyes creased with his smirk. ‘No woman in her right mind would.’

‘Oh.’ Payal’s shoulders drooped. She hadn’t factored in matters of the heart. It wasn’t a priority for her, not with everything else gone to hell in her life. And she most definitely didn’t anticipate a man from a criminal background to turn down her father’s money on such … sentimental grounds.

She took a long sip of her drink, her thoughts racing. Of course it was wrong to deny someone the opportunity to be with who they wanted to be with. Where, then, would that leave her? No security. No Columbia in the fall. Wasting the prime of her life holed up in Scarsdale, with tax season being the only thing worth looking forward to.

She’d pinned all her hopes on this arrangement. On him. She needed him for life to return to some semblance of normalcy.

And he needed her to refuse the match.

Because he couldn’t do it himself.

‘And do you plan to marry this person?’ Payal asked, arching her brow in challenge.

Eyes narrowed, he answered, ‘Like I said, marriages in my circle have to be sanctioned by the vor zakone.’

So he’ll have an illicit paramour. Payal could live with that. Was she disappointed that this gorgeous man would never reciprocate the desire she felt for him a second ago? Sure. Was she crestfallen that she would be bound to a husband who’d never love her? Not really. She’d been raised to be comfortable with the idea of marriage as a glorified business contract. Besides, what was one man’s love compared to the freedom to live her life as she pleased?

He needed to know she had no qualms with his having a lover on the side. ‘But you are in a committed relationship?’

Something she said hit a raw nerve. Tersely, he said, ‘I’m committed not to marry anyone else.’

‘I don’t expect loyalty from you.’

‘And I don’t think it’s fair for either of us to be trapped in a loveless marriage.’

Payal suppressed a groan. This was aggravating. ‘Love’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Oleksiy hissed under his breath. He turned his head away so the full force of his sneer didn’t burn a hole in her. ‘What’s a career girl like you even doing here?’

‘Actually, I’m unemployed.’

‘And heading to grad school this fall, if memory serves,’ he snarled. ‘You’re smart, you’re beautiful, you come from money. You can have your pick of men. Why this? Why me?’

Because I don’t want to die.

‘Because I have a duty to my family.’ The lies she’d been so apprehensive about telling came easier now she knew she wouldn’t have to seduce the man, or put on the airs of a blushing, deliriously happy bride. This marriage would be a marriage in name only. A business contract. Once the papers were signed and the terms of agreement met, they would carry on with their own lives, independent of one another. No feelings involved meant no feelings got hurt. ‘I have to look out for my family’s interests—what my father deems best—before I look out for my own. And while I can’t say I’m familiar with the inner workings of the bratva, I imagine it’s not very different for you.’

‘Then we’re at complete odds,’ Oleksiy said, violently jabbing a finger on the tabletop for emphasis, ‘because my life’s one purpose is to step out of my father’s shadow.’

Payal steeled herself from recoiling at the spite in his words. ‘I’ve said all I have to say. I don’t have a problem with you being with someone else.’ She fished out a fifty from her purse and slapped it onto the table before rising to her feet. ‘If you have an objection, I suggest you take it up with the men who brokered the deal. Otherwise, I’ll see you at City Hall.’