PROLOGUE: In Which She Takes One for the Team

PROLOGUE: In Which She Takes One for the Team

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“No. It’s much too soon, Vanya.”

“Come on, Father. What do you have to lose? Lena can do this job,” my oldest brother, Ivan, replied, ignoring my father's use of the affectionate nickname he so despised.

“I don’t know. She is a girl and she is my lastborn. If anything happened to her…”

It was nice to know my blood had so much faith in me and my gender. Not.

“You don’t want to give her a tough job and she just wants a job,” Ivan insisted. “This is a win-win solution. Assign her to this Lancaster guy. She’ll never see any action this way.”

“Lena will know what we’re trying to do. Obviously, if Lancaster isn’t in any imminent danger, she’ll figure out that we sent her there because we don’t trust her.”

“Even she can’t fúck this up, Father.”

Well, that just did it. Clearing my throat loudly, I rapped on my father’s door and pushed it open without waiting for a response. I folded my arms across my chest when he and my brother instantly stopped talking, their faces a picture of embarrassment. Together, they made an impressive pair. My father was a beefy man in his late fifties who had been in the Russian army before coming to the States and settling here in San Francisco, where he met my mother. His dark hair had long turned silver but the years had been kind to him. My brother was taller and leaner, wearing his thick black hair much longer than mine.

Yet they were afraid of five-foot-three me.

“Funny, despite the sign outside saying Anosov and Sons Security, I still thought I was part of the team.” Despite my sarcasm, I was a little hurt. “Guess I was wrong.”

“Docha,” Dad began, “how much of that did you hear?” He seemed wary and I couldn’t blame him. My temper rivalled even Ivan’s.

“Oh, just that you two” – I motioned between my brother and father – “feel that I’m an idiot who’d screw up protecting my pinkie finger, let alone one of our clients.”

Ivan rolled his eyes at me. “Come off it, Len. You’re still a rookie at this. Do you know what kind of training Alex and Dave – not to mention the rest of our men – had to go through?”

My blood began to boil at the mention of my other two older brothers, whose asses I’d been kicking since the seventh grade. “Yeah, and I went through the same. I have the same skill set. I’m good, Vanya – if not, better than any of them.”

This was the hugest problem with being an only girl: Being told that you couldn’t do anything because you didn’t have a second head between your legs. Alexei and David – both twenty-eight and older than me by three years – were good-natured even if they were overprotective. Thirty-year-old Ivan was a complete dick. This was probably due to the fact that the stick up his ass had termites.

“You don’t have to raise your voice at me, Len,” he said quietly. “I’m only looking out for you.”

“If I wanted that, I wouldn’t have become a bodyguard, would I? I would’ve gone to culinary school like Mom wanted.”

“That’s what you should’ve done, all right.”

“You’re such a sexist piece of crap, Ivan.”

We glared at each other until our father cleared his throat. It was a well-known fact that Ivan and I could go at each other like a pack of hungry cannibals and Dad obviously wasn’t in the mood to clear the debris of our verbal assault.

“What Ivan is trying to say,” he began in a patronising tone, “is that this is your first gig, Len. I would feel a lot better if it was an easy one. Lancaster is some kind of wacky artist and is apparently more of a danger to himself than anyone else.”

“Babysitter,” I said monotonously, unable to really comprehend this. “You want me to babysit some mad Picasso?”

“Drop the mad part, Lena,” Ivan scolded, sounding more like our father than our father did. He came over to me, in an attempt to intimidate me with his six-foot-four height. “He’s extremely rich and his family would like a bodyguard with him at all times. Of course, there won’t be much action but you’d be his personal bodyguard with a small security detail outside. That’s a great way to start.”

“Here’s a file on him.” Dad held out a manila folder to me. Sighing heavily, I took it.

The file was thin, practically nonexistent. There wasn’t much information, save for the fact that he was Reed Lancaster, twenty-eight and his pricey works were shown in art galleries all over the world. He lived in a gated mansion in the North Bay area and enjoyed his privacy. His older brother, Nathan, and sister-in-law, Imogen, were his only remaining relatives and lived in the UK. There were no photographs of him.

“So, what? He hasn’t been threatened by a rival? Hasn’t got any crazy stalkers?” I shoved the folder back at my father. “I get that he’s rich and everything but I have no desire to sit on my ass and watch him play with colours. What I want is some action.”

“And that’s the kind of thinking that’ll get you killed, Lena,” Ivan muttered. He crossed his arms and the muscles bunched beneath his army-green T-shirt. I could still totally take him. “This isn’t a joke,” he continued. “Ask Dave about the shrapnel he still has in his leg.”

That sobered me. David had been assigned to some diplomat who’d been in Kenya during the shopping mall bombing and had almost died trying to protect the man. Not everyone had had an intuitive guardian angel like my big brother in the background. He still had nightmares about the bodies he’d seen there.

“I get it,” I said softly, realising how stupid I was being. Just the fact that they were considering sending me out on duty should have been enough. After all the training I’d completed over the years, this was long overdue. “So...do I have to Google a picture?”

Dad shook his head. “There won’t be any. Nathan Lancaster explained that his brother doesn’t allow pictures.” He rounded his desk and pulled a drawer open, retrieving something and handing it to me. “This is a picture of Nathan. Reed looks like him, only younger, of course. Nathan recommended it as a reference.”

Nathan had an arm wrapped around a blonde I assumed was his wife. He was blonde himself, his hair curling around his face in tight ringlets. Big green eyes stared at the camera and coupled with a lady-killer grin, he looked like he didn’t have a care in the world.

“You can stop drooling over him now. He’s a married man.” Ivan’s sarcastic voice made my brow furrow.

“I wasn’t,” I candidly informed him. “He isn’t even my type. Now his wife on the other hand…”

Ivan and Dad both choked on something imaginary, a blush creeping up their necks and staining their faces. Satisfied, I flashed them a teasing grin. It was my prerogative to remind them of my lesbian phase in my last few years of high school. They were both so comically conservative, it was way too easy to get under their skin. Mom and the twins were more like me – free-spirited and fun-loving. If I hadn’t bought my own condo just last year and moved out of the family home, I had no doubt that my father and brother would’ve attempted to strong-arm me into becoming a nun.

“Nathan requested you.” Ivan.

I scowled at him. “You don’t have to lie to me.”

He held his hands up in surrender. “I’m serious, Lena,” he claimed. “Because of Reed’s...delicate condition, his brother felt that a female bodyguard would be more...understanding. When he heard that you’re the only woman on the team, it was a no-brainer.”

“What delicate condition?” Suspicion laced my voice.

This time, my father spoke up. “Lancaster was in an accident that left him blind when he was a kid. He only regained his sight a year and a half ago, so –”

“So, as Nathan said, he will be difficult,” Ivan cut in. “He doesn’t enjoy interacting with new people. Does things his own way. You will have to deal with a client who doesn’t want you around and will deliberately make you sweat.”

Okay,” I said slowly, a little apprehensive about being “understanding” to this formerly blind artist. How sexist was Nathan? Did he think men were buffoons and women natural coddlers?

“So are you interested in this job, angel moy?” This came from Dad.

“Fine. Yes. I’ll take it.” A monkey could do it, but what the hell. This was my chance to prove myself to them, to anyone who continued to doubt that I hadn't shrugged off my rebel status to become somewhat responsible.

My father breathed an audible sigh of relief. “Good. Let’s go through the brief again.”

And that was how I ended up in a ridiculously well-barricaded estate in the North Bay. The house was too big for one person and Jake and Shepherd, the only other security needed, took close to an hour to patrol the perimeter.

I hated to admit it, but I would’ve rather walked the grounds than stay in the house with Reed Lancaster, who wasn’t anything like I’d expected. Reed never left his hideaway of a bedroom but I was pretty sure he was doing anything but paint. Women came in and out of the gates – skanky ones, stuffy ones, slimy ones, sultry ones – like trains at a station. I was beginning to think my job description mainly included escorting the well-fúcked women to the front door.

The rare times that he did leave were to go shopping. I’d have to suffer through hours – hours – in Santa Rosa menswear stores, resisting the urge to curse his narcissism aloud.

After I’d established that he didn’t hang his own paintings in his house, I had gone online to look at some. I was beyond impressed.

Most of his pieces were dark, angry abstracts or simple, wild splashes of colour but at the core of them all, Lancaster’s obvious passion was visible. The fact that he hadn’t been able to see when he’d done these paintings... Well, it made me want to like him. I wanted to like him, I really did. It was just so difficult to believe he was shallower than the works he created.

It took two weeks – two fúcking weeks – for me to realise that the man I’d been babysitting – the man I’d been taking crap from – was not even Reed Lancaster, the art world’s wunderkind.

Typical Lena Anosova – the big fúck-up of the family.