Guarded Rebellion (The Baranov Legacy)

6. Eva

6

EVA

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I entered the café. Having my uncle’s men following me was nothing new. I’d grown up with the expectation that security would be ever-present in my life.

Having Lev behind me was something else altogether.

He just had to pick the broodiest, grumpiest smartass to be my bodyguard, didn’t he? As soon as classes were over today, I’d be calling Uncle Oleg and requesting that he swap Rurik for Lev.

“Eva?” a blonde asked as she approached me in the line. Her smile was soft but shy, and her brows spiked high with the inquisitive, unsure tone of her voice.

“Kelly?” I guessed, but without as much of the nervousness. I was nervous. To my surprise, I felt unprepared for this. I’d never struck up a conversation with someone not vetted and associated with the Mafia life. Preferring to be a homebody and always homeschooled with tutors, I was lacking the basic experience of socializing with ordinary people. But I’d never show my hesitation or fear. Never. My uncle had taught me well to always maintain a mask.

“Yeah! Hi!” Kelly warmed up instantly, shifting her smile into a full, bright beam. As she raised her hand to shake mine, the strap to her messenger bag slid down her arm. “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too. I’m sorry if I kept you waiting.”

“Oh, no.” She dismissed me with a wave. “No worries. Although, I’ve got to say this place is super close to the dorms. Kind of handy.”

I nodded, biting back the groan of annoyance. I wouldn’t suffer for coffee or treats at the place Lev arranged for me, but that wasn’t the issue. It was his highhandedness in making me give up the idea of living independently.

“Um.” Kelly’s brow furrowed as she shot a look behind me. “Hi.”

I swallowed a growl of frustration, glancing over my shoulder. Rurik smiled, amping up his charm, as he greeted Kelly.

“Hi.”

Volleying her gaze back and forth between me and Rurik, Kelly advanced in line. “Is, uh, he with you?”

I shook my head, trying not to look too pissed. Before I could finish the motion, though, Lev stepped closer and brushed against my back. I didn’t need to turn and see that it was the tall asshole. I smelled him. The faint hints of sandalwood and bergamot reached me, and I loathed how well I could identify him.

“Oh.” Kelly frowned, leaning around to study them both. “Hey. Maybe give a girl some space?” she said firmly, tugging my sleeve so I’d step forward.

Her instant support told me all I needed to know about her character. She would stand up for another woman. She wouldn’t back down from a perceived threat.

Lev slid his arm around my waist, tucking me closer to him instead of allowing me to advance with Kelly. Heat coursed through me, and I chided myself for the instant rush of awareness that came with his strong arm wrapping around me.

I cleared my throat, lowering my arm from Kelly’s fingers and sidestepping Lev’s arm. “They’re…” A deep sigh left me. How the hell was I supposed to explain this? I hadn’t rehearsed how to explain why I’d have a bodyguard with me. I wasn’t familiar with ever having to explain that I’d have a security team nearby. In my world, it was expected. Guaranteed. Now, though, I had no clue how to explain Lev’s presence.

“They’re with you?” Kelly guessed, clearly confused as we neared the counter to order drinks.

“More or less. As security.”

Her eyebrows spiked nearly to her hairline.

“I come from an influential family,” I said dully. “And as such, I have to have them near.”

“As guards?” Kelly once more looked over Rurik and Lev behind me. “Wow.”

I nodded, preparing myself for her judgment. Praying she wouldn’t ask for more details, particularly ones I couldn’t give her, I studied her curious gaze on them.

“They follow you everywhere?”

Another nod.

“Is that why you’re not living in the dorm with me?”

I shrugged, but ended the gesture with a nod. So much for fitting in as a normal person here.

“Huh.” Kelly lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “That has to be interesting.”

“Interesting?” I glanced at the two men behind me. “More like a pain in the ass.”

“I bet. I mean, you have no privacy, then, right?”

I delayed answering her as we both ordered our drinks and took a plastic stand to set on our table. Without looking at the men assigned to me, I searched for a table that wouldn’t have a neighboring one open for them to take and hawk over my shoulder.

“Privacy is a privilege I have yet to encounter,” I replied when I sat.

Lev glowered at me from four tables over. I was still within his sight, and that would be good enough.

“Me too,” Kelly admitted. “I didn’t come from the best family. Well, no family. I bounced around in foster care most of my life, so yeah, I get you on the no-privacy thing.”

Foster care? Maybe that’s the ‘questionable background’ Lev’s worried about. “Ah. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It is what it is. I’m just glad I aged out of the system and managed to get a grant to come here and study.” She shrugged, watching our black coffees be delivered to us.

That was fast.

We both sipped our hot beverages, and I hated the weird silence spanning between us. I had no clue how to follow up after her comment. In a strange way, I felt like I’d had to apply for a grant, too. A grant of permission from Uncle Oleg, but I couldn’t tell her that. Saying as little as possible about my family would be best. Besides, it was damned depressing to vocalize and admit how sheltered I was supposed to be. How little freedom I could rely on.

When we made awkward eye contact again, she huffed a laugh. “I didn’t realize we’d dive straight into the weird but deep background info like that right off the bat.”

I almost smiled. “I’m not used to meeting new people,” I replied. “And I’m not used to having to explain why I have a bodyguard with me either.”

“Well, hey. We’re already more similar than not.” She smiled as she lifted her cup. “I’m not used to making new friends.”

“Then we’ll bumble through it together.” I held my cup up higher, like a toast.

She raised her mug up as well. “I’ll drink to that.”

Relieved that I’d forged a path to making a friend, I relaxed in my seat and vowed not to let my bodyguard ruin this experience. So long as I could always make him hover along the perimeter of the room, I just might be able to have a sense of privacy.

For the next couple of weeks, I did. Rurik didn’t always stay close, but Lev did within reason. He wasn’t right at my back. During lectures, he sat toward the end of the row or a couple further behind me. When I walked on campus from one class to the next, with Kelly next to me, he remained a decent distance in my wake.

It wasn’t a suffocating presence that I had to endure, but I never forgot that he was there and “with” me.

“Don’t you get tired of them looking at him?” Kelly asked as we took seats at our class one Friday. Since she was also going into an English program, we shared so many courses. She peeked back at Lev, sitting rigid and scowling off to the side. As she settled into her chair, I winced at all the girls smiling at him. Several blatantly checked him out. Whether I wanted him to or not, he attracted a lot of attention.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” I told my new friend.

“It doesn’t?” She grinned at me, seeming to be in an exceptionally playful mood today. Every day that we spent getting to know each other better, either through studying or just hanging out, we grew more comfortable. Like real friends.

I frowned at her. “No. Why would it?”

“Oh, come on.” She rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me you can’t admit he’s hot.”

I couldn’t . I couldn’t tell Kelly that Lev was an ugly man. He was a god among men, rugged and so masculine. He was sexy, but that hardly mattered.

“He’s a sarcastic jerk, Kelly.”

“A bad boy, then,” she teased. “Even better.”

“Lev? A boy ?” I scoffed.

“You know what I mean.”

I did. I was all too aware that she had noticed how sexy he was. I’d witnessed how damn near every woman in our classes took notice of the brooding soldier lurking in the back. Even the likely married female professors seemed to blush when spotting him. He just had that pull on people. I wasn’t impervious to acknowledging how damned fine he was, but that didn’t mean that my opinions about him would change.

“He represents an arm of control in my life,” I whispered to her. “He’s a sign of how I’ll never actually be free to live the life I want. To just be .”

She nodded, sliding her books out of her bag. “I know.” She was clued in to how I lacked the power of deciding what to do with my free time. While she respected that I was held to expectations and limited to the whims of my damn bodyguard, she seemed to know better than to ask for details. “I remember how disappointed you were last night.”

“What, when I told him yesterday that we wanted to check out that pub for dinner? And he refused to let me go near it?” I glowered at the wall ahead, waiting for the prof to show up.

“Well…” She shrugged.

I gaped at her. “Oh, you’ll side with him ?”

“No. It’s just, well, that Rocky’s is kind of seedy. I’ve heard that it’s not a great place.”

“Rocky’s?” a man said as he suddenly slipped into the chair to my left in the lecture hall. “Rocky’s is the best! I love their happy hour.”

Kelly and I both turned to face Bryce as he made himself comfortable in the chair next to me.

“Of course, you’d say that,” Kelly quipped.

“Hi, Bryce,” I greeted belatedly.

“Hey, Eva. How’re you doing today?” he replied, heating up his smile as he leaned closer to me. We’d met the second day of courses, and it was obvious from the get-go that he was just one of those guys, goofy and charming, outgoing and full of some thrill only he seemed to see in life.

Just like I couldn’t lie and say Lev wasn’t hot, I lacked the ability to find a flaw in Bryce. He was good-looking. He had charisma. But…

He wasn’t anything like the men I knew. Soldiers and bosses were the sorts of men I’d become familiar with, and Bryce lacked that hardness Mafia men were born with.

Just past him, I caught sight of Lev seething as he watched me. To make matters worse, Bryce snuggled closer, putting his arm around my shoulders.

“Rocky’s is an excellent place to hang out,” he said, oblivious to the glowering Mafia soldier who stared at us.

Oh, you don’t like this? I smiled at Lev, getting a little kick out of his annoyance. The ass was so damn strict. Overprotective to a fault. He forced me to live in an apartment off campus instead of in the dorm with Kelly. He dictated where I could order food from. He prevented me from having any kind of a nightlife, even to damn study halls, because he lacked enough advance warning to have the places checked first.

Of course, he’d bristle at Bryce touching me at all. And of course, he’d look like he was two seconds away from making the guy back off.

Tough crap.

So long as I was a student here, I damn well would live. I’d do what I wanted. Bryce’s attention wasn’t a threat. It wasn’t like he was laying a claim on me or rendering me ruined for an arranged marriage.

It didn’t matter that I wasn’t interested. Not really. Bryce was too pretty. Too soft. He could act like a rebel and bad boy, but in that comparison, he was more boyish than cutthroat. The faint stubble on his jaw made him look sexy, but it didn’t make him look roguish and rugged like Lev’s beard did. The lean angles to his face made him attractive, but he lacked the hardness Lev showed with scars and evidence of the violent life he survived. Muscles pressed against my shoulders from Bryce’s arm, but they were smaller, found from going to the gym here and there, not a sign of pure masculine strength like what Lev got from kicking ass.

Stop. Stop comparing them.

“I can get you in when we play next.” Bryce’s fingers squeezed on my opposite shoulder, jarring me back into focus.

I blinked, zoned out from whatever he was saying.

“I don’t know,” Kelly whispered as the prof started speaking. “Going to Rocky’s to check out your band isn’t something we should be doing with a test coming up next week.”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Nerds,” Bryce teased lightly.

I shrugged, preferring that label to the others I’d suffered. Mafia princess. Frigid bitch. Nerd sounded nice. It sounded normal, even if I felt disillusioned to ever think I could be any shade of normal.

As soon as class was dismissed, Kelly hurried to her next one, which I wasn’t in. And sure enough, Lev was there.

“I didn’t give that punk permission to touch you,” he growled as he fell into step next to me on the walk to the parking lot.

I sighed, not making eye contact. “It was his arm on my shoulders. Nothing more.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter, that’s right.” And he moved it off me anyway.

“You don’t have the privilege to let any man here assume possession of you.”

“Look around, Lev,” I snapped. “This is a college campus. No one of importance is watching what I do.”

As soon as the words left my lips, though, Irina Petrov walked by with a few friends. I’d noticed her, the only other person here who moved in the same circles as I did when I was forced to be social for my uncle, but we had yet to cross paths and speak.

“Someone is always watching.”

“I don’t care.” I hoisted my bag’s strap higher on my shoulder. “I’ve got other things to worry about.”

He scoffed.

“I’ve got a test next week and I need to study for my chem lab.”

“Why bother?”

I clamped my lips shut and bottled in a scream.

“Why bother to study anything or be here?”

I hate you. He’d never understand. He’d never care to understand or respect that I could want independence from the life he’d always coveted. Lev had come into the Baranov organization as an orphan. He hadn’t been born into it like me.

“You’ll just be married off and bred soon enough,” he reminded me dryly.

“I’m aware,” I bit out.

“Then why try to escape fate? Why do you insist on wasting your uncle’s time and men to be here?”

The judgment in his tone irked me to no end. “Because,” I growled. That was all the answer he’d get out of me. Reaching the car door before he could, I wrenched the handle and yanked the door open.

Sliding into the car and slamming the door shut was the only means of venting my anger. As soon as he rounded the vehicle, he got in and glared at me in the mirror.

This is why they left. This is why Mother got Sonya out. Tears threatened behind my lids, but I breathed through the anger. I would not give Lev the satisfaction of witnessing me crying.

My mother and sister had escaped this very fate, to always be told what to do. To lack any real future to count on other than being forced to fuck a husband and spread my legs to produce an heir.

I hated them for leaving me behind. I hated my uncle for expecting me to stay in the family. I hated them all. But as I felt the burn of Lev’s glare on me through the reflection in the mirror, I decided to dish out my fury on him .

Slipping away from him wouldn’t be easy. He never let me out of his sight, always within reach.

But I would find a way. The deep satisfaction of seeing him seething at Bryce’s arm around my shoulders was an ember of a fire I wanted to bask in the heat of again.

I'd dreamed of going to college as an avenue of escape, but as I was driven off campus to the apartment I shared with my overlord, I realized I hadn’t begun to try at all.

Watch me. I glanced at the mirror, finding the broody asshole paying attention to the road. Judge me all you want and watch me, Lev. Watch me rebel against your overprotective ass while I try to live a little before my goddamn fate is the sentence I’ve never wanted.

If he could be so pissy about a guy putting his arm around me…

You haven’t seen anything yet.

A slow smile lifted my lips as I stared out the window and wondered how much further I could push to get another taste of what I wanted to call freedom.