Red Alpha: A BWWM Russian Alpha Billionaire Romance (2 page)

Not that Darrell and Tiffany Freedman hadn’t tried to interest their daughters in normal playthings. They provided them with everything from finger paints to toy kitchens in the hopes that Alessia and Cadence’s odd preoccupation with the
real
world would fade away.

But it never did.

Both of the girls had joined their school’s international and debate clubs as soon as they were old enough, and were always clamoring after the latest news stories. After a while, their parents gave up trying to force them to be children and merely let them have their way. Of course, they weren’t allowed to talk about religious conflicts and refugees at the dinner table, but it was a small sacrifice for the girls to make, really.

They subscribed to every world news site that they could, listened to talk-shows instead of music, and swore to one another that they would always try to make the world a better place. Alessia, in particular, had always been interested in Russia.

One of the largest countries in the world, with one of the most convoluted political systems. An ally to the US, but holding to policies in direct opposition to its ally’s interests. Alessia wanted nothing more than to go there. To live on the ground and watch the operations of a former communist country from the inside.

Of course, their parents had been skeptical, to say the least. A black girl, in Russia? She would stick out like a sore thumb. Where would she learn the language? How was she going to stay warm? While Darrell and Tiffany had always encouraged their daughters that they could do anything they set their minds to, Alessia and Cadence quickly found that their options were limited to things a little closer to home.

Yes, their mother and father wanted them to succeed – but they wanted them to do so within the reach of their parents– where there was little danger and more opportunity.

While Cadence had actually been willing to assuage their parents’ desires, Alessia was having none of it. She had been determined to escape from beneath their parents’ thumbs and explore the world she heard so much about every day. How, she demanded of her younger sister, were they supposed to change the world if they never got to see it?

That had always been Alessia – headstrong. Willing to fight for what she believed in.

Cadence watched her sister graduate high school three years before her. Spoke to her every weekend on the phone after she moved away to attend classes at Penn State – her dream school. Alessia majored in International Affairs, much to their parents’ dismay, and signed up to study abroad at the first opportunity. Darrell and Tiffany tried to prevent their daughter from going by refusing to fund her trip, but Alessia had just worked two jobs – and gone to school - until she raised the money herself.

She went directly to Moscow – do not pass go and do not collect one hundred dollars. Of course, it had cost far more than one hundred dollars to get Alessia to Moscow, but she never regretted the hours she spent working. She posted hundreds of pictures online, played tourist at every site she could, and called Cadence every night to insist that she was going to end up in Russia, somehow.

Even then, her conviction had been completely steadfast. While Alessia had been in Russia, she had first done the tourist thing – visiting every major attraction the city had to offer. From the Kremlin to the cathedral in Moscow, she left
literally
no stone unturned. In the year that she was in Russia, it became a part of her. She learned the language so well that she literally shocked her professors, and learned the city almost as well as the majority of her Russian friends. And so, of course, when the time had come for Alessia to return, she was reluctant.

Cadence tried to understand. Though she and her sister had always been close, she knew that being in Russia was what her elder sibling wanted – and so she worked with Alessia to try to find a program, a job-
anything
that would ensure that she stayed in Russia.

Their parents hadn’t been so thrilled.

They demanded that Alessia come home – and back to the life they planned for her.

Thinking back, Cadence realized that their mother and father hadn’t really meant to alienate their eldest daughter. They had only wanted what was best for her – and in their minds, what was best for her involved keeping her close. Alessia responded to their unyielding attitude by cutting off all communication with their parents – necessitating that Cadence serve as their go-between.

It was a hard few years. Cadence herself was trying to get her undergraduate degree in criminal justice and doing so while trying to maintain relations with her parents and her sister was hard on her. There were times where she resented her family – times when she
begged
them to make amends, but it never made any difference. Convinced that they’d lost their daughter, Tiffany and Darrell started pretending that she didn’t exist.

Which made things all the harder when she died.

While their mother and father tried to reconcile how they felt about Alessia’s choice, Cadence’s sister had gotten the biggest break of their lifetimes. While she was finishing school in St. Petersburg, she was recruited by a lower branch of the US Central Intelligence Agency, who were impressed by her Russian skills and her drive.

She accepted without hesitation – and Cadence couldn’t remember her sister being prouder. She started training and her graduate degree at the same time – her eventual position at the CIA dependent on her finishing the latter. Of course, this meant that she had to come home for a while – and while Cadence encouraged their parents to forgive and forget while her elder sister was Stateside, they were stubborn.

They had always been stubborn.

Even so, during those months, Alessia’s happiness was so infectious that Cadence could often forget the tension brewing amongst members of their family. Her sister talked so much about how fulfilled she felt working in Russia – knowing that her efforts were going to make a difference in the way the world worked. It was during this period that Cadence began to think that she might like to try for the CIA as well – if they would accept her. At the time, she hadn’t been nearly as skilled as her sister – though they had both always been near obsessed with the plight of the world.

Spurred by her desire to be formally accepted into the organization, Alessia made her commitment to the CIA by finishing her graduate degree a year early. Though Cadence got to spend the year Alessia had been stateside cherishing every moment she had with her sister, her graduation marked her embarking to Russia for the last time.

Though their parents stolidly refused to say goodbye, Cadence threw herself into her own studies in an attempt to get her mind off Alessia’s absence – and after two years of barely hearing from her sister, she had almost succeeded. She was on the cusp of getting her own graduate degree, had a long-term boyfriend and was anxiously looking to start her own career…

When they had received the news.

Of course, since Cadence had nothing to do with the intelligence agency at that time, she hadn’t known the exact nature of her sister’s death. She’d only known that Alessia had been gunned down in cold blood while on assignment in Kiev.

In the country she had so loved.

And, of course, all of a sudden: their parents wished they’d cared. Wished that it hadn’t been too late. They decried the choices Alessia made in life, warning Cadence that nothing good could come of choosing to travel so far away and abandon one’s roots. A black girl in Russia, they reasoned, could never have gone well in the first place.

The weeks after Alessia was killed were the only in Cadence’s life where she truly recalled hating her parents. Up until that point, she had tolerated the way they felt about her sister, hoping that they would eventually come around. But after that, she had realized that there was nothing that would ever be able to displace their stubbornness.

And so, she had distanced herself from them.

It hadn’t been hard – especially once they found out her intentions to follow in Alessia’s footsteps. Her mother and father had shouted, kicked and screamed. They had threatened and cajoled – and yet nothing changed Cadence’s mind.

And nothing was going to.

She would figure out what had so enthralled her sister about Russia – and in doing so, she would discover her killer.

Mind you, Cadence wasn’t stupid – she hadn’t lied to the woman who would potentially be the director of her program. This wasn’t about revenge. She didn’t plan a secret vendetta of hunting down her sister’s murderer.

No…Cadence just wanted to know what Alessia had loved so much she deemed it worth dying for.

And she swore she wouldn’t rest until she figured it out.

Leaning back against her beat up leather couch, Cadence clutched her pint of ice cream to her chest, her eyes locked on a framed photo in the center of her coffee table.

The image captured a single moment in time – the day of Alessia’s commencement ceremony for grad school. Neither of their parents had come up to Penn State. They were too busy trying to show their daughter the error of her ways. So, instead, Cadence lent her sister enough support for their entire family.

She’d worn her favorite yellow dress that day – the same one she had ripped apart in a frenzy when they told her Alessia was gone. But at the moment the picture had been taken, that devastating news was far in the future. They were together and happy – Alessia all but glowing with pleasure.

She’d always been the pretty one – older, smarter, and faster. For the majority of her life, Alessia would have given anything to be just like her. Alessia was close to six feet tall – slender and athletic. She was blessed with hair that seemed almost naturally straight and dropped almost to her waist – not that she had ever appreciated it. She’d been too busy trying to tie it up and hide it while she got her hands dirty. She was at the top of every class, spoke perfect Russian by the time she was twenty one…but in many aspects, they were very similar.

They had the same slanted, hazel colored eyes – inherited from their mother. Where Alessia’s hair had been straight, Cadence’s was rampantly curly – an uncontrollable mass that she struggled with every day. They had the same love for school, learning, and world affairs – even though Cadence’s primary interest had been in South America up until her sister’s death. They both loved white chocolate, old kung fu movies, and long days at the beach.

But Alessia had been gone a long time. What was it now, five years? Six?

It was strange…sometimes she still expected to hear Alessia’s voice when she picked up the phone. Her elder sister would have been thirty three on her next birthday…and Cadence knew she would have teased her relentlessly for reaching her own thirtieth year.

But instead, hopefully she’d be celebrating in Russia.

Providing that she won this assignment.

Popping a last spoonful of pistachio and almond into her mouth, the young woman rose from the couch to make her way to the bathroom. For the past few weeks, she had to make due with all but falling into the shower for a few minutes every night when she got home in the wee small hours of the morning. Though Myles was rooting for her, that didn’t mean that he was making her job any easier.

And he wasn’t giving her up without a fight.

The thought made her smirk as she stared at her reflection in the mirror.

Yes, she and Alessia were very alike. But she wouldn’t be going to Russia because she loved it. She would be going there because she needed to understand.

She couldn’t be at peace until she did.

Things didn’t come as easily to her as they had to her elder sister. She had to train harder to work her curvier form into a semblance of athleticism, Russian had taken her years to master…but none of that mattered now.

Not when so precious few obstacles remained between her and her goals.

He was exhausted. That seemed to be the constant state of things recently. Between reining in Elisaveta when she went on a rampage and tending to his own affairs, Demyan never really seemed to get a moment to himself.

He supposed he should cherish these fifteen minutes alone in his car on the way downtown to pay Minister Danshov a visit.

The very prospect was enough to make the dark-haired man’s full mouth pull downward in a frown. Having an audience with Osip was always like pulling teeth: painful and not always necessary.

But the man liked to flaunt the control he had over his pawns – over the entire country, really. Of course, no one believed he had been elected democratically since the last election he won – his sixth. What mattered, however, was the illusion of democracy – and the people still believed in that well enough.

Or, at least, they were smart enough to pretend to. And that was all that mattered.

The streets of Moscow were crowded, as always, and it was smack dab in the middle of rush hour. Osip would never have stood for such a thing. He would have called up the police to give him an escort to where he needed to go – even if it was only to McDonald’s. Demyan, despite having the resources to do the same himself, was nowhere near as enamored of his own power. He liked to do things himself…made him feel more human and less like a pion.

Less like his sister.

As if thinking of her had summoned her, his phone suddenly buzzed on the empty passenger seat beside him. Demyan glanced at it, unsurprised to see Veta’s number.

She loved to keep tabs on him.

Speaking into the car’s system, Demyan answered in Russian. “
Da, Veta?”

“Hello, little brother.” His sister delighted in reminding him that he was younger than her at every opportunity. Even though he was nearly forty. “I assume you’re on your way to see Osip?”

“As instructed.” He replied crisply, making a left as he headed toward the Kremlin. “I should be there in about ten minutes. I’m stuck in traffic.”

“Of course. I’ll meet you there. And I’m bringing a friend, Demyan.” The conversation ended abruptly, and Demyan’s mouth pulled into an even tighter line as he swallowed a groan. Another of Veta’s
friends
.