AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"You need to go after him and apologize," Adva told me. I rolled my eyes.
"You think that’s going to be a good look?" I asked him. "I kick him out, and then I go back to him and grovel?”
"It’s better than letting him walk out of here and think that the Antonovs have a problem with him," he growled. "Now. Go. Before he leaves."
"No."
I refused, crossing my arms over my chest, and practically daring Adva to fight me on this. He glowered at me, those gray-blue eyes burning into mine. I didn’t shift my gaze for a moment. I knew he was pissed at me, but it didn’t bother me. I’d dealt with scarier guys than him over the years, and I had to prove myself to the Antonovs, who had hired me because they knew I could handle my shit. What would it have said to them if I’d gone running down the street to plead on my knees for forgiveness to the kind of asshole who was likely just going to cause trouble here anyway?
"You’re going to get us into some serious shit for this," Avda snarled at me. I shrugged.
"If that happens, you can tell them it was all my idea," I promised him. "Send them my way. I’ll deal with it."
"That’s not how this works-"
"Then I’m going to make it work that way," I replied, widening my grin as I stared at him. His eyes flicked down to my mouth for a moment, and I could tell he was just getting more and more pissed at the way this conversation was going. He thought he was the big man around here, and now, here I was, making his life a whole lot harder than he wanted it to be.
"You’re going to be trouble," he told me. For a moment, I thought I saw a flicker of amusement on his face – like, maybe, there was some part of him that liked the idea of trouble.
"I’m just doing my job," I shot back. "And if you don’t mind, I’m going to get back to it."
I pushed past him, my shoulder clashing with his for a moment as I made my way back to the dance floor to make certain there were no problems in this place. Now that Oliver was gone, it seemed as though everyone was starting to relax a little, unwind after the tension of how he had been conducting himself. The girls he had been hitting on were dancing again, laughing together, and I even noticed one of them shooting a flirty look in my direction.
Yeah, not going to happen. I was working tonight, and I hadn’t been here long enough to get caught slacking off on anything. Especially with Avda looking over my shoulder the way he was. Look, I got it, he took his job seriously, but did he have to act as though I was some problem waiting to happen/ The Antonovs had hired me because they understood that I knew what I was doing, and they weren’t going to let anyone in on their operation unless they had stone-cold proof that they were good at their jobs.
And me? I’d been out here making a reputation for myself since I was a teenager, and I’d started working for Bratva families to pull in a little extra money to support my mother and sister. Of course, they didn’t have a clue what I was really doing out here, and I was fine with that - as far as they knew, I just had some high-paying bodyguard work, and I was able to send money back to keep them housed and fed while my sister focused on looking after our mom, since she’d had her fall and had to take some time away from work.
When they had found out what I’d been doing though, they had cut me off. Told me they didn’t want anything more to do with me. And, being young as I was, I had let them cut me off, let them push me out, too proud to give up this career I had worked so hard for. I wasn’t going to let them shame me out of it, not a chance in hell.
And the hours I worked were hardly hospitable. I didn’t want them to know the true details of everything I got up to, and I figured it would likely just put them in the firing line for anyone who wanted to cause me trouble if people found out I had a family.
I glanced around and saw Avda making his way over to the bar, head down. I could tell he was still pissed from our encounter earlier, and I couldn’t help but smirk to myself. Childish? Probably. But I had never been good at listening to the people in charge, and if he thought I was going to do exactly as he said just because he had been here longer than I had, he had another thing coming.
Stretching my arms above my head, I made my way to the back room to grab a coffee and give myself the hit of caffeine I needed to get through the rest of the night. It had already been a busy one - and I got the feeling it was far from over yet.
Chapter Three – Avda
That asshole, that fucking asshole.
I didn’t know what the hell his problem was, this new guy, Sasha, but it felt like he had been nipping at my heels since I had arrived back at the Flood a couple of weeks ago. I had dealt with plenty of guys like him over the years, guys who came in here acting like they were the ones calling the shots – he would grow out of it soon enough, but his attitude was getting under my skin, and I didn’t like it one little bit. Didn’t like how easy it seemed to be for him to piss me off. I should have been able to brush him off, but there was something about that cocky grin of his that made it impossible for me to walk away when I knew I should have.
I needed a drink. Several, preferably. Ever since I had come back from my work at the compound across the city, I had been feeling out of sorts – like something was off here. I knew it was just me overthinking, and all I really needed to do was relax and get myself back in action, it was hard not to feel like I had been pushed out in the time I’d spent away.
I slipped on to a bar stool, and lifted my head, expecting to be met with a grin from Freddie, the bartender – but, instead, the person I saw standing opposite me made me freeze to the spot.
I recognized her at once. Those green eyes, they took me back to a night – a night I couldn’t quite place at first, but the longer I looked at her, the clearer it became.
A night at a club. I could remember...I could remember her eyes blazing into mine, her hand on my arm, pulling me in close. The look on her face when she came, the way her cheeks flushed as she went over the edge.
Running in to someone I’d hooked up with wasn’t exactly an unusual experience for me. When you’d been with as many people as I had, it would have been crazy to expect to get away without bumping into at least a few of them. But this? This was a little different. This was a girl behind the bar, a girl who was working here, a girl who I could remember, all too vividly, coming on my cock.
Okay, this could be fun. And could be exactly what I needed to get my mind off Sasha’s bullshit.
She was standing there, unmoving, as she stared at me, like a bunny caught in the headlights – clearly trying to parse whether or not I remembered her, and, if I did, just what I thought about her presence here.
"Well, hey," I greeted her, tipping my head to the side, letting my eyes trace up and down her body. Oh, yeah, I remembered her. She was short, but curvy, with the most gorgeous legs I’d ever seen. I could remember the way they felt when they were wrapped around me, the way she had arched her back against me like she couldn’t get enough.
"Hi," she blurted out. Her cheeks were burning red, and I could tell she had no idea how to deal with this. I didn’t blame her. I doubted this had been covered in the employee handbook.
