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“I don’t pout,” Alexie corrected, his brows furrowed in concentration.
Was this even fair? English wasn’t his first language. I would challenge any words that weren’t in English as well.
Alexie spelledcanceron the board.
I grinned and immediately put the wordcaptordown.
He frowned at the board as he added up the points. He then laid out the wordpunish.
I let out a snort and spelled the wordprisonerusing his I.
Alexie glared at the game board between us.
I couldn’t hold back my giggle. “You’re right, this is fun,” I cackled.
“Keep it up and your ass will be redder than this tablecloth,” Alexie warned.
I shrugged it off and waited for him to take his turn. He spelled the wordnaughtyusing thenfrom theprisoner. I immediately retaliated with the wordrudeas he gathered more tiles. Alexie laid down the worddemonusing thed.
I gathered my tiles and thought about what I was going to put down next. I finally decided on the wordmonster.
Alexie threw a tile in the center of the board, messing up everything we’d spelled so far.
“Hey,” I protested. I tried to rebuild the words we had, but I couldn’t remember all of them at this point. Alexie smirked at me.
“I guess I win,malishka,”he crowed.
“No, you don’t. You cheated! Besides, according to the point chart, you have less points than me. In what universe does that make this a win?”
“I never knew you were a sore loser,malishka.”
“Only with board games—and I didn’t lose. You cheated, and because you showed me how untrustworthy you are, I’ll never play another game with you ever again. Not even Monopoly.”
Grinning, Alexie asked, “What’s that?”
I gasped. “How could you not know about the best board game of all time?”
He shrugged. “It can’t be the best because I don’t know about it.”
I leaned forward and flicked his brow. “Just because you didn’t play it back in bum fuck Russia doesn’t make it any less of a classic. My dad and I played board games all the time.”
The memory of my father and me playing in the clubhouse made my chest ache.
Alexie pulled me out of my thoughts with a small touch of my hand. “You can tell me about your father. In fact, I want to know more about him and your mother.”
I blew out a sigh. “My mother died way too soon. I wasn’t old enough to understand how her loss would affect me.” I stopped a ball lodged in my throat.
“How did it affect you?”
I gazed up at him and saw that he wasn’t pitying me like so many other people did. His face was open and inviting. Like he just wanted to be my rock. It gave me strength to keep going.
“My dad sold our house almost immediately and moved us to the clubhouse. He had been in charge, just like his father was before him, but when he made my mom his old lady, he also moved us off the property. He said it wasn’t the right environment to raise a child. But after she died, it was like he couldn’t bear living in the home she’d built.”
A flash of understanding shot across Alexie’s face. Did he know what that was like? I didn’t ask. Maybe one day I would, but I wasn’t going to risk asking him more about his bloody past today. I could just tell that it was going to be gruesome, and my heart just wasn’t up for it.
I kept going. “The men were all rowdy and taught me things a child didn’t need to know.”
“Like what?” Anger laced his voice.
