AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yes.”
“And I’m the last resort.”
I could feel the walls closing in. I was the only one of us who was still single. I wanted to keep it that way. It had been a long time since I’d had a satisfactory date. I certainly wasn’t looking to walk down the aisle with any of the women I currently knew. Marriage was a long way off as far as I was concerned. But Ivan had other ideas.
“Yes,” Ivan repeated. At least he was honest. “He’ll bring more of his people with him, station half up in Boston to take care of the Rossi threat once and for all, and I’ll find some small holdings here for him.”
“You trust him?”
Another laugh, this one even more humorless. “I trust no one but us, Yuri. The Rossis think they have the upper hand so they’ll go even harder now. We’ll lose what we have in Boston—not just the money, but more blood will be shed. Then they’ll come down here.”
My veins felt like they were awash with ice water. Miami was my home. I worked my ass off for everything I had here. Every ounce of my energy went to keeping us safe, at least legally. What was happening in Boston was a shame, but I had to admit I didn’t care about the extra millions Aleksei’s wife Theresa’s art forgery business was bringing in. But I cared about what happened here. I didn’t want or need another war on home soil.
Ivan could read me like a book, and he knew I was about to cave. As if I ever had a chance to resist. My home was also my family, after all, the most important part, even when they annoyed the shit out of me, took me for granted, and constantly showed up in my office without an appointment. Of course I was going to cave.
“How much time do I have left?” I asked morosely, making him laugh with real pleasure this time.
I couldn’t help myself. I reached over and punched him. Not hard, just enough to get my frustration out. Or some of it. I still had plenty left, and had to fight the panic from the feeling of my freedom slowly slipping away.
“Not long. We’ll meet with them tonight.”
“Tonight?” I shouted, quickly lowering my voice. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Relax, the wedding won’t be for a week or so. We’re going to have to hustle so we can put on a big show for all your fancy society friends. We want everyone there. The chief of police, the mayor, everyone from the building councils. This needs to be set in stone so Orlov doesn’t get any bright ideas about weaseling out on us when we hand over power.”
I quietly uttered every swear word I knew, and all the Russian ones I could remember, then put my head in my hands. A week. One last week. Even men who were sentenced to death row could still have years ahead of them to put everything in order.
“You’re not dying, Yuri,” Ivan said, reading my thoughts.
“Fuck you,” I told him weakly, all my rancor gone and replaced with hopelessness. Did I even have enough time to plan a last fling? Who would I choose?
My thoughts raced back, two years in the past to the last real relationship I had. Ever since then, it was casual dating and one nighters. It was hard to tell fortune hunters from women who might really be interested in me, so I kept everyone at a distance. But this one had been different. A forbidden romance since she had come to work for my company as an intern, and I never, ever dated employees. Not to mention she was a lot younger than me—ten years to be exact. God, she’d been so beautiful, it was hard to stay appropriate around her in the office.
Whip smart and eager to learn everything, she kept asking me questions whenever we crossed paths. Fresh off the boat from Russia, I took her under my wing, helping her improve her already excellent English and letting her tease me in Russian, which I barely remembered. She helped me out one day when my assistant was sick, and I rewarded her with a nice lunch. And she was so funny, just genuinely pleasant to be around. I kept giving her more duties that would keep her close to me. More lunches under the guise of meetings. We started texting each other in our off time, hours of conversations that lasted late into the night so then we’d tease each other about looking tired when we saw each other again in the mornings.
I think I was already a little bit in love with her when, after two months of that, I finally bit the bullet and asked her out. Not under the guise of lunch where we always talked about work at least part of the time. A real date with dinner, dancing, the whole nine yards. We kissed for the first time under the stars with the sound of the ocean as a backdrop, and it was a whirlwind romance from there. If only she hadn’t been my employee and God damned eighteen years old.
I took things as slow as I could, but she eventually offered me everything and I panicked. I was even less ready to settle down then than I was now, nor did I want to expose her to my family if we took that next step. As far as she knew, I was the respectable head of a tax law firm, not deeply mired in Miami’s most infamous crime family. Sure, she knew the last names were the same, but she never asked me, and I never brought it up. I was sure she didn’t really want to know the truth, which only led me to believe she wasn’t ready either.
I refused to let her give her virginity to me when I couldn’t offer her forever. It broke my heart to let her go, but I’d hoped we could stay friends. Maybe a bit more time, and I would have thrown in the towel for love and happiness and responsibility and all that. But she quit her job and disappeared off the face of the earth.
With my contacts, I could have easily found her, but I’d been the one to let her go, so I had to respect the fact she wanted nothing more to do with me.
At that moment, as I stared down at my uneaten sandwich, my beer growing warm and soaking its coaster with condensation, I felt a punch of regret that nearly knocked me off the restaurant bench. The only woman I really wanted to spend my last days of freedom with was long gone. It looked like I was going to have to spend the next week in misery, alone.
I looked up to see Ivan tapping on his phone. He stopped reading his messages and frowned at me. “They can meet us now if you want to just get it over with.”
Surprisingly, I did want to get it over with. It would be better to know what I was in for than to build up the horror in my mind. Let the countdown begin.
Chapter 2 - Kira
I looked around at my apartment, with its tiny, lone window looking out over a sorry patch of grass that was often littered with broken bottles instead of flowers. The synthetic lace curtains I splurged on fluttered in the breeze of the single air conditioning vent that could barely keep up with the Miami heat. Not that I minded much. I loved the heat, couldn't stand the cold. It was the main reason I chose this place two years ago when I ran from my old home.
My laptop sat closed on the cracked formica kitchen table, and my notebook and pen rested neatly next to it. I had exactly three plates and two glasses, still more than I needed, and one of the glasses was drying in the dish rack that I got at the thrift store and scrubbed until it didn’t look so shabby. I turned around in the small space, running my hand over the rough tweed edge of the couch that pulled out into my bed every night. Every morning I stuff it all away so it didn’t seem so cramped while I went about making my breakfast, then worked at that scuffed table until lunch, when I pushed aside the coffee table, also a thrift store find, and did a workout. Back to work until dinner, when I sat on the couch and watched some TV until bedtime. It was a simple, sometimes lonely life, but one I chose and created for myself. Some might have considered it pathetic but they didn’t know what I came from, what I’d run from.
Despite the glorious weather and the fact I was only one twenty-minute bus ride from one of the world’s most beautiful beaches—at least I thought so, having only seen the one—I rarely left this tiny apartment. It cost a bit more, but I had my groceries delivered. The superintendent brought what little mail I got and left it outside my door, having long ago realized it would stuff up the box if he didn’t. I was lucky that so many jobs were available online, and that I had experience—at least making amazingly believable resumés—in so many things, that I was able to find work that I could do at home. I didn’t love translating boring Russian documents all day long, but it paid the bills, and I was finally able to save up enough to pay for one of the online college classes I’d been dreaming about since I set foot in America.
Nothing went to plan when I got here, but I made it work after my first mistake of trying to blend in and be normal. I wasn’t normal, and my foolish desire to make friends and have a job outside, walk in the blazing sunshine and swim in the clear blue ocean nearly got me caught. It was safer inside. Even though my place was tiny and the furnishings were all someone else’s castoffs, this was all mine. None of it was given to me by someone who only wanted something in return, and none of it was accompanied with harsh words and hard slaps.
