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Chapter 1 - Roman
Staring at the ceiling of my new apartment, I listened to the dark-haired woman gently snoring next to me, while remaining lazily trapped under her arm. I gave it a few seconds to try to remember her name but decided she probably wouldn’t remember mine either, once she woke up.
Miami Beach nightlife was insane, and meeting her at the third or fourth club I dropped in on last night was as much a blur as the places. Normally, I stuck to the same old haunts back home in Los Angeles, where people knew me and knew what to expect. Being in a new town—almost with a whole new identity and lease on life was exhilarating, and I was making the most of it.
Growing antsy and wanting to start the day, I finally gently extricated myself from her smooth, slender arm. Not even the glimpse of softly rounded flesh as the sheet slipped away could get me too interested in another round. I had much more important things to attend to, and there’d be someone just as eager to take her place tonight if that’s what I wanted. The lovely woman murmured and rolled over, and I decided to let her sleep a bit longer since I still had to prepare for my meeting.
Out in the vast, open-plan living area, I was distracted by the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, similar to the ones in my Hollywood Hills mansion, but with a completely different view. The view continued to take my breath away, even after being here for almost a month. After turning the coffee machine on to get the jolt of caffeine I needed to shake off last night, I stepped out onto my balcony and breathed in the salty, still-cool morning air.
A couple of joggers ran past on the strand far below my highrise, and a few people were already down at the waterline, heads down, very seriously searching for whatever treasure might have washed up on the shore. Other than that, it was nothing but miles and miles of crystal blue water and white sand. Despite not yet being ninety degrees, the sultry humidity clung to my skin, making me shrug off my bathrobe.
I shouldn’t have been so impressed by the scene since I lived about half an hour from an even bigger ocean. But the dark, angry Pacific just didn’t compare somehow, and since my twin brother and I were always working at our finance firm, we rarely got even a glimpse of the beach, let alone a long, lazy day at one. The spectacular view made me consider convincing Sergei to open up a permanent office here, but right now, he was barely speaking to me. He was flat-out refusing to have anything to do with Miami and the reason I was here.
That reason, and my steely determination to carry it out, no matter what my more level-headed brother had to say about it, dragged me off the balcony and back into the apartment.
“Half an hour,” I shouted toward the bedroom, listening for any kind of acquiescence from my overnight date. “Then I’ve got to go.”
A gravelly purr answered back. “I could wait for you to get back…”
I poured two mugs of coffee, and headed back in to find her wrapped up in my expensive Egyptian cotton sheets, looking aimlessly around for her clothes. I handed her one of the cups and hooked her skimpy club dress up with my finger, and tossed it onto the bed.
“Sorry, babe. Got way too much to do today.”
She merely shrugged, sipped the hot brew, and wriggled into her dress, keeping her eyes locked on me to see if I was enjoying the view. Sure, I was, but I was totally focused on the task ahead of me, the job I’d been working for the last month. The one thing I wasn’t going to be distracted from, no matter how inviting her tits looked as she smoothed the tight black fabric down over them.
By the time I was out of the shower, she was gone, and I breathed a sigh of relief as I got dressed for my meeting with Feliks Dryga. This was the sixth meeting with the dangerous crime boss since I relocated to Miami and the sole reason I was there. Well, he was the means to an end, really. The reason I was here was much deeper. And important enough to risk my relationship with my brother, who thought I was insane for delving into this world.
We both knew about the world of organized crime, having grown up in Los Angeles with a scrappy single mother who had to fight tooth and nail to give us every opportunity to become as successful as we were. While Sergei kept his nose squeaky clean, I wasn’t as averse to building alliances with the mafia factions in our city. Still, I never thought I’d get as close to the Bratva—the Russian brotherhood rife in Miami—as I was now.
Not just benefiting from favors, but getting down and dirty with legit criminals. It wasn’t because of Dryga’s money, of which he had a staggering amount. I had plenty of my own, thanks to our years of hard work and our mother’s sacrifices. Dealing with Dryga was personal and I was doing this for both Sergei and myself. I was convinced he'd come around even if Sergei didn’t get it yet.
I still had some time before the meeting, so I poured a second cup of coffee and settled onto the balcony lounge chair, letting the rapidly warming air ruffle my hair while I stared at the ocean to get my thoughts in order and my rising emotions in check.
A little more than a month ago, Sergei started going through our mother’s personal belongings. A year and a half had passed since her death, much too soon to lose her for either of us. The house we’d bought for her ten years earlier when our business really took off was already dealt with, but there was a storage shed on his property full of old pictures, journals from her youth, and sentimental things that weren’t worth anything, but priceless at the same time. He’d called me out of a meeting, something that we never did. Never. I seriously thought he was on his way to the hospital.
“You need to get over here.”
“Where are you heading?” I asked, still thinking he was in an ambulance.
He was at home, demanding I drop everything and get to his house immediately. The tone of his voice, going from strong and assured to barely being able to scrape out the words, got me going in a hurry. I found him out in the middle of his highly cultivated jungle of a backyard, sitting in the open doorway of the shed, surrounded by open boxes and clutching a folder full of old papers and photos.
“What the fuck are you calling me out of a seven hundred thousand dollar pitch meeting?” I demanded, pissed and relieved at the same time. “I thought you were having a heart attack at age thirty-six.”
He shook his head, holding out the folder. “I found our father,” he said. “I know who he is.”
This stunned me enough to sink onto the carefully tended grass beside him, letting him shove the folder into my hands. All during our childhood, I had regularly asked our mother where our dad was. Who he was. Just a name. Normally loving, warm, and gregarious, this would shut her right down. She would demand to know if she wasn’t enough for us, her clear blue eyes filling with tears. Of course, she was, and eventually, once I hit my teens, I stopped asking.
But I never stopped caring, or wondering who the man who left us alone before we were even born was. As for Sergei, he’d purported to not give a shit, but the look on his face at that time told me it had all been a lie. Or maybe it was just shock at finding out who he was.
“Oleg Morozov?” I asked, rifling through the papers.
An old photograph showed a tall man who looked shockingly like Sergei and me. Dark wavy hair that fell in unkempt, wild tangles down to his collar like Sergei still did. Same strong jaw and mid-day scruff we both had. Peering closer, it looked like he had brown eyes, whereas ours were blue like our mom’s. The back of the picture hadMoscow—first datescrawled across it in our mother’s feathery handwriting.
“He’s still in Russia,” Sergei said.
“How do you know?”
He tapped the restaurant behind them in the picture. “That place is still around. He owns it. He owns a lot of places in Moscow, apparently.”
