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Just seeing Alek was a stark reminder of why she was here, and she hated that she could still smell Nickolay’s enticing scent. He was too close to her, too distracting. It made her feel flustered to realize just how caught up she got in flirting with him.
“Right,” Alek said. “I assume that Chloe has shown you around the house and explained which areas are off limits?”
Alice nodded.
“Good,” he continued, walking further into the kitchen, his steely gaze still on her. His expression was hard, and she couldn’t help thinking about how much she preferred Nickolay’s flirty smirk. “Aside from those areas of the house, you need to know that discretion is important if you’re going to work for me. That’s the reason that I thoroughly vet everyone that I hire, especially if they’ll be around my family.”
The underlying threat made her heart sink. This man was intimidating, just as she expected he would be. He was telling her that he’d run a background check on her, and she was glad that the identity the FBI created for her held up. Otherwise, she was sure that she wouldn’t be here.
“Oh good, you guys met,” Chloe said as she suddenly breezed back into the room.
Alek’s attention finally shifted away from Alice and onto Chloe. It was startling to see the warmth in his previously hard expression. It was as if she were the sun, melting away the ice that made him so cold and menacing.
Chloe picked up the coffee she left behind and took a sip before frowning. “Gross. It’s cold.”
“I’ll heat it up for you,” Alek said immediately, taking the cup from her. As their fingers touched, Chloe sent an adoring look his way.
Alice made a mental note about the nature of their relationship, but it made her feel dirty to think about how the closeness between the two of them could be exploited by the FBI down the road. For the first time, she realized that this undercover investigation that would require getting as close to these people as possible was going to be more difficult than she had imagined.
4
NICKOLAY
Nickolay watchedhis son carefully attach the components on the engine of the model car they were building, smiling at the way his son bit his bottom lip. He always did that when he was concentrating intensely on something, ever since he was a toddler.
“Tell me about your day, Kiddo,” he said once Max had put the part in place and sat back.
“It was good.”
Nickolay waited a moment for him to continue, but he was looking at the instructions instead. “And?”
“I played red light/green light at recess.”
Nickolay chuckled. Everytime he asked Max about his day at school, all he wanted to talk about was recess.
“That’s great, but did you learn anything?”
“I don’t know.”
He shook his head and handed Max the next piece that needed to be added to the model. Max didn’t like school because he thought it was boring. Nickolay suspected that had something to do with the fact that he already knew how to read beyond the first grade level.
“You had fun at soccer practice, right?” he asked, and Max’s face lit up. School might have been boring, but sports were another story.
Max prattled on for the next ten minutes about the practice he went to after school, the plays he learned, and the kid on the team that spent the whole hour doing cartwheels in the grass instead of listening to the coach.
Nickolay was busy with Bratva business this afternoon, so his aunt took Max to his practice. She usually picked him up from school and took care of him until the evening, and Nickolay knew he was damn lucky to have her. As a single parent to a six-year-old, he knew that having someone he trusted to take care of his son was invaluable.
His phone dinged with a text message just as he called it a night and sent Max to brush his teeth and get ready for bed. Pulling out his phone, he saw that it was from Alek.
Come to the house at noon tomorrow. All hands.
He typed back an affirmative response, understanding that it would be a meeting with all of the Brigadiers. They were all going to have to figure out how to handle the threats against the Bratva. That was the point of the structure of their syndicate. The leaders worked together as a unit to address problems and threats. That was why the Bratva ran this city. They were strong together.
Heading to Max’s room, he found his son sitting on his bed, playing with Superman and Batman figures. He was making them fight, pulling a voice for their dialogue and creating sound effects as he had them crash into each other over and over again. Nickolay didn’t know where he got such a vivid imagination. Maybe it came from his mother, not that she had anything to do with raising him. Max had never met the woman and he never would.
“Time for bed,” Nickolay said, going to the bookshelf in his son’s room and grabbing a Clifford book that Max could read. Up until about six months ago, he read to Max every night at bedtime. Then, all of a sudden, he insisted on reading the stories to Nickolay instead.
Damn, he was growing up fast.
