AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Once I’m finished getting ready, I grab the towel off the bed to take it back to the bathroom, but I stop halfway there and look over my shoulder at my sleeping husband. Chuckling quietly, I throw the towel at his face and run out of the room as fast as I can.
One of the women who looks after the house passes by me on the stairs, carrying a stack of sheets on her way to the upper floor.
“Good morning!” I chirp.
She gives me a somewhat hostile look, but her expression transforms into confusion upon seeing the fuzzy slipper booties I’m wearing. They’re orange and have big white polka dots all over. The middle of each dot is nested with a small orange sequin.
“Nice shoes,” she mumbles.
“Thank you.” I beam as I respond.
When I reach the ground floor, I notice several men standing by the front door, taking off their coats. I recall seeing them at the dinner last night and remember they mentioned heading out for night guard duty after the meal. Why would they come back here instead of going home?
I enter the great dining room, only to stop barely a step over the threshold. Almost every chair at the long table is occupied. Do Serbs celebrate special events for several days? The spot at the end of the table where I sat yesterday is vacant, and I make my way toward it, voicing a cheerful “good morning” as I pass. A few people nod, but most just glare at me. Looks like I’m not winning any popularity contests around here. I take my seat and lean toward Jelena, the red-haired girl with freckles I chatted with last night during dinner.
“So, what’s the occasion today?” I ask.
She furrows her brows. “Occasion?”
“Yeah. I see we have guests again.” I gesture toward the people sitting around the table.
“Oh . . . they are not guests.” She laughs. “They live here.”
“Here? In this house?” I gape at her. “But, that’s like . . . like forty people.”
“Forty-eight, actually. The first guard shift already had their breakfast, and others aren’t here at the moment.”
I look down the length of the table. Jesus Christ.
The door leading to the kitchen opens, and women carrying multiple plates over their arms and in their hands rush inside. Two take the right side of the table, while the other three take the left. They begin placing plates loaded with scrambled eggs and bacon in front of each person.
A guy in his early twenties sitting a couple of seats down from Jelena reaches for a plate being lowered before him, but the girl putting it down quickly moves it out of his reach.
“Keva said you’re on a diet. She’s making you a salad.” The girl slaps the back of his head and then sets the last two plates down on the table.
“Nato, sweetheart, don’t do this to me,” the guy calls after her as she heads back into the kitchen. “I’m starving. You know I can’t work when I’m hungry.”
Everybody ignores his whining and digs into their food. I grab a piece of bread from the nearby bowl and start eating, pretending to be solely interested in my meal while listening to the conversations going on around me.
I’m having a hard time understanding complete sentences because I don’t have experience with conversational Serbian, especially with so many people talking at once. My attention shifts from one exchange to the next, but all I can grasp is bits and pieces, and just some of the meaning. It seems most conversations revolve around a big deal that has been made and the new security measures.
“Pop treba da se vidi sa ludim Rusom u vezi isporuke,” the big tattooed man sitting across from Jelena says.
The fork stills halfway to my mouth. Pop? That means priest.A priest is meeting the crazy Russian for something related to a shipment?Do they have a priest among them? What does the priest do, bless the drug containers? I try listening in to what he’ll say next, but the guy is back to stuffing eggs into his mouth.
At the other end of the room, the kitchen door is pushed open again, and an older man enters. His hair is completely white and gathered into a short ponytail. Combined with his long white beard, it makes him look like Santa Claus. A really weird Santa Claus, since he’s wearing army-green tactical pants, a matching T-shirt, and a shoulder holster with two guns overtop. He also has a knife sheath strapped to his thigh. The badass Santa takes a seat, pulls out a wicked-looking knife from its sheath and starts cutting the bacon with it.
“Who’s that?” I nudge Jelena.
“Oh, that’s Beli. Our gardener.”
“A gardener? What does he garden, exactly?”
“Tulips are his favorite, can you believe?”
“Nope.” I snort.
“He and Keva hate each other. A couple of years ago he planted white lilies all around the house, and Keva had one of the guys mow them down because she says those are funeral flowers. Beli makes sure he plants them every year now, picking a different place every time.”
