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My eye wandered from the island of red, all the more vibrant when surrounded by a sea of white snow, to Damien, whose face was unquestionably melancholic while he observed the flowers. His eyes caught mine for a second, and then darted away.
My parents must have really meant something to him.
“I’m freezing,” I said, finally. “Can we go back?”
“Sure, my boy,” Roman said, already beginning his retreat to the house.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” I said earnestly.
“It’s your garden, my boy. You should come here whenever you’d like.”
Chapter 11
Damien
The thought of Nikolai with a gun turned me on.
No one needed to know that but me.
I’d kissed his cheek—maybe he’d picked up on something. Regardless, I would behave from here on out.
But thoughts of Nikolai packing heat in my own head were safe. No one had to know. So long as I could hide any physical excitement.
But dressed in the elegant suit Mr. Ivanov had bought for him and wearing a black puffer on top, even blond and angelic little Nikolai looked like a young mafioso—like the blatnaya boys I used to fantasize about back when I was just a teen, jerking off in my bedroom. Standing in the backyard and with snow falling down onto his face, he resembled some sort of Syberian gangster, ready to set out on a life-risking mission full of danger and intrigue, his steely gaze piercing through the icy flakes.
Kiss the boy,I heard the wintry air whisper as it whipped across my face.You know you want to kiss him.
Shut up!
Svetlana had prepared well for Nikolai’s training. Just as she normally mounted her four shooting targets with photos of her ex-husbands, each target now carried a printout of Vladimir’s mugshot. The evil idiot spent time in the clink for failing to pay several speeding tickets. And to think, they could catch him for that but not for being a filthy psychopathic murderer, drug lord, gang leader, and kidnapper.
“Is that your ex-husband?” Nikolai asked innocently.
Svetlana burst into a hearty laugh. Despite being ostensibly on our side, that woman exuded a villainous aura; even her laughter seemed to blend playfulness with a subtle undercurrent of sinister intent. “No, Nikolai,” she replied, still doubled over. “That is Vladimir.
The man you will kill. I never so much as kissed him.”
I saw Nikolai blush and felt my own cheeks turning red. Nikolai turned to me and I looked away quickly, pretending to be interested in a flock of birds flying above us.
“But yes. I guess someone,” Svetlana looked my way; with my eyes still exploring the gray sky, I felt her gaze burning into my flesh, “...told you about my ex husbands. Love is tough. I guess deadly, in my case. Have you ever been in love, Nikolai?” As Svetlana asked this question, she approached Nikolai and put a black Glock G19 in his hands, which were bare and turning blue with the cold. I saw Nikolai observing the cold steel, his hands clearly virgins to the touch of a gun.
I wondered if that was the only virgin thing about the boy.
I saw a lump form in his throat. Shit, here I was thinking about that throat…
“No, I’ve never been in love,” Nikolai said, his eyes still fixated on the cold metal in his hand.
“Young boys like you could fall in love with their own shadow, for heaven’s sake,”
Svetlana said, chuckling to herself. “How is it that you’ve never been in love?”
“Were you in love with all of your husbands?” Nikolai asked. I know he didn’t mean for the question to be so pointed, but it was. Thankfully, Svetlana took it in stride.
“Oh, very much so,” she said. “But they all hurt me very much.” Svetlana cocked her own pistol, aiming it at one of the birds circling above us, the ones that I’d previously pretended had caught my attention. She pulled the trigger and hit one of them, which squawked and then came tumbling down out of the sky, landing in the snow with a thud. The shot echoed in the distance and I could see fear on Nikolai’s face. “I guess in the end, I hurt them more. Love is funny that way.”
“I don’t want to ever be close enough with anybody to be hurt like that,” Nikolai said. “To be abandoned like that,” he added.
Svetlana seemed to understand. “Well, I should tell you, little prince, I don’t regret meeting any of my husbands. Loving them was a great pleasure. Even if I needed to eventually kill them.”
