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“Dimitri has the same ring,” I blurt before I can reconsider.
Ivan raises an eyebrow. “And he never told you what it meant.” His response is a statement, not a question. It sounds like he knows much more about Dimitri and his relation to me than I know about him.
“No,” I mutter. “He never did.”
“And you will wish it had stayed that way once I explain what it stands for,” he says, his voice deep and serious. “But you have no other choice now. You’re tangled in a web you can’t escape from and struggling will only make it worse. Accept your new life, Lily, or you will surely end up dead.”
3
Ivan
Lily is like a flower in the rain. Delicate, trembling, soft, and beautiful. Her skin is as pale as the moon, and her lips are flushed deep red with worry. They sit like puffy little pillows on her innocent face, and if I didn’t have such a strong respect for Dimitri, I’d be tempted to kiss her the moment we got to my house.
But I took an oath I can’t break, which makes Lily precious cargo. I can’t do anything that crosses that kind of line without express permission from her, which I doubt she’s going to give in the current circumstance.
I steal glances at her as I drive down familiar roads, wondering what’s going on in her pretty head. She’s not very happy about all this, but I can’t blame her for it. She’s lashed out at me several times already, attempting to defy me despite my obvious power.
She’s a little firecracker packed with more powder than she knows what to do with. I like that about her, though. Life is too short for boring people.
“May I ask where we’re going?” There’s still an edge of aggression in her voice, despite her polite phrasing.
“Home,” I reply, making another turn. “Everything will be explained there.”
“Your home?”
I nod. “The only safe place in a hundred miles of here.”
“Mine is safe,” she replies quickly.
I smile to myself, but it’s coupled with a deep sadness. She has no clue how dangerous her life has become, how naive her words are going to sound to her in a few short hours.
“We must go to my house. I will debrief you there,” I say, taking another turn. We’re on the final road, a long path of jet-black asphalt that winds through the trees. The further we go, the deeper and darker they become, but there’s a light at the end, glowing bright with the promise of safety – the front gate to my sprawling estate.
“Don’t freak out when you see guns,” I warn as we approach the gate.
“Guns?” she asks, her brown eyes growing cartoonishly large.
“A necessary evil, I can assure you.”
“No more shooting, please. There must be a better way to deal with this. We should’ve just called the police.”
I rub my fingertips across my damp forehead. I’m not used to such ignorance, especially not about the police. It almost makes me angry, but I know she doesn’t mean anything by it. Civilians tend to trust the police, especially when bad things are happening.
In this case, however, the police are the bad thing. She’ll understand that soon enough.
“Just stay calm and I’ll take care of things. Do you still have your phone?” I ask as we pull up to the gate.
“Yes,” she replies, pulling out a large glass rectangle in a sparkling red case.
I snatch it out of her hand, rolling down my window and flinging it onto the pavement before she can react.
“Hey! That’s my…” Lily falls silent as two of my men approach the car.
The pair are dressed in camouflage and holding heavy black rifles across their chests. It’s hardly the way most people want to be greeted when they come home, but for me, it’s the ideal situation. If they’re here, I know nothing happened while I was away. Not seeing men with guns outside would mean trouble in the gravest sense.
I roll down my window the rest of the way, leaning out and pointing at Lily’s phone. “Make sure you destroy that in a way where it can’t be tracked any longer. There was trouble at Dimitri’s funeral. More of the same shit from the Blue Boys.”
One of my guards scoops the phone from the pavement, turning it over to reveal a cracked screen. “They don’t make them like they used to.”
