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6
Dmitry
Manya had been quiet since I’d responded about the blood. Her eyes stayed on either the rearview mirror or the road, every part of her body held as if she were afraid to allow herself to relax. We had shaken the tails a good twenty minutes back by my count, but still she wove in and out of traffic at random, taking turns and checking her mirror each time. On and off the highway, around a building, down random side streets.
She drove as if expecting those broken headlights to pop up behind us at any moment.
“Take a right,” I instructed, finally breaking that silence trapping us and gesturing with the back of my hand up towards the approaching side street.
She jumped as if startled by the sound of my voice. She looked at me questioningly, despite the fact that her hand had already moved to put her blinker on. “A right?” she verbalized slowly. She slowed the car, as if considering whether she should take it or not, and I had to bite back a sigh.
“Da,” I nodded. “A right here. We’re not going to know if they’re still following by staying in a traffic-congested area.” Not that it hadn’t been exactly the right thing to get us to this point. I hadn’t had time to marvel at her driving earlier: swinging in and out of traffic before driving at breakneck speeds without so much as a blink.
Even now, the overly large vehicle we were in was being maneuvered down side streets as if she were handling a high end sports car instead of the older model Lincoln. Her fingers tightened somewhat on the wheel as she followed my direction, driving down the road and obsessively checking those rearview mirrors after she did so. I sat back in the passenger seat, cleaning the blood off of my hands as I watched her.
“Take a left here,” I directed, gesturing again before going back to cleaning under my fingernails. My thumbnail had a jagged crack down the center of it, chipped in a manner that made it impossible to fix. I glanced briefly at the familiar streets before looking back down again, safe in the knowledge she was following my instructions. “Any parking lot on the next street over will do but try and find a more isolated one.”
“You don’t think that’s risky?” she asked tensely, her thumb drumming a random beat on the wheel as she looked over at me.
I met her black gaze with raised eyebrows, silent in the face of her question until a faint red blush spread across her nose and along her cheekbones. “Because anything that we’ve done in the past six hours hasn’t been?” My sarcasm was obviously ill-received by the grimace it was met with.
She huffed, pulling into the parking lot of an old department store. The building was tucked away in the back corner of a shopping strip, its windows boarded up. The other side of the chain-link fence surrounding the building was filled with sparse, twig-like trees. Manya kept going until she could pull into a back corner, backing into the space so that we could see anything that approached from all directions.
“You know,” she muttered, scanning the parking lot and the ways into it, “Before marrying you I didn’t have these kinds of problems. The worst I had to worry about was random robbery or a failing grade!” Her voice rose a little bit, her body slowly sinking back from the tense way it had been held near the steering wheel.
I laughed, climbing carefully over the console and into the back seat, wincing at the sudden pull in my rib cage. “How exciting,” I answered dryly.
“Maybe not exciting,” she fired back. “But not dangerous either!”
“And how many orgasms would you have had last night, if you weren’t married to me?” I asked silkily, lifting my eyebrows as she spun around in the driver’s seat to glare at me. The corners of my lips lifted slightly, my fingers dropping to the buttons holding my shirt together. I watched amusedly as her eyes dropped to watch me unbutton them.
“You’re an arrogant asshole,” she said.
“Maybe.” I shrugged, using the movement to remove the shirt from my shoulders. “An honest one though. My guess, from how uptight you were when we first married … is that you would have had none, da?”
Her black eyes flashed, sparks lighting inside those obsidian orbs as she narrowed them. Her lips opened, her fury clear on her features as she leant back, but my wince stopped her in place. As I’m sure the blood oozing from my side did as well.
“I thought you said the blood was from your arm!” she exclaimed, betrayal and worry fighting for first place in her tone.
“The blood you saw was,” I dismissed easily, ripping the shirt I had been wearing up into strips. “Do you want to help bind me up, or are you going to be in a fit about me not telling you about the injury?”
“A fit,” she snapped, rolling her eyes and clamoring over the console to join me in the back seat. She took the strips from my hand with a sniff of derision. She began to wrap them around my torso, slapping at my arm to make me move in the directions she needed. “Why are we stopped here in the first place?”
I watched her work around me, taking a moment to look her over. “Waiting out the trouble that’ll ensue. We had a few members of the Italian mafia after us before, but now … might be the whole Italian mafia, da? Here we stay safe till Shura calls us back, till we know where to regroup.” I sighed then let out a hiss despite the fact that her fingers were nowhere near the bullet wound.
Her eyes shot up to me concerned, her hands falling. I couldn’t stop the smirk that lifted my lips at her reaction, any more than I could the laugh as she slapped my chest with all the force her arm could muster in such close proximity. “You asshole!” she screeched, pupils dilating so far they almost encompassed her eyes.
My laugh died out slowly, my back sinking into the seat behind me as I began to relax. I let my head roll back, stretching my already sore muscles and looking at her from beneath hooded lids. “Careful, wife, I’ll think you care,” I reminded her, my lips twitching at her obvious recognition of the moment I was referencing.
That red flush returned to the bridge of her nose, her gaze dropping as she pulled my arm out towards her and poked around the edge of the stitched wound as if to ensure that it hadn’t reopened again like I’d claimed.
As she did so, I felt the weight of the keys in my pocket, and the realization hit me that they were there, and the car was still running. I looked down, using my free hand to pull the keys out and hold them up, the question clear. She was suddenly looking at me once more,almost guiltily.
“How did you start the car?” I asked dumbly, dropping the keys on the console as she wrapped my arm as well.
“I hotwired it.” Her answer was short, her words almost clipped, and I could see her shoulders rising defensively.
“And how did you know how to do that?” Genuine curiosity filled me, but I could feel that line growing closer once more. The one that let me know we were approaching a territory in which one wrong word could set her off.
