AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I know him from the old days,” Andrei explained. “There is no man who can hold his vodka like Dimitri.”
Andrei stepped into the cabin first. I followed and nodded in approval. This would be an adventurous thirty days, for sure. Trapped with a hot Russian assassin on a Russian drug cargo ship on the run to Indonesia.
Why the hell not!
Chapter 13
Andrei
The cabin had a queen bed, a corner for dining, and two couches. It all looked old and outdated, but it would do.
I set our bags down, walked to the couch, and sat down. Watching Elise walk around, I folded my hands and glanced at the bed.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“It’s nice.” She smiled back.
In all honestly, we didn’t really have much of a choice about the cabin. This was a drug cargo ship, not a Disney cruise.
Elise walked toward the old television and then bent down to look at the VHS tapes on the shelf. She read the Russian names of some of them and shook her head.
I got up and walked toward our luggage. “I’ll put these over here,” I said, pointing to the wardrobe. “We can unpack everything later.”
She nodded and, together, we lifted them into the wardrobe and then clicked the doors shut so the luggage would be secure, even in rough seas.
I walked to the bed and lay down. I was exhausted from the long drive but couldn’t help but glance at her. She was standing in front of the mirror by the wardrobe and washed her face and neck with a wet cloth. Something about her faint smile as she did it warmed my heart.
I shut my eyes and thought about how to protect her. We had left South Africa without a hitch. Hopefully, now we could live a quieter and safer life in Indonesia and no one would ever know where we were hiding. But we needed to be smart. The only way to stop our enemies from coming after us was by living as quietly as possible.
I must have fallen asleep for a few hours. When I woke up, the room was a lot darker. Elise had turned off the light and was sleeping peacefully beside me, her nose breathing soft, warm air onto my arm. She was wearing her pajamas and had her left leg on my thigh. I carefully lifted her leg off me so she wouldn’t wake up.
I turned on the small table lamp beside the bed and glanced at her one more time. Then I tried to get out of bed as noiselessly as possible and made my way to the bathroom, where I showered. When I returned to the bedroom, she was sitting there in bed, reading a book. She turned around, blinking bashfully up at me.
“Did I wake you?” I worried.
“No,” she replied, smiling.
I was just wearing my boxers when I walked to the bed and sat down. Her eyes were scanning my tattoos from my upper thighs all the way up to my neck. Did they scare her? Or did she find them repulsive?
“What do they mean?” she asked. “Your tattoos?”
I looked at her. “Believe me. You don’t want to know. I had to live this life. I had no choice but to do what it took to earn them.”
“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t want to know,” she insisted. “I find them, well, beautiful in a dark way.”
For a moment, I just stared at her in shock. No woman had ever referred to my tattoos asbeautiful.
“They are as savage as they look,” I finally explained, “but a requirement in the Russian mob to pay off my father’s debts. He had betrayed the mob and was killed for it. They wanted to kill my sister and me as well, but I proved to them that I would be of more use alive.”
She just looked at me with sad eyes. “Come here.” She patted the mattress beside her. I crawled toward her, and she laid her head onto my chest as her fingers caressed my abs.
“What about this one,” she asked, pointing at a tiger on my lower abdomen.
“The tiger stands for defying the authorities.”
Her eyes sparkled with a passionate darkness as her finger ran up my chest to one of my star tattoos.
“What do stars mean? You have them on your knees as well.”
