by Roxie Rivera
Ivan looked at me as if I had suddenly sprouted three heads. “Please, tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m not. The Texas Rangers investigate this sort of thing. That’s part of their mandate, isn’t it? To investigate corruption?”
“What makes you think they aren’t corrupt, too?”
I shrugged. “They’re the Texas Rangers. They’re the good guys.”
“As much as I would like to believe in romantic notions like that, I think it’s best if we don’t do something that drastic yet.” With a shake of his head, he added, “It’s not our decision. Ruby has to decide who she wants to tell and when. We can’t force that on her.”
“No, you’re right.” Ruby had been clear she didn’t want to go public about her experience. “You’re right.”
“Erin, look at me.”
I did.
“I don’t care what it costs or how many lines I have to cross. I will get justice for your sister. It might not be the legal kind, but she’s going to get it,” he promised.
I could only hope that the lines he might have to cross wouldn’t send him to prison.
Chapter Thirteen
Ivan stood at the counter the next morning, dumping scoops of protein powder into the blender, when Ruby unhappily shuffled into the kitchen. He plopped the lid onto the blender and pressed the button. “Good morning!”
Frowning, Ruby grunted and yanked open the refrigerator. She grabbed a bottle of orange juice and then scowled at the blender until he turned it off. She grimaced when he started to pour it into his tumbler. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s my protein shake.”
She plunked down the container of orange juice and picked up the giant canister of protein powder. As she read the ingredients, she made a face. “How can you drink this crap? Vegan? And what the hell is a BCAA?”
“I drink it because it’s a quick and consistent way to get enough protein in my diet. I use vegan because the ingredients are higher quality, and they do more safety testing.” He took the canister from her and put it back in its cabinet. “Block chain amino acids.”
“What?”
“BCAA,” he clarified. “They’re amino acids our bodies can’t produce. We can only get them from food or supplements. “
She seemed surprised as she admitted, “I had no idea you were, you know, educated in nutrition.”
“I can even count to twenty without taking off my shoes and socks.” With a shake of his head, he started drinking his protein shake.
“Yeah? But what about twenty-one? Do you have to take off your pants to go that high?”
Ivan choked on a mouthful of the thick liquid at her unexpected joke. She laughed at his predicament and snatched a dishtowel from next to the sink. She smacked him with it. “Here.”
“Thanks.” He mopped his face and then whacked her right back with it. “I could have choked to death.”
She rolled her eyes. “I totally would have pushed you over onto your side and called 9-1-1 as soon as I finished my juice.”
“Wow. Such compassion and caring,” he grunted.
“You’re the one who made me get up at this ungodly hour. You get uncaring Ruby this time of the morning.”
“You’re more than welcome to go right back to bed and spend the rest of your day trying to get a job washing restaurant dishes or scrubbing hotel toilets.”
“Pass.” She opened a cabinet and grabbed a glass before sloshing orange juice into it. “When do you eat real food?”
“Erin brings breakfast, or I make it at the gym in the kitchenette at the back.” He gestured to the pantry. “You can bring things you like and keep them there. Tell Erin what you like, and she’ll make sure it’s stocked at the gym. For lunch, we go out or hav something delivered. I leave that up to Erin.”
“You really like letting her boss you around, huh?” Ruby’s eyebrows rose as she drank her juice in unladylike gulps. Her eyes narrowed. “Is that your thing?”
“My thing?”
“Yeah.” She gestured with her hand. “Your kink. Having some pretty little thing give you orders and, well, you know.”
He huffed out an annoyed breath. “We aren’t talking about this.”
“I knew it!” she declared triumphantly.
“You don’t know shit,” he replied, swiping the orange juice jug and returning it to the refrigerator.
“Uh-huh.” She grinned as if she had figured out a difficult riddle. “We’ll see.”
“Go ahead and ask Erin.” He grabbed his tumbler and polished off the last of his shake. “Be sure you really want to know,” he warned. “You won’t be able to forget the mental pictures she paints.”
“Gross.” Ruby acted as if she were gagging. She placed her empty glass on the top rack of the dishwasher and took his tumbler from him, placing it there also. “It’s bad enough that I can hear you two if I don’t get my headphones on fast enough.” She puffed up her chest and dramatically imitated his voice. “Oh, Erin. Oh, angel moy.”
“Oh, fuck off,” he swore, laughing despite himself. “I do not sound like that.”
“Bro,” she said seriously. “Would I lie?”
He snorted. “Do you want me to answer that?”
She shot him the finger. “Are we going to work or what?”
“Let’s go.”
The ride to work was surprisingly pleasant. It was the longest time he had ever been alone with Ruby without the buffer of Erin between them. He had to wonder if confessing to Erin about what had happened to her in jail had somehow freed the real Ruby. She seemed much more like the younger woman Erin had described to him.
“Did you schedule your classes yet?”
“The drug offender ones?”
“Yes.”
“Not yet,” she admitted, scratching at her knee through her black leggings. “There’s a class toward the end of February. I think I’ll try to get into that one.”
“How long is it?”
“Five days. Three hours each day.”
He frowned. “That’s a bullshit schedule.”
“Right?” She shook her head. “Like people who just got out of jail can afford to take five days off from work or to ask to be rescheduled if they just got a new job!”
“The people who make these laws have never had to deal with that kind of situation. They make their decisions in a vacuum.”
“Clearly,” she agreed. “So, boss, I’m going to need five days off in February and a ride to and from class.”
“Take it up with my supervisor,” he counseled.
“Is that how it is? Like—not joking right now.”
“I hate the business part of the gym,” he admitted. “Erin has a natural skill for all of that. Bringing her into the business was the second smartest decision I ever made.”
“And the first?”
“Marrying her.” He expected her tease or poke fun at him, but she didn’t. She seemed to be pleased with his answer.
“I always thought she would end up following in Dad’s footsteps. I think that’s why she liked Teague. He reminded her of Dad. At first,” she added.
“But later?”
“Later, she figured out what a colossal dick he was. Not that she’ll ever admit that,” Ruby insisted. “She hates to speak badly of people. She always wants to believe the best of them. She went out of her way to end things on friendly terms with him.” Reaching into her purse, she said, “I’m glad she found you. She deserves to be with someone who loves her the way you do.”
He wasn’t sure how to respond to her unexpected compliment. Finally, he said, “I would do anything for her.”
“I know you would.” She unwrapped a stick of gum and popped it in her mouth. Turning her attention out the window, she stared into the early morning darkness. “Andrei loved me the same way,” she said, her voice so soft he barely heard the words. She glanced back at him and advised, “Remember how our story ended.”
For the rest of the drive, he could thin
k of nothing else. She didn’t mean the drug addiction part of their story. She meant the part where Andrei died and left her behind. He couldn’t allow his story with Erin to end that way. He refused.
When they reached the Warehouse, he walked her through his morning routine for opening up the gym. In a few days, he would expect her to take over that duty. He showed her the supply closet and the laminated checklists Erin had put together for cleaning the equipment, washing laundry and more.
“Towels get washed three or four times a day, depending on how quickly the hampers outside the locker rooms fill up.” He showed her the correct settings for the washer and dryer as well as the types and amounts of laundry detergents, bleach, and everything else Erin had on the laundry checklist. “Brooms and mops are over there.”
“Do I need to mop the whole place?” Ruby asked, eyes wide at the prospect of having all that square footage to clean.
“No, we only mop if someone gets sick or there’s a spilled drink or something like that. We have a cleaning that comes in every night to clean and sanitize the floors, mats, equipment and locker rooms. Paco stays late for that.” He led her to the private bathroom he had installed for Erin when she started working at the gym. “There is an extra key to this door in Erin’s top drawer. Make sure to lock it when you’re done. The guys here are fucking animals.”
“Duly noted,” she said, making a face.
“Kitchen and break room are here.” He showed her to the large lounging space at the rear of the gym. “Fridge. Water. Coffee. Cups. Plates. Silverware. Pots. Pans.” He opened and closed cabinets and drawers to show her where to find things. He tapped a laminated sign on the fridge about labeling food. “Erin cleans out the refrigerator every week. She keeps labels and markers here.” He pointed to the metal basket fixed to the side of the appliance. “If it’s not labeled with a name and the date it went into the refrigerator, it gets thrown away.”
“Good. God.” Ruby shook her head. “I thought she was bossy when we were kids, but this is bananas.”
“In her defense, this place was a pigsty before she came in and laid down the law.” He rubbed the back of his neck, grimacing at the memory of her gagging the first time she opened the refrigerator in here. “Her rules and organization can be a bit much sometimes, but her system works. Look at this place. It’s spotless.”
“Fair enough,” Ruby said.
He continued the tour by taking her to each piece of equipment, all of the weight stations, the mats, the sparring rings and the cages. “Everyone who trains here is supposed to clean up after themselves. Most of them do, but they get fatigued and forget. If you see a station that’s been used and not cleaned, spray and wipe.” He pointed out the bottles of cleaner and the stacks of paper towels placed near every station. “The biggest issue for the gym is preventing staph. That shit is dangerous There are fighters who have died because of staph infections that started in a cut or scrap and spread. Cleanliness is the first and best defense.”
“Right,” she said, nodding and taking it seriously. “There was a staph outbreak in one of the cell blocks when I first went inside. One of the girls over there ended up with it on her face.” She shuddered. “She almost lost her eye.”
He wasn’t at all surprised to hear that. He had seen even worse things in prison, but he wasn’t about to share those stories with her. Instead, he asked, “Any questions?”
“Nyet, comrade,” she said with a mocking salute.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he grumbled and walked away from her. “I’m already regretting hiring you.”
“Hey, can I get an advance on my first check?” she called out as he unlocked the office he shared with Erin. “And what’s the retirement plan here?”
Throughout the rest of the morning, he kept an eye on her. Erin wasn’t coming in until after lunch because she had meetings at the bank, with their accountant and Mueller. That meant Ruby was the only woman in the Warehouse, and he worried that there might be friction. The few times he caught some of his fighters trying to catch Ruby’s attention, he made sure they didn’t look at her a second time.
“Why don’t you just issue them blindfolds?” Ruby asked when she wandered into the kitchen a little while later. “The amount of sweat dripping on the floor from the laps you’re making them run is making more work for me.”
“More work means you have job stability,” he replied, grabbing a dozen eggs from the well-stocked refrigerator. “Do you want one?”
She shook her head. “I made some oatmeal while you were stretching your neck in that torture machine.”
“It’s for neck strengthening.”
“Whatever you say.” She flopped down in a chair and watched him crack eggs into a bowl for his usual scramble. “Do you know how many times I’ve heard the words ‘bitch tits’ this morning?”
He frowned. “I’ll talk to them about the language.”
“You should have Erin make a sign,” she joked. “Can you imagine? She’d need, like, twenty sheets of poster board to list all the forbidden words.”
“In English,” he remarked, still cracking eggs. “She would need even more for all the Spanish and Russian that gets thrown around in here.”
“How many eggs is that?” Ruby asked in a scandalized tone. “Is this when you break out into song and tell me how you eat five dozen eggs so you can stay the size of a barge?”
His brow furrowed, and he turned to face her. “What the hell does that mean?”
She seemed taken aback. “Gaston? Belle? Le Fou?”
He shook his head.
“Seriously?” She reacted with disbelief. “I’m supposed to believe that my sister married you, but she’s never made you sit through Beauty and the Beast so many times the lyrics and music are imprinted in your brain for all eternity?”
“Is it a movie?”
“It’s her favorite movie. The Disney cartoon version,” she clarified. “She watched it every single day after school from kindergarten until, like, fifth grade. She watched it at least once a week after that. Burned through dozens of copies of the tape and the DVD.” Her expression turned wistful. “We went to Disney World when we were kids, and I thought she was going to faint when she saw Belle. We were supposed to go back after they added all the restaurants and show to Magic Kingdom, but Mom and Dad...” She let the thought fade. “Well. Anyway.” She stood up and checked her watch. “I need to switch out the laundry.”
After she left, he finished cooking his breakfast and then used his phone to look up the movie. He added it to his watchlist and then texted Erin to see how her morning meetings were going. She had taken Kir with her, but he was still anxious that something would happen. She replied back with a selfie from the bank waiting area and assured him all was well.
Back out on the gym floor, he noticed the way Ruby carried herself as she moved around the space. She kept her back to the wall. Her eyes were continually scanning the room, seeking out potential threats and exits. He understood that fearful behavior and defensiveness. He had been the same way once. It was hard to slide back into civilian life after all that time on high alert.
He waited until she neared the mats where two of his fighters grappled and signaled for her to join him. She stopped at his side and watched them. He glanced down at her and asked, “Do you want to learn?”
Seemingly stunned by his question, she stared up at him with confusion. “What?”
“Do you want to learn to fight?”
She looked around as if she thought she were being set up for a prank. “But...you don’t train women.”
“You’re family. It’s different.” He kept his arms crossed, and his jaw set. “It would be good for Erin to have a partner closer to her size.”
“Why?”
“Why does Erin need a smaller partner than me?”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “Why are you offering to teach me?”
“Because you need to know how to defend yourself.”
“From?”
>
“Anyone stupid enough to try you,” he replied, glancing down at her with a wry smile.
She returned his grin. “Okay. I’m game.”
He nodded. “Good. We’ll start in the morning.”
Chapter Fourteen
“You sure you want to go in there alone?” Kir asked as we rode the elevator to the top floor of James Mueller’s headquarters.
“Yes.”
Kir looked uneasy. “I promised Ivan I wouldn’t let you out of my sight.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean that literally.”
“I’d rather not find out if I’m wrong.”
“I’ll be fine,” I assured him. The hulking fighter and enforcer for Nikolai grunted unhappily at my decision, but he didn’t argue further as we stepped out of the elevator and into the reception area of the firm. After I spoke with the receptionist, he directed us to a private waiting area outside of Mueller’s office.
Just as we sat down on the sleek sable leather chairs, an indignant shout penetrated the office door in front of us. Kir and I exchanged surprised glances as the angry shouts continued. I wasn’t able to decipher any of the actual words. The room was too well constructed, and the door was thick and heavy. Whatever was being said, it wasn‘t good.
The door burst open suddenly, and I was stunned to see Teague storming out of the office. He must have been just as shocked to see me because he froze right there in front of the open door. I took in the sight of his wrinkled suit and stained shirt. His hair was a mess, and his eyes were bloodshot with deep circles. He seemed on the verge of his losing his mind.
When Teague stepped toward me, Kir instantly rose from his seat and moved between us. With a click of his teeth, Kir gestured to the elevator. “Keep walking.”
Teague didn’t have the energy to argue. He dropped his gaze like a beat dog and left without a word. I stared after him, wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into and what it had to do with Mueller. The idea that Mueller might be connected to the attack on Zoya and me began to grow. Was that how Teague knew what was said to me during the attack? Had Mueller ordered it? Or was there some other shadowy hand at work?