My arms start shaking and suddenly I grab the handle of my luggage and run to the front of the cabstand and jump in the first car, clumsily pulling my bag into the back seat with me.
“Drive!” I yell. “I’ll pay double.”
Money talks and b.s. walks apparently. The driver floors it, the car red lining nearly as much as my spiked pulse.
“What going on back there?” the driver asks.
“I have no idea,” I say.
“But you must know that you are lucky to be alive,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say nodding my head. I’ve never felt more alive in my entire life.
CHAPTER 3
Ivan
Creating a scene is the last thing I need right now…make that second to last.
If anything had have happened to her…just the thought of it pisses me the fuck off.
I quickly leave the taxi stand area and move towards the Yandex ride sharing area. Yandex is Russia’s clone of Uber and right now I wish there was a way to clone me. The security cameras must have seen all of that and I’m guessing they’ll be sending some security out quick.
Being that it’s Russia, most people are usually head down and mind their own business, but at the airport there’s no way they’ll risk anything, especially considering their cameras picked up a foreign woman.
“Just drive,” I say to the first driver. Luckily I didn’t have to wait and we’re quickly leaving the airport grounds.
I open my bag and pull out the phone that I brought just for this occasion.
What she didn’t know is that the free Wi-Fi at the airport is restricted to travelers with Russian phones. The free Wi-Fi she thought she was getting came at a very high price.
I now have verification of her name and flight number, and when she logged in the program I set up immediately installed a backdoor into her phone.
I look at the phone, which is a clone of hers. She doesn’t have Wi-Fi now, but cell phones constantly ping cell phone towers, even when they’re not in use, so I can see generally where she’s at based on which cell phone tower she’s nearest too.
But that’s way too much work and way too amateur, and I’m no amateur.
I scan through her downloaded documents folder and sure enough, there’s a copy of her hotel reservation.
Just as I thought…she’s staying at the Aquarium Hotel, which is part of the group that owns the Crocus Expo center, which is why she’s in town.
Over the next two days “Phd” will take place. It’s an acronym for Positive Hack Days, a computer hacking conference that’s become world famous, although most of the guests are from Russian and the former Soviet Union countries. This is why I’m still wondering why she’s here, other than the fact that being together is our destiny.
I open her WhatsApp app and see she’s sent a message to a number in Jupiter, Florida. It’s an affluent beach town and sure enough the number checks out with the one I expected. She’s telling her mother she arrived in Moscow.
But there’s no way she can tell her what I have in store for her. No one knows…only me.
CHAPTER 4
Willow
The minute I get to my room at the Aquarium Hotel I slide the deadbolt shut and finally exhale.
What in the hell just happened?
Why was the same guy who loaned me his pen in the immigration line saving me from those two cab drivers?
Were they even cab drivers?
I figured all that Russia stuff in the news was just clickbait to scare people and drive page views up so online “news” sites could collect the ad revenue.
Maybe I underestimated how serious it is here.
Maybe I underestimated how hot a Russian guy could be too.
Most of the Russians on my flight were wearing Adidas tracksuits and speaking in that lacerating way that Russians do. I swear their words can be like knives to your ears when you hear the harsh language especially when used by taciturn people.
And what was up with people opening small plastic containers of pickles and hard-boiled eggs on the flight? I swear a couple babushkas were pulling sardines out of I don’t even know where…with their fingers! I literally saw one lady and at first I thought she was nervous and then I realized she must have had some sort of container in her purse and was trying to avoid being found out. So weird.
After a long, hot shower, I do some Googling about crime in Moscow. As expected there’s a ton of mafia stuff and also a lot of KGB stuff. Whatever’s going on here seems organized and well thought out, almost like what happened at the airport.
It’s like those two cab drivers both knew I was coming, but they were competing factions.
I read some more and see that Russia nearly had more murders than Colombia and Iraq combined just a couple years ago.
Factoring in the violence, the cold, the language, and the dreary architecture and you have a country where you pay a high price to live, let alone survive. Only cigarettes, vodka, and caviar are cheap, and as soon as you make any real money the mafia, which will almost always have government ties, shows up at your doorstep.
Okay, so I need to be more careful and even though I’m twenty-one years old and will graduate college at the end of this month, my real life education has already started.
I get in bed and prepare to make up the sleep I missed on the long flight over.
I should be knackered, but for some reason I can’t sleep. I can only think of him.
The tall, dark man in the impeccable suit who looked Russian, from what I could tell, but didn’t really sound it.
When he handed me that pen I saw the ink on his hand and I thought about asking him about it, but then remembered that Russians don’t really talk to strangers.
As a young woman who will be working in tech soon I’m definitely tatted up. Programmers were some of the first people who really went all in on the tattoo thing that’s become almost cliché at this point. IT people did it before it was safe and socially acceptable.
And the thoughts I’m having about him are far from socially acceptable right now.
At college I’m surrounded by so many nerdy boys that would rather play video games and eat Cheetos all day long than lift a weight or strive to actually improve themselves.
If I would have waited around for that guy at the airport, maybe I could have had him lifting me, in more ways than one.
But that’s not gonna happen. Despite being surrounded by guys in a field of study and eventual career that’s still vastly male dominated, I haven’t had any experience between the sheets. I haven’t even let a guy see my body for that matter, and I won’t until I’ve met the one…and that’s not about to happen on a couple days visit to some foreign city.
I take a few deep breaths and remind myself that even though I’ve just had a high stress situation, and it makes sense that it would make me have certain thoughts about the guy who certainly seemed to save me, it doesn’t mean I’m going to fall in love with him or anything ridiculous like that.
Lust? Sure, maybe.
Wanting to blow off some steam in a physical manner? I can understand that, but I don’t do that. Never have and never will. It’s not me.
But without him there, there might not have been a me at this point. Who knows where those guys wanted to take me and what they would have done to me when they got me there.
I’ve seen Taken and Hostel and movies like that, and just the thought of it happening to me has me pulling the covers up and over my head.
I just wish I could have one more face-to-face with that guy, to thank him.
That’s all I want…to thank him.
If I keep telling myself that I just might believe it.
CHAPTER 5
Ivan
I tip back my Beluga vodka on the rocks and stare out the massive windows at Moskva River from my seat at the Aquarium Hotel bar.
Unlike bars in the west, Russian bars generally have tables with the idea that people don’t mingle with anyone they
didn’t come with. This place is no exception.
There are a bunch of Ikea style tables, aligned perfectly like some Russian mathematician was in charge of decorating the place, and then the gunmetal gray “bar” at the end.
But what’s not here is her.
I look at my cloned phone of hers and I can tell she’s in the hotel, although I don’t know which room…yet.
She’s connected to the hotel Wi-Fi and she hasn’t put the phone in airplane mode yet, then again not everyone takes this step to avoid nuking their brains overnight when they leave a fully connected phone lying inches from their head while they sleep.
It’s my second drink and I decide to humor myself a bit, and let the staff get accustomed to seeing my face so they see me as a friendly guy who they know, and not some stranger when the time comes for a little social engineering, also known as a psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information.
“Can I get a refill?” I ask as I stand at the bar.
“Yes. Certainly. Please. To your chair and we will bring you.”
I almost want to laugh at the curt tone of his voice, remembering how it is here in Russia, but I hold back.
“Need to stretch my legs. I’ll just stand here if you don’t mind,” I say, bellying up to the “bar.”
“As you wish.”
Less than a minute later and the vodka slides past my lips and I’m reminded of just how good vodka can be here, and why it’s called vodka in the first place. If you believe vodka actually originated in Poland, which scholars often do, but thanks to hundreds of years of marketing, most don’t, then vodka means “to burn.”
If you believe vodka is Russian, then the translation would be more akin to “little water.”
Either way you slice it, this little water does have a bit of a burn, but not when you tip back the top shelf stuff. It’s easy to see why you can drink it down like water.
What I’d really like to drink down right about now is her.
My dick is hard knowing she’s somewhere in this hotel, likely in the shower or in her bed…all alone, without me.
If I had her room number I could easily clone a key and walk right into her room.
But I’m not a creep. That’s not the way I operate.
I’m here to put myself in her path and to let things happen naturally, naturally being a concept very much open to personal interpretation at this point.
At this point in the evening the bar is completely empty, just me, the bartenders and the sterile space devoid of personality.
The events from the airport replay over and over in my mind.
I’d done everything perfectly. I waited for her before immigration, which was key, so that I could get my Wi-Fi hotspot access point close enough to her so that the signal would easily show up as her first option.
That was good.
But what wasn’t good, and what I hadn’t expected, or at least not so soon, were those two goons pretending to be cab drivers.
The one that looked the part while the other was pretty suspect.
Thank god I was there to deal with them or else I’d have a mess on my hands right now and she wouldn’t be mine, she’d be someone else’s.
“You are trying to break bar?” the bartender says.
“Sorry,” I say, not realizing my free hand was grabbing the steel edge of the bar, giving it a white-knuckle grip as every muscle in my body flexed at the thought of another man, one of those cab drivers or whoever they worked for, having her right now.
And if those men would have taken her? Dead. All dead men.
I slam the vodka and pound the glass on the bar, but the bartender doesn’t make eye contact at my over the top gesture that’s lacking in manners even at this hour in a place that’s devoid of other patrons.
“Another,” I say.
He pours the next as if my order was the most natural thing, not even thinking of cutting me off.
I’m not drunk even though I rarely drink. This premium vodka is filtered beyond belief. That and the fact that I exercise every morning and eat a healthy diet means my body is very efficient at processing alcohol in those rare moments when I do indulge.
How I’d like to indulge in her, all of her.
What I feel for her isn’t just a physical thing. It’s more, so damn much more.
I want her in every way. I want to fill her with my seed and breed her forever, filling the house we will share with our babies.
I knew we had common interests such as computers and traveling, and that was enough to get this whole process started.
But when I saw her for the first time, everything increased ten fold, hell a million fold.
That’s when I knew this was more than “just” my plan, and was all about us.
She’s perfect for me in every way. No woman has ever made me feel this way about her and no one else ever will. I’ve seen a lot in my forty-two years, but I’ve never seen anything, or anyone, like her.
She’s one of a kind and she will be mine. I will not stop until I have her, and I’m going to use my cunning and smarts and make her think the entire thing was her idea.
There’s smart and than there’s clever. In this case I’ll need to be both.
The barman hands me another glass and I take it in my hand, turning it and seeing how crystal clear it is…just like the clarity of the rock that I’m going to put on her finger one day…soon.
Out of the corner of my eye I see a woman standing at the bar and she’s speaking to the barman.
Using my peripheral vision I can see that she’s in a dark business suit with her hair up and has a look about her that tells me maybe she works here. She appears to be about my age and the barman maybe closer to twenty-five. The way he stands erect and his body language tells me that my guess that she is in a managerial capacity is probably correct.
“Good evening,” she says, turning to me in yet another Russian accent with an American English twist. It doesn’t sound like she’s studied abroad though. It sounds more like an American who learned Russian, and now uses it on a daily basis picking up the little quirks that carry over into her native tongue, than the other way around.
“Evening,” I say turning to her.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
“Excellent. The barman is fantastic and the vodka excellent.”
“Glad to hear you’re enjoying your evening,” she says.
I would be enjoying it a lot more if this woman was the real woman I wanted, the one who’s still up in her room. It reminds me that my clone of her phone is in my suit pocket and I haven’t checked it in a few minutes. I could easily pull it out now and no one would have a clue that it wasn’t really mine, but there’s no point in risking it. I’ll just wait until she leaves. I turn my head back around, facing forward.
“In town for the conference?” she asks.
Apparently she isn’t planning on leaving just yet, and didn’t seem to correctly interpret my body language.
At this point I would normally just politely excuse myself, I’m not interested in her. I only have eyes for one woman and she’s up in her room, not in the hotel bar.
But this woman’s persistence, a random woman that showed up out of thin air, combined with what happened at the airport is telling me to let this conversation run a little longer and see if the two are somehow connected. I get the feeling there is some sort of puzzle unfolding in front of my eyes and the more pieces I have the better chance I have of putting the thing together.
There’s no way she’s going to try and pick up a guy at her own hotel in front of her employee, so I don’t have to concern myself with that angle at all. “Slut shaming” is huge in Russia, and there’s just no way she’d put herself in a position to be water cooler fodder.
“Yeah, guessing a lot of the other guests here this evening are as well. The event got so big they had to relocate from the World Trade Center to Crocus,” I reply. It’s always stran
ge to me that so many cities have a “World Trade Center,” although I’m not sure why.
“So you must be a regular attendee if you know they moved.”
“First time,” I say. Where in the hell is she going with this?
“Please excuse my directness, but you seem a bit old to be an attendee. You must be presenting?”
Jealous Russian Stalker (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 92) Page 2