Stolen from the Hitman: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance

by Alexis Abbott

  I roll my eyes, leaning against the back of the room with my arms crossed as I watch him, my eyes occasionally flitting back to Liv, who’s sitting on the couch. She hasn’t said much since I called Felix, and I’m becoming more concerned about her by the minute. Her being afraid of me at a time like this is potentially dangerous. If anything happens, I need her to know she can count on me.

  But it may yet be helpful, if only to keep her out of danger. If she doesn’t want to be around me, then I can pull off this rescue mission on Maggie without her interference, and that’s safer for all of us.

  “You would have known eventually, Felix,” I say, sounding bored. “We’ve had more than a few other things on our minds.”

  “Okay, sure, fine, but you can’t go into an apartment building armed to the teeth with guns and knives and then expect me to be able to sleep at night, alright?”

  I smile. “Here I thought you knew about my past.”

  “It’s one thing to read about someone,” says Felix in a fluster, “but to see him charging into a building like some kind of American cowboy, fuck! No offense,” he adds offhandedly to Liv, who just raises her eyebrows a little.

  “Anyway,” I change the subject, “like I said on the phone, we have more tracking to do. As you can see,” I say with a gesture to Liv, “we have one student somewhere safe, but we’re missing one more. Her name is Maggie. I have her number here. Can you work your magic again?”

  “Um duh?” he says, glancing to Liv as if asking if his use of the expression in English is correct. He speaks it heavily accented, but we converse in English to make sure she doesn’t feel excluded. Particularly considering the circumstances. “Are we going on another car ride?”

  “No,” I say quickly, “I can’t leave Liv alone. And I know she damn well doesn’t want to be. If you can get me a location, I will take care of what needs to be done.”

  Felix gives me an incredulous look, and I know what he’s thinking: am I seriously leaving him on guard duty? But I shoot him a meaningful look back, meaning that yes, indeed, I am.

  “This place is safe, Felix,” I affirm. “We took no car here, and the mafia hasn’t known about my location for years. This apartment is just another face in the crowd.”

  “Well then, yeah, I can uh, do that,” he says, pushing his glasses up again before he moves over to his bag and takes his laptop out, taking it over to the little excuse for a dining table and plugging it in before opening it. “But you saw about how long it took me to get an exact location last time. So, y’know, give me a few minutes to let me ‘work my magic.’ You know, magic that you could learn in like twenty minutes if you cared to.”

  “Sure,” I indulge him, “give me a tutorial on triangulating — I’m sure the slavers will put things on hold for us while we educate ourselves.”

  Felix rolls his eyes and starts typing on his computer after I slide my phone to him on the table with Maggie’s number pulled up.

  I spend a few minutes just pacing around the room while I wait on Felix, but before long, Liv gets up and heads into my room, flicking on the bathroom light and heading inside. I look after her a moment before Felix gets my attention with a click of his tongue.

  He nods in her direction, raising an eyebrow at me. “She okay?” he says in a low tone.

  I take a few long moments before responding. “She will be okay. She’s... taken in quite a lot in the past day and a half.” And though that much is true, what I’m really worried about is that I’m the one whose traumatized her most of all. Not long ago, just a few hours, she said I was a hero, and for that brief window of time, I felt something I never had before.

  But now she knows the truth. I’ve never been a hero, and no matter what I do to atone for my past, it will never be enough. Not for her, and certainly not for me.

  Frowning, Felix nods curtly and gets back to his work. As he does, I stand up and head into my room after Liv, waiting by my bed for her to get out.

  The door opens, and she stops short as soon as she sees me, standing in the doorway to the bathroom and looking away from me, unsure what to do with herself as I turn my gaze up to her.

  There are a few moments of awkward silence between us before either of us says anything, but something feels so...wrong about leaving her here without a word between us, without some closure.

  “Liv, I…” I start, closing my mouth and frowning as words fail me momentarily. “I can’t change anything about my past. I wish to god that I could, but…”

  She isn’t looking at me, just standing in the doorway with her gaze at the ground. I can feel the pain in her heart. She desperately wants to look back up at me, but after everything we shared last night, after everything she’s been through, I can’t blame her for her reticence.

  “When I was growing up,” I start slowly, “I had no parents. In America, such a start is incomparable. In my home city of Yakutsk, it is a near death sentence. The winters are harsher than anywhere else in the world, and the people can be just as cold to each other. I knew so little warmth in my life that I could never even begin to imagine what it might be like to share a bond with another person. In the orphanage where I spent my early boyhood, we were always in competition.” I almost smile at the memory, though most of them feel so distant now, after I’ve come through so much.

  “We fought against one another, we raced each other, we stole from the administrators and compared our loot with one another. It felt like that was expected of us. We had to compete to be the best, in hopes that we would one day be adopted by some kind soul. I had only one person who I could call ‘friend’ during that part of my life.” I take a deep breath. I haven’t spoken of this in a very long time. I can feel Liv’s quiet gaze on me, but I keep my eyes on the wall.

  “His name was Andrei. He was tall and sturdy, not unlike myself. Through all the cutthroat competition of the boys’ pecking order, we had each other’s backs, no matter what. We fought together. We survived together. And when we passed into adolescence without a single prospect of adoption, we were ejected out into the cold Russian winters together.” I pause, Andrei’s face clear in my mind that day that we were discharged from the only home they’d ever known. “I felt so betrayed by the world by then. With so many families out there, not a single one would adopt us, give us the warmth every child should know? One more birthday rolled around, and I remember being so angry I wanted to flee the orphanage and starve to death out in the snow rather than face the icy shoulder of prospective parents.” I pause, looking up and meeting Liv’s gaze.

  “That day, Andrei spoke to me. He said, ‘Max, we humans, we find our greatest strengths in the bonds we forge with one another that we can choose, not in our families that we can’t. We will do what we must to get by, you and I, because we know that we can work together to do what we have to.” I squeeze my fists tight a moment, the memories quieting me despite myself. “That thought was in my mind when we left the orphanage together. And that was what kept me going when I started working for the Bratva to survive after my time in the military. None of us were truly free,” I say, more fire in my voice than I had realized as I stand up, “but together, we survived.”

  I step to the doorway and pause, looking back at her. “I understand if you don’t wish to speak to me, and I won’t blame you. No matter what. But I will keep you safe, and I will save Maggie. I promise.”

  With that, I move back into the main room and look to Felix, who’s still at the computer, but the look on his face tells me he has something.

  “Progress?” I ask him hopefully. I could use a distraction. I’m not a man who usually retreats into memory like that, and it puts me in a strange funk.

  “Progress,” Felix affirms with a smile, tapping something on his screen before turning the laptop around to face me. I see an address on the screen, as well as a map of the location the phone was traced to.

  “That’s quite a manor,” I say, “on the outskirts of the city.” I grimace, my fists flexing. “Liv
said the bastards already have a buyer for Maggie. If they’re at an estate like that…” I trail off, knowing that the answer may be that she’s part of the entertainment for the night, and Felix looks concerned by my face.

  “A manor is gonna have one hell of a security force, Max,” Felix warns, but I’m not fazed as I cross the room and pick up the same weapons I used to storm the apartment the first time, strapping some to my legs and some into a leather jacket that I draw over my shoulders.

  “Yes, but you forget, this is the Bratva,” I say, rolling my shoulders. “I still have a few connections there — I only pissed off the ones tied to the slave trade, and most parties like this are mixed company. I am highly skilled, Felix,” I say with a smile, glancing back at him to enjoy his perturbed expression. “More than a few high-ranking members will jump at the chance of having me back. Even if that means my crashing a party under friendly pretenses.”

  “So you’re just gonna...waltz in there?”

  “I’m more of a tango man myself, but yes,” I reply candidly.

  Felix opens his mouth a few times to protest, but sighs, taking a drink of the beer he’s helped himself to from my fridge. “Well, shit. You know what? Okay. I’m not even gonna say anything. You go do your scary murderer thing, and I’ll just uh, sit here with my spreadsheets and make sure your girlfriend doesn’t go chasing after you.”

  “Student,” I correct him, giving him a meaningful look, and he rolls his eyes.

  “Alright, alright. Go on, get out of here. And Max?” he says as I’m halfway to the door. “Don’t get shot — my hacking programs can’t extract a bullet.”

  “No promises,” I say, “just keep her safe.” And without another word, I head out the door and down the stairs to walk into a manor full of the Russian mob.

  17

  Liv

  We’re awkwardly avoiding each other’s eyes, both pretending to be totally engrossed in our own respective distractions. I’m fidgeting with my hands and looking down at a Kindle in my lap, even though I haven’t turned the page in several minutes. It’s open to some book about gymnastics training techniques, but the whole thing is written in French, so it’s not like I can comprehend anything on the pages anyway. And Felix, my glorified babysitter, is fiddling with an iPad, clicking around on the screen and heaving dramatic sighs every now and then.

  The near-silence is getting to me.

  “So, how do you know Max again?” I ask suddenly, unable to stand the quiet tension any longer. The young man’s bespectacled face quirks upward and he blinks at me, his dark eyes comically enlarged behind the frames of his glasses.

  “Uh, well, we’re good friends!” he begins. Then he quickly corrects himself: “Okay, more like okay friends. We go way back.”

  “Are you, like, a gymnast or something?” I question, doubting that would ever be possible. This guy doesn’t look like he’s ever done anything more strenuous in his life than post a Facebook status. But I’m determined to dig into the mysterious background of the man who saved me, the man whose hard body was pressed up against me in bed last night.

  I want to know he isn’t horrible.

  I want to know that falling for him isn’t the second biggest mistake since landing in France.

  Felix snorts as though I’ve said the stupidest thing in the world.

  “Oh, god no,” he retorts, wrinkling his nose. Then, as it dawns on him that I might find this response a tad bit offensive, he backpedals. “I mean, I wish. It would be nice to be a jock. Might have better luck with the ladies, if you know what I mean…”

  “Sure,” I agree flatly. His smile fades away and he swallows hard. I can tell he’s not used to spending time around women alone — or around women, period, for that matter. He’s the kind of guy who’s got a closer bond with his laptop than he’s ever had with another human being. But I don’t get the same sense of creepy desperation from him I would usually expect from such an awkward, mouthy, nerd type. He seems less threatening than that.

  I don’t suppose Max would have left me alone with him if he’d had any suspicion otherwise. Apparently, despite Max’s heavy confession, I still trust his judgment. That comes as a bit of a surprise to me.

  Anyway, I have a feeling I could probably take this shrimp down pretty easily, even if Max’s judgment is off.

  “Anyway, Max and I have known each other for a long time. I know, I know, we don’t look like we run with the same kinda crowd, huh? Well, for your information I used to hang with some dangerous types back in my day,” Felix says.

  “Back in the day? You can’t be much older than I am,” I remark, frowning.

  He sighs and sets down his iPad. “I’m twenty-two, alright? But let’s just say I got an early start down the wrong track.”

  “What happened?” I press him, eager for any information he might have. While Max is gone, and I’m stuck with this guy who seems all too willing to talk my ear off if I let him, it seems like the best opportunity I’m ever going to have to find out what’s actually going on. To make sense of what I’m actually feeling.

  I mean, if Felix trusts Max and sees some of the same things in him that I do, maybe I’m not so crazy after all for falling for him.

  “Well, I came up through famille d’accueil, kept getting bounced around from one group home to the next. I’ve always been too smart to really get along with my fellow foster kids,” he says, rolling his eyes. “It was never easy for me to make friends, I guess. Because I’m too smart, obviously. People just can’t handle it.”

  “Mhmm,” I agree reluctantly.

  Felix looks a little giddy to have me agree with him on something. “So anyway, when I was eighteen I aged out of the system and luckily I got into college here in Paris. Dieu merci. Finally got me out of that slummy little town down south. But I was a scholarship kid, you know, and not one of the athletic rides like you. No offense, of course.”

  “Oh, none taken,” I say rapidly, smiling. He looks genuinely taken aback to have received a smile from a member of the female gender. It’s almost enough to make me pity him.

  “So I was the poor kid, as usual. Once again, I didn’t fit in with my peers. While everyone else was partying it up, I had to find myself a job to keep my ass housed and my expenses paid. Lucky for me, I’ve always been a whiz with computers, so I started working at the administrative offices, in billing. It was cool, having access to everybody’s private information. I have the university to thank for sparking my interest in hacking,” Felix says, his eyes glittering behind his spectacles, as though remembering an especially fond memory.

  “How did you end up running into Max, though?” I push onward, my curiosity overwhelming me. He gives me a slightly annoyed look.

  “I’m getting there. Well, I started looking into everybody’s private school accounts… then their emails… and from there I figured out how to hack into people’s bank accounts, too. That was the big breakthrough. But most of the students were too broke to be worth anything, anyway. The real jackpot was the donors. You wouldn’t believe the kind of le fric these guys had. I’d never seen numbers like that! I started thinking, well, they had so much money they probably wouldn’t even notice if I started skimming a little off the top,” he explains, shrugging.

  “Probably not the best idea,” I comment, looking at him dubiously.

  “I was desperate, alright? I was tired of being the shrimpy little poor kid!” he says defensively. “I just wanted to have money for the first time in my life.”

  “Alright, alright. Go on.” I know what he was doing was wrong, but at the same time, I get it. There were a few poor kids in my classes growing up, and they always struggled. Grades, getting to class on time, bullies, everything was a struggle.

  “Well, this went on for a while, no problem. I finally had cash in my hand. It was awesome. But then one day I get this letter, pushed under my dorm room door. And it says they know who I am and what I’m doing, and if I don’t pay them back every cent with interest b
y tomorrow, they’re gonna flay me alive,” he says, fidgeting.

  “Geez!” I gasp, pulling my legs up into the armchair. “How did you get out of that?”

  “Ah, that’s where our hero Max comes in,” Felix says triumphantly, brightening up. “You see, I found out everything about everyone who was affiliated with the university, and I remembered seeing something about a guy named Maksim. I remember thinking, hey that’s a weird name. And so I researched him using some… less than legal methods… and found out he was running with the same kind of shady figures I was stealing from. Tracked him down, begged for his help. With dignity, obviously.”

  “Wait, if he was one of them then why did you reach out to him?” I ask suddenly, holding up my hand to slow him down. This isn’t making any sense. And my heart is sinking to hear that Max was, in fact, one of the bad guys. I begin to feel antsy, unnerved by the fact that I just spent the night with a hardened criminal.

  But god, he’s also my savior, isn’t he?

  “I had found his name in some police databanks, that he gave up that life before he started working at the university. I knew I could use that against him if he refused to help me,” Felix reasons.

  “So you were going to just blackmail an ex-mobster to get his help against… other mobsters?” I clarify. Felix nods.

  “Desperate times, desperate measures. Isn’t that the phrase?” he says simply.

  “Well, what did Max do?”

  “He was pissed as all hell, first of all. Since I hacked into his private life and all, and brought up his past. He wanted to start fresh, and didn’t want anyone to ever find out about any of that. But when I told him who was targeting me, he got all serious. Took care of it right away.”

  “How? And why did he ever leave that old life behind in the first place?” I ask, leaning forward anxiously. I feel like everything hinges on the answer to that question.