My heart banged hard, just once as I did it, but it felt perfect. When I heard the bearded Russian say, ‘Fat Tony,’ the knife in the belt of the man in the white suit was all that was in my mind. It was perfect. I knew what the Donna would do.
I grabbed the knife, pulled it out of the gangster’s belt, lifted it high and slammed it into the middle of the table.
“Nobody calls him that,” I hissed. I glowered at each of the men in turn while the heavy knife twanged in the table top. The men were all absolutely still and the rush that I felt was dizzying.
With the knife still shuddering in the table top, as I looked hard in the eyes of each of the Russians around the table, all that I thought was, And don’t you ever fucking forget it. Fuckers.
As I turned again on my heel and left, I thought that maybe I was beginning to understand why men did this stuff. That was the most electric sensation and it still buzzed inside me. An absolute rush.
They had all been quiet. Waiting. Dangerous men waited for me. The jangling taste of power that it gave me felt like a new beginning.
~~
On our way out of the club, the woman who greeted us approached me and introduced herself as “Princess.” I’d thought the Russian was just saying that, the way men do. Poor kid, I thought, having to go around with a name like that.
I said, “Princess, I’m sorry about the table.”
She shook her head. Her eyes sparkled and shone. “Really. Don’t think about it. I just wanted to welcome you properly to the club. You know, anytime you need it, or if you just want it, I can get you work.”
I was taken aback. “Doing what?”
She smiled. “Keep in touch, okay? And please, consider yourself a V.I.P. member of the club. Treat the place like home.” She pressed my hand between hers. “Come back. Often.” She smiled as she handed me a card. It was a card for the club. A number was handwritten on the back.
As we walked up the spiral steps, I looked back at Luka, wondering how he thought I had handled myself in there. He flashed his dazzling smile and it nearly knocked me down.
I stayed close behind Alexa as she sprang up the spiral steps. She shone like she was lit up from the inside. My phone was ringing but I just reached in my pocket and muted it. As we got out into the night air, she looked up in my face. That smile awoke parts of me I didn’t know I had.
She put her hand on my chest. “I loved the feeling of having you there with me, you know?” I loved the feeling of her leaning into me like that. Why didn’t all women feel like this to be with? She said, “I think I understand why men do that stuff. It’s exciting.” She pressed her lips together.
There was no future for any kind of a connection between her and me, nothing outside of what was strictly businesslike. I knew it. She did too. But the way that I felt right then, watching her emerge like that—where did she get the balls for a display like that?—the way I felt with her right then, it was like I was a new man. A different man. Like I was a seventeen again, like the past was gone, didn’t matter. All that mattered in that instant was her. I didn’t know how I was going to keep it together.
It was like magnetism. Like gravity. When I looked at her, my arms, my whole body, wanted to wrap itself around her. To close her in and keep her. Keep her safe and keep her mine. But, of course, she wasn’t.
Keeping it as light as I could I said, “You know everybody calls him ‘Fat Tony,’ right?”
She looked up at me. She wanted to talk about something else. I could feel it. I knew it. And we both knew that it would too dangerous. Way too dangerous.
I tried to make my voice normal, but it came out soft and husky. “You were pretty good in there.”
“Really?” She kept her cool, but her eyes sparkled when I said that. Like it mattered to her. Like it mattered a lot. The tension in the air was like the throbbing tang of a bare electrical wire.
I was hunting desperately for something to say, something to talk about. Something other than the thing we both wanted to talk about.
I said, “So, you speak Russian. That certainly got their attention.”
After the tension in the club, her giggle was like springtime. She said, “I don’t. I hardly understood a word they were saying. A girl at our school taught us all a few useful phrases. What I told them was ‘I can hear you.’ Which was true.” She grinned. “Strictly, it was true.”
We were standing out on the cold street. Neither of us ready to move. She bit her lip but she wouldn’t take her eyes from mine. “Who was on the phone?”
I shrugged. I fished the phone out of my pocket and looked at it. “Bruto. He sent a text, too.”
Call me
Now
There was a bar across the street. We went in and found a booth. We sat together, and I was about to call Bruto when the phone sounded and I saw it was him calling.
As soon as I picked up, Bruto said, “Tony’s gone.”
I blinked hard and took a breath. Alexa must have seen a reaction on my face. She leaned closer. I took my time to ask Bruto, “What happened?”
“He went for a swim.” His voice was matter of fact. That was Bruto, though. He never dropped the officer manner. “He won’t be back. I’ll take care of things now.”
I didn’t say anything. He said, “Where are you? How is it going with the Russians?”
I told him, “We’re on our way to meet them now,” thinking I would steal us some time.
“Let me know everything that happens,” he said. “Bring that woman back safe if you can. I’m looking forward to her.” An icy trickle ran through me. He expected to inherit everything that was Tony’s. And Alexa along with it.
When I hung up, Alexa’s voice was soft and concerned. She touched my hand. “What happened?”
I told her what Bruto had told me. Her eyes widened then she pressed her lips together. “Gone? You mean ‘gone,’ as in he’s not ever going to come back?” I watched as the blood drained from her face. I could read plain as day what she was thinking. If they can do that to Tony, what can they do to her?
“But then, I don’t have to go back,” she said.
“Your father gave you to Tony when he was in debt?”
She nodded and I saw the clouds drift across her face. She knew it before I said, “So, if you skip, then first they’ll go after him.” I left a pause for a moment. “But if he gave you up like that...”
She shook her head. “He did, but he’s still my father. If I handed him to them to save myself, then I’d be no better than him.”
“You could call and warn him.”
“No.” She looked into her lap as her head shook. “He’d just call them straightaway. The card rooms are his holy church.” She looked up at me. “Besides, I’d be on the run forever, wouldn’t I?” Her eyebrows steepled.
She wanted me to say, ‘no,’ of course. The urge to tell her what she wanted to hear was so strong. But of course, I couldn’t. It would have been totally selfish. I would have done it just to see the fear on her face part and open up to a little gratitude.
I wanted to lean up against Luka’s certainty, feel the pulse of his sureness. His strength. His warmth, his heat was like a fire on legs. I wanted to have him wrap me in his confidence, be protected by his power, and be folded in his strong arms.
After what I had just done, after confronting Vassily, my nerves were crackling. The news about Tony, part of me wanted to jump, but I couldn’t take delight in the death of a man. I was sure that was what Bruto had meant. I’d heard it before. So-and-so was ‘gone.’
Even more chilling was when I’d heard that so-and-so would “have to go.” But if it were true was I free of him, or would I simply pass into Bruto’s ownership?
I started to wonder whether that could be any worse than Tony’s, but in the time I had spent with him, I knew that, yes, it could be a whole lot worse. Inside me was a storm, a raging swirl of emotions.
I couldn’t decide immediately whether a shot of alcohol would bring it
all into focus, or scatter what reason I had to the wind. There was too much to take in. I breathed hard and said, “You told him we hadn’t met Vassily yet, right?”
“He could easily call Vassily himself and find out.”
“I don’t think so.”
He sat taller. “Why?”
“If they could just call and chat, Tony would never have sent me to meet with Vassily in the first place.” His eyebrows lifted. He could see I was right.
“I don’t want to go back to the apartment.”
“No, of course not. We could be on a plane in about an hour.”
“I don’t mean that. I know that I’ll have to go back. I mean that I don’t want to go now.”
“Okay,” he said slowly.
“I want to check into a hotel. Get a shower, something to eat. A couple of drinks. Sleep on it.”
His brow knotted. I liked that. Finding a hotel for me wasn’t his thing at all, but he wanted to rise to it.
I touched his hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll get the hotel.” And I led him out to find a cab. I shivered in a way that was thrilling when he did the whistle.
“The Carlysle,” I told the driver. As we got in, I took out my phone to call ahead for a room. I told the booking clerk, “Two rooms,” I looked across at Luka, “with a connecting door.”
Why she picked that expensive, uptown hotel, I had no idea. I got a beer from the bar and found a table in the far corner. I did my best not to be irritated by the scrawly drawings all over the cream walls. Place looked like it was decorated by a child.
Every time I saw her, she was a pleasing vision. I stood and watched as she walked between the tables, and I tried to figure how she looked so different this time. She’d pulled her hair up on one side, which gave a wonderful view of her neck all the way up to her delicate little ear, but that wasn’t it.
She’d fixed her makeup differently—that was it. Now she was something else again, somewhere in between the gorgeous young girl I’d seen when her face bare in the cab, and the tough, glammed-up Mafia donna who stood with her feet apart and owned the Russian gangsters in the club.
Now she bounced toward me like a peppy college student, just into her twenties and fresh with optimism, ready to set the world right. One thing was for sure: a woman like her, you couldn’t ever get bored with looking at her. Seeing Alexa was a happy surprise, always.
She sat across the table from me. I raised a hand for the waitress and Alexa got a glass of wine and a Caesar salad. I ordered a rare filet steak with fries. They call them ‘frittes,’ for some stupid reason. I said, “Are you sure a salad’s going to be enough after the day you’ve had?”
She gave me a look and I decided this woman had proved she could look after herself, at least enough to choose her own food. She said, “Shall we get some dips while the food comes?” and without waiting for me to answer, she told the waitress to bring hummus and pita bread and some olives.
She folded her hands on the white linen tablecloth and looked at me. “So, look at you, being my big brother. Telling me what I need to eat.” She was teasing. There was a sparkle in her eyes.
I just said, “You got to keep your strength up.”
“I’m saving my strength for what comes after.”
The fresh scent of her was almost completely natural. Clean skin and hair, like a baby in newly cut hay. I breathed deeply. “What comes after?”
She lowered her chin and flashed me a mischievous grin. “The chocolate cake here is sinful.” The way her head shook as she stressed the word lit a picture in my head. How was it that I couldn’t spend five consecutive seconds with this woman without imagining her underneath me or stretched out in front of me or thrashing on top of me?
Her voice was low. I liked it when she sounded like that. “Or are you going to keep up the big brother act and tell me what’s good for me?” She pulled her lips between her teeth. Tony was gone; she should be climbing all over me by now.
“Hell,” I was talking before thinking, “I know what will be good for you.” She touched my hand again. I had the urge to turn my hand over, grab a hold of hers. Pull her across the table.
I said, “You’re a free woman now.”
“Am I, though? Seems like Bruto has another idea.”
“Tony was your fiancé.”
“I’m still getting used to the ‘was’ part of that.”
“But he did have a claim. Maybe not the most legitimate of claims, but it was a claim. Bruto, I don’t know what’s in his mind. Maybe his head got turned by the hill tribes in Afghanistan, I don’t know, but you don’t inherit wives and fianceés in this country. There’s no way.”
“Are you going to explain that to him?”
“If he needs me to, I will.”
“You two have a history, don’t you?”
“We were in the SEALs in the same theater of operations.” I wanted to tell her about what happened. To share the truth, for once. But not now. Now, telling that story would be a dark shadow on the day, and the day had been bumpy enough for her already.
More than anything, I wanted it to be her day. Let her bathe in the triumph that she pulled out of a hat in that club. She had the Russian Mafia eating out of her hand. The stunt she pulled with the knife, that was a masterstroke, and I wanted her to savor it.
Okay, truly, I wanted her to realize what a perfect moment this would be for the longest, hardest, and filthiest fuck of her life. In celebration.
“The way you talked to those Russians,” I told her, “the thing with the knife? Any red-blooded man would run over hot coals to get to you.”
She said, “I don’t know if any man ever put up a fight for me. Walk on hot coals? Not happened yet.”
“Show me the coals. I’d do it.”
“Yeah, but that’s just because you’re nice.” She reached over and patted my hand. “And, thank you, Luka. It means a lot.”
My breath caught. I’d been freindzoned. First and only time ever. I’d heard about it, talked to a ton of guys it happened to, and I was always like, “Get a grip. Show ‘em you’re a man, okay? They start to pant and shake uncontrollably. What else is there to it?”
Freindzoned. And not by just any woman, either. The one woman who happened, in some odd way, to be different from all of the others. I didn’t see how she could make such an error. Almost lost my appetite for my steak.
I knew that there was more to Luka’s story, something he kept deep and dark. Something sad that he hid, maybe from himself as well as the rest of the world.
The thought of ghosts that haunted Luka made a chill run down my spine, but it set off the idea of his strength and mine combining, merging. That thought lit a fire way down inside me. Maybe Tony really was out of the way, really gone. That would change things. It would change things a lot.
In the club, facing down the Russians, I had felt free, freer to trust my instincts and act on them without thinking than I had in a long, long time. Maybe ever. Part of it was, whatever happened, I thought a spray of machine-gun fire was the likely outcome. That, or me getting killed by Tony afterwards. After I realized that, a strange kind of a calm came and wrapped me like a warm comforter.
When the Russians laughed at me, I knew that turning my back was the strong move without really knowing why. The only thought I had about it was whether to turn smartly, like a reflex, or to make it slow and theatrical.
And I’d decided in that split second to give it a little of both. When I started to turn, I kept Vassily’s eyes fixed with mine. I lifted my coat out to give them all a show of my figure and it was then, as they knew what was happening, that I spun on my heel.
It felt like the big move in a dance video, where the girl is majestic and triumphant with her feet apart on top of a pile of golden Cadillacs.
But the strength that I felt, standing by the table, looking around at the men—hardened Russian gangsters—and telling them how it was going to be... something soared in my stomach as I remembered their eyes on
mine.
Hearing Luka say that he was impressed, though. That meant more than all of it.
For certain, I had needed an escape from Tony. Any way out would have done. I had been desperate, and there was no point in dressing it up. When I saw Luka in the bar, when I first got the idea of how tough he was and how ruthless, my first thought had been, Could I get him to kill Tony for me?
Since then, all the time I spent with him, he was dumb, infuriating, and ridiculously full of himself, but I wanted to get into his jeans so bad it made me sore. Allowing romantic feelings at a time like this, though, that seemed crazy. Dangerous, too.
If it came to it, I thought that Luka could have taken Tony. Not easily, but I thought that he could. It wouldn’t be a sure thing. Now would I need him to protect me from Bruto?
Two Hitmen: A Double Bad Boy Mafia Romance (Lawless Book 1) Page 94