“You have five minutes to finish your crying,” Nikolai told his brother. “Then security will escort you out. Do not come here again.”
More cursing. This time in both English and Russian.
That was when Nikolai had gotten the text from Isaac saying the woman in the green dress had been detained at the porte-cochère valet station, right outside the front door. As good a reason as any to end the conversation with his brother.
Nikolai had headed toward the valet station with his heart full of ice, but his body was burning hot with need. He wanted to lose himself inside someone, and he’d already decided it would be her. Not the vapid fan she’d tried to pass him off to. Her.
But he’d only gotten one kiss. A kiss so unexpectedly earth shattering, he was still thinking about it three days later.
“Have you been able to find her?”
“Who?” Nikolai asked, even though he knew exactly who his cousin was talking about.
“The woman in the green dress,” Alexei answered in English, his eyes highly amused.
“Your visit for my last game has been very nice, but you are eager to get back to your family, yes? When will you go to your plane?” Nikolai asked in Russian.
Alexei just smirked, and continued to speak in English. “The car won’t be here for another five minutes. Until then you can answer my questions about this woman. I assume you still have not found her.”
“No,” Nikolai, answered, making a terse switch back to English. “Isaac is still checking. But nothing so far. We think she gave fake name to guard at gate.”
“Hunh,” Alexei said with a thoughtful raise of his eyebrows. “It sounds like you have a mystery woman on your hands. It must be killing you, cousin. She was very attractive, and I know you do not like loose ends.”
This was true. Nikolai wasn’t one to let challenges go unanswered, whether it be from an opposing team’s player or their team’s former spendthrift owner. And though getting turned down by a strange woman who maybe was or wasn’t supposed to be at his party shouldn’t have qualified as a thing that disturbed him, he’d found himself visited a few times over the past few days by mental images of him “eating her for breakfast.” An idea she’d unintentionally put in his head. Even now, his body stirred in response to the mere thought of having her in this way, the flesh between his legs tightening as he imagined his tongue inside of her, her hands in his hair as she submitted to his mouth. He could almost taste her, hear her moaning cries as she came for him—
“Mr. Rustanov! Mr. Rustanov!”
Isaac’s voice shattered the erotic vision. Both he and his cousin turned to see his assistant running around the edge of the rink wall toward them.
“Sorry,” he said to Alexei, when he reached them. “I meant Nikolai.”
“Da, what is it, Isaac?” Nikolai asked, not knowing whether to be irritated or grateful that the smaller man had snapped him out of his waking dream.
“Maybe it would be better if we talked privately?” Isaac suggested with a glance towards Alexei.
Nikolai shook his head. “Whatever you say to me, you can say in front of Alexei.”
“Okay,” Isaac said. Yet he still lowered his voice to whisper level when he let Nikolai know, “Indy PD is on the line. They say it’s about your brother.”
Isaac held the phone out to him.
And Nikolai sighed. “Tell the Indiana police department you will come down to the station after our practice is finished to bail him out. Whatever the trouble is that he has brought upon himself this time, he can wait until then.”
Isaac nodded in agreement. “Yes, I offered to take care of whatever assistance your brother needed, but they’re insisting on talking to you.”
Nikolai’s brow knitted. This was highly unusual. Back when Isaac had first come to work for him as his personal assistant, before Nikolai had cut Fedya off, Indy PD hadn’t had any problem letting his assistant handle his brother’s bail and the subsequent charges—the least egregious of which were dropped in deference to a generous on-the-spot donation from Nikolai to the policeman’s ball.
Isaac gave him an apologetic grimace. “They say it’s important.”
He took the phone from Isaac with a frown. “Da, this is Nikolai Rustanov.”
8
YEARS later, Nikolai could still remember the call as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. It came in the early hours of the morning, startling him from a deep sleep.
“I am sorry to wake you,” his cousin had said in careful Russian. “But I must throw a party for your father.”
Code for kill. His cousin had given him a courtesy call to tell him he planned to have Sergei executed. Later he would find out the very good reason Alexei decided to do this, but at the time, it wouldn’t have been wise to ask over an insecure line.
“I understand,” he’d said, not really needing to know the reasons why.
“I have a man ready to host a party for Uncle Sergei, but our way is to let the son host, so I am calling you…”
One of the stranger Rustanov traditions. Every once in a while it became necessary to kill a member of your own family. But in a morbid bid to honor, the option of killing the family member was always given to the killee’s son.
Sergei had described this time-honored tradition to Nikolai with pride.
“If it ever happens to me, I want you to do it,” he’d told his only son. “I am Rustanov until end.”
The tradition and the conversation about it had been incredibly surreal and Nikolai had quickly put it out of his head. Especially after Alexei made the Rustanov family a legitimate business. Yet here was his cousin now, putting out a hit on his uncle, Nikolai’s father.
Sergei would still want his son to do the deed, Nikolai knew. To fly all the way to Russia to put a bullet in his own father’s head. Sergei would actually consider that an honorable way to go.
So, of course, Nikolai had said, “Thank you, but I do not wish to host this party. I trust your man to do a good job.”
And the next time Nikolai had seen Sergei, he’d been dead on a slab. Just like Fedya was lying dead in front him right now, his face a bluish gray, with a bullet wound between his open eyes.
“If anything ever happens to me. If your father ever does as he threatens, you must take care of your brother. He is weak. Not strong like you. You are your father’s son, and he is his. You must protect him. Take care of him.”
His mother’s words rang in his ears as he stared into his brother’s lifeless eyes.
“That him?” a voice asked from somewhere behind him. Probably the detective who’d escorted him in.
Nikolai nodded, unable to look away from his dead brother’s face.
“Sorry, but we need a spoken yes. You gotta say it out loud. Sorry, Mount Nik,” the voice said.
A hockey fan, Nikolai noted with a grim disinterest. During his decade plus in Indiana, he’d found that fans of America’s fourth favorite professional sport were everywhere. If Fedya were alive, he would have been thrilled at the recognition. During the years when he and Nikolai had still been talking, Fedya had often taken in Nikolai the pride he couldn’t take for himself.
“You showed your father good,” he once said to Nikolai. “You escaped. You did not let him ruin you like he ruined our mother. Like he ruined me.”
On the table, Fedya’s body morphed into a slightly shorter and more muscular one, grey of hair, but still radiating danger even in his death. The body was now Sergei’s, lying on the same kind of slab as Fedya, but in a Russian coroner’s office. Also, unlike Fedya, his father had been killed in the old way, the one named after the Rustanovs and popularized by Sergei himself. One last show of respect from Alexei who’d ordered the hit, but could not get Sergei’s son to make it honorable.
It had taken Nikolai three days to get to Russia and deal with the body, just as it had taken three days for the police to track him down. As it turned out, Fedya had moved since the last time Isaac had bailed him out of ja
il, and “hockey star brother” wasn’t the kind of note kept in the non-existent file of a criminal who had been arrested several times but had never garnered an official record, thanks to Nikolai’s connections. If one of the police officers in the precinct hadn’t been a hockey fan and put two and two together after an internet search, they might never have made the connection, since he and Fedya had different last names.
But there had been no denying it when the white sheet had been pulled from Fedya’s head. And now, as the body on the slab morphed back into his brother, he confirmed it out loud.
“Yes, that’s him,” he said, his voice grim.
“If you want more time to say your goodbyes, we can give you that.”
“No, that is not necessary,” Nikolai answered, placing another layer of ice over his heart. He’d said his goodbye to Fedya a long time ago when he cut him off. He known then that there was no way his brother would live past his forties. Known and forced himself to accept the inevitable bad end.
Nikolai took charge of the situation, turning to face the officers. “Tomorrow my assistant will come here, handle body. Is there anything else or can I go now?”
“We’ll get the paperwork together for you upstairs,” the older detective who’d brought him in answered. His face was creased with weary lines that spoke to how often he’d watch this same scenario unfold. “Now that you’ve given us a positive ID, we should probably ask you a few questions, seeing as how foul play was obviously involved. And there’s also the matter of your nephew…”
Nikolai went thunderously still. “My what?” he asked.
* * *
His nephew. He had a nephew.
Nikolai was still having trouble believing what he’d been told, even as the police officer whose desk he was currently sitting at wrote down an address for him.
“Normally, I wouldn’t do this,” the officer, who’s desk plate read “Marco J. Gutierrez”, said. “But I’m a big fan. Plus, I want to see you reunited with your nephew. You know, it was me who connected the dots. Since he’s half black, nobody was putting it together, even though he’s got a Russian name. But he was over at my girl’s house watching hockey and I remembered reading something about you having a half brother who used to play hockey, too. Did an internet search the next day and put it all together. Lucky break, huh?”
Lucky indeed, though Nikolai still wasn’t clear on a few things. “Why is my nephew in custody of your girl? She is not his relation. I am.”
“Yeah, try telling her that,” Marco answered with a wry half-smile. “That’s why I’m giving you her address, so you can go over there. You should have seen the hoops she wanted me to jump through just to find him a foster home. My girl is sweet—real cute, too, but she can be like a rabid dog when it comes to the women and kids she takes in. And she’s taken a real shining to your nephew. The truth is, she might take some convincing before she hands him over to you.”
The prospect of having to convince some police officer’s girlfriend to give him the custody that should be his by familial right didn’t sit well with Nikolai. Not well at all.
Marco mistook his frown of irritation as one of worry.
“Maybe lay on the uncle stuff real thick. Make sure she knows you had no idea this kid was in the picture, or you would have helped out.”
“I would have done more than ‘helped out,’” Nikolai informed the police officer.
According to the police reports, the child’s mother had died of an overdose about two years ago—right around the same time Nikolai cut his brother off. Nikolai had no idea how close Fedya had been to the boy’s mother, but obviously he’d taken over his custody without telling Nikolai. Maybe because he’d thought Nikolai would have judged him for having a bi-racial son. Sergei, like many in Russians in his generation, had been a vehement racist and maybe Fedya thought Nikolai would react badly to the prospect of a half-black nephew.
But more likely, he decided Fedya hadn’t told him because he knew what would have happened if Nikolai had known his addict brother had full custody of a child. Nikolai not only would have taken the boy away from his brother, but he also would have made sure his brother didn’t see the child again until he got clean. So of course Fedya decided to keep the boy’s existence from him rather than risk losing his son.
But still, for a man-child like Fedya to insist on raising his son on his own? Stupid, Nikolai thought to himself. Stupid and unbelievably selfish. But of course, being stupid and unbelievably selfish was something his brother had excelled at, along with an uncanny ability to make the exact wrong decision at every one of his short life’s turns.
“Here you go, man.” The officer handed Nikolai a piece of paper with the name “Samantha McKinley” on it and an address. “And thanks. Not that I don’t appreciate her commitment. I know it will come in handy if we end up having kids of our own. But it’s kind of hard for us to spend quality time together when there’s a kid in the background taking up all her attention. Know what I mean?”
No, Nikolai didn’t know what he meant, and it sounded to him like the police officer’s girlfriend would have more than one child on her hands, demanding all her attention, if she decided to marry him.
But Nikolai took the piece of paper, forcing himself to set his irritation aside. As bad as the situation was, it was something that could be corrected. Right now. He’d go get the boy from the policeman’s girlfriend and by tonight, his nephew would be exactly where he should have been from the beginning: under Nikolai’s roof.
9
“I can’t believe you, Marco! I can’t believe you!”
“Sammy, don’t be mad at me,” Marco said on the other side of the line. “I’m only trying to do what’s best here.”
“What’s best?” she repeated, her voice full of derision. “For who? Your favorite hockey player? I can only assume that’s why you’d give this guy our home address.”
“I gave him your home address. It’s just yours. You only have temporary custody, and you’re not the kid’s blood,” Marco answered. “Rustanov is.”
“Maybe not. But I could have stalled, given Pavel the time and counseling he needed to properly process what happened to him before I sent him off with some guy who didn’t even know he was alive until a few hours ago!”
“You’re acting like it’s his fault his druggie brother didn’t tell him he had a kid. The point is now he knows, and he’s trying to make it right.”
“Trying to claim Pavel like a piece of luggage, you mean. And you just made it that much easier for him!”
Just thinking about how Marco had betrayed her and Pavel in favor of his hockey hero made her want to scream. But Pavel was in the front room with Back Up and she worked hard to keep her voice down so he wouldn’t hear her in the back bedroom when she all but hissed, “Pavel doesn’t need a hockey star who will hand him off to a nanny to raise. He needs counseling. He needs guidance. He needs love.”
Sam thought about Nikolai Rustanov’s derisive dismissal of love as a silly custom at the party and said, “He needs all the love he can get.”
“Sam, I like you, I really like you, but you have got to start seeing reason here. You are one person and you said it yourself, you’ll be stretched thin again as soon as the shelter fills back up. Rustanov can hire a battalion of yous to give Pavel whatever he needs. You should—”
“Don’t tell me what I should and shouldn’t do, Marco,” Sam said through clenched teeth. “I don’t care who he is, I’m not going to hand a traumatized little boy over to him just because they have some tenuous family connection. You have no idea what Pavel has been through. No idea!”
“And you do?” Marco asked, sounding both confused and skeptical.
Sam paused, then paused some more, her mind buffering, because how could she explain it to Marco? Her reasons for feeling so connected to Pavel were secret, and she hadn’t told anyone but Josie.
“Yes, I do,” she eventually said. “More than whatever therapist this ho
ckey player’s assistant picks out for him. So please, if you really like me, if you ever cared about me at all, call him off. Call him and tell him not to bother coming over here. Tell him that he’ll have to go through Child Services if he wants custody of Pavel, just like anyone else would.”
“Sammy…”
“Please, Marco. I know what I’m doing and I know what’s best for Pavel right now. You’ve got to trust me.”
“I do trust you, but in this case, I think you’re being a little… I don’t know a nice way to say this—but you’re being kinda crazy, Sammy. I mean, don’t you want us to get back on track with dating? See where the relationship goes? All the places it could go?”
The stress he put on “all” left no doubt of his real meaning. During their last date, he’d hinted that the next order of takeout should include an overnight stay. Obviously he was fed up with waiting to take their relationship to the next level.
Sam’s heart hardened with bitter disappointment. Marco might think she’s cute, she realized, but apparently that was all he thought of her.
You’re just a piece of ass, far as any of these boys concerned, and that’s all you ever going to be to them.
Her stepfather’s ugly words rang in her ears as she realized the truth about Marco. He wasn’t a potential love connection. Not someone she could eventually marry and trust. At the end of the day, the only thing he cared about was getting her into bed.
“You’re right, Marco. Obviously, I’m not thinking clearly,” she said. “I mean, Nikolai Rustanov knows how to hit a ball with a bent stick really well, and all I am is a grown woman with two degrees who works with children in crisis on a day-to-day basis. What could I possibly know better than Nikolai Rustanov about what’s best for Pavel? Thank you for interfering. I’m not sure how I ever got this far without your clearly superior expertise and advice.”
“Now you’re just being mean, Sammy.”
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