I told Vassily, “I’ll stand.” Like you didn’t, fine Russian Vassily. “This won’t take too long, and I’m sure you gentlemen have plenty of important things to do.” No actual sarcasm in my voice, I hoped, but just the possibility. Room for doubt.
“You’ll have a drink.” His eyes narrowed very slightly. “Black Russian, Moscow Mule? Maybe you like a vodka Martini.”
I knew not to refuse hospitality. I also knew not to be told what to have. “A Gibson. Please.”
There was the faintest light of a smile in those hard gray eyes. Score one for me. He snapped his fingers. “Princess!”
The woman who showed us to the table appeared. “Can your boy make a... what was it you said, a ‘Gibson,’ my dear?”
“Straight,” I told her. “Silverskin onion, of course, if you have one.”
Her eyes widened a little and shone. “Naturally.” And she backed away.
“Will she bring you a guitar?” the boss Russian said. One of his cronies piped up, “A Les Paul, perhaps?” The circle of henchmen all laughed. It was just like one of Tony’s meetings, only with a different accent. Show a bond against the outsider.
Allow them in, welcome them, but don’t let them forget where they are, like they’re visitors to a medieval court.
“Who knows?” I said. “But I’m expecting a gin martini. You should try one. Crisp and dry.”
The girl brought my drink. She waited while I tasted it. I raised my glass and said, “Chin,” like Tony and his ‘guys’ did.
The men lifted their drinks and said, “Nostrovia.” They all downed theirs in one throw. I sipped. The girl was still at my elbow. I nodded to her and she left.
This was probably the only chance I would ever have to play a role like this. If the Russians didn’t kill me, I felt sure that Tony would, so I resolved to play the part at full velocity. On the way to the club, I’d thought, What would Tony do? I had no other script to follow.
I was there to represent a Mafia underboss. His ‘emissary,’ he said. Typically Tony had given me practically no idea of what I was supposed to do. And, naturally, he would blame me entirely if I didn’t return with the exact results that he wanted. I saw him do that all the time with his lesser ‘guys.’
With no brief and no script, I was here to represent a boss. So I decided to act the part of a woman who has one of the bigger crime families at her command.
“So,” Vassily said, “Tony sends you here to negotiate.”
I said, evenly, “Tony is prepared to offer you a partnership in the venture you proposed.”
There was a silence. A long silence. Vassily looked hard at me I had to control my breathing. Remembering Luka behind me, I stopped feeing afraid. Then the bossman’s face cracked wide and he laughed.
The men around the table all laughed, too. Loud, harsh, rattling laughter. And it went on too long.
I turned on my heel. I fixed the boss with my eyes, turned my body slowly, like a dance move, like a ballerina. Then, at the last moment, I snapped my head around and walked away. Luka stepped aside.
Inside I shook, imagining how Tony was going to react when I told him. They laughed, Tony. I told them what you said to tell them, and they all laughed. That would really go over well.
As I spun I heard them fall silent around the table.
Vassily called after me, “Partnership.”
I stopped. Waited. Then slowly I turned around. All the men at the table were quiet. All trying to keep their eyes still. Looking from me to the table, to the floor, back to me. All except the guy at the head of the table.
Vassily’s eyes were right on mine as he spread his arms out along the top of the bench. “Why would I need a partnership?”
I didn’t move, just stayed rooted where I was. Spoke from a distance. I told him, “You’re on Tony’s territory. You don’t need his partnership; you need his permission.” I lowered my voice. “Offering you a partnership is an honor and a great compliment that he pays you. He expects you to understand that.”
I stepped back to the table. “It’s up to you how you choose to treat it, but I suggest you consider your answer carefully.”
Vassily took a moment. For show only, I was sure. “It is a gracious offer. We are honored to accept.”
They all smiled. Then they started to chatter. In Russian.
I looked hard at them and said a phrase that I remembered in Russian.
They were silent. After a moment, Vassily made a grin like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Okay, okay. Please. Forgive them, it was stupid.”
I scowled. The biggest Russian, nearest to me on the end of the group said, “No, really. It’s a very honorable arrangement. Fat Tony is lucky to have you.” He was older than the others with a thick, dark beard and black eyes under thick, dark eyebrows.
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.
CHAPTER TEN
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.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
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?”
Perfectly Damaged: Luka : A bad boy mafia romance Page 6