by Stacy Gail
Prologue
No, no, no, no...
In my mind, disjointed images merged into a nightmarish kaleidoscope. The worst image of all was the one of the man I loved, Polo Scorpeone, as he flew back from where I stood on a rooftop terrace.
The confusing madness came after that, jumbling everything together into a messy ball of chaos. Polo’s chief of security, Yuri Rodin, had tackled me to the ground. Another member of Polo’s security team, Cap Fogelmann, had rushed to Polo as he lay on his side, unmoving. My brother, Knives, screamed for Polo. Cap’s hands had come away from Polo’s chest drenched in blood. There had been blood everywhere. So much blood.
Polo’s blood.
I was Dasha Vitaliev, daughter of the late Borysko Vitaliev, the man who’d built the Vitaliev Bratva from the ground up. Most people wouldn’t think my life was normal, but it was normal for me. Violence, brutality, death...these were natural facets of my life.
That didn’t mean they were any easier to deal with.
I Didn’t know when time ceased to have meaning for me. I knew the basic order of events—my brother and I were hustled into the hotel restaurant where a fundraiser for my charity, Chicago’s Future, was being held. An army of private security flooded in from nowhere, moving quickly to load an unresponsive Polo into an ambulance. My brother Knives and I were held back by people I didn’t even know, with both of us fighting to get to Polo. And Rudy Panuzzi, Polo’s friend and part of his security team, had pulled me aside to tell...to tell me...
My Polo, the man I loved, was dead.
My Polo...
That was when my life stopped, too.
It didn’t actually stop, of course. That would have been too merciful, and life was never merciful for a Vitaliev. But that was the last time I was capable of feeling anything. The horror that stabbed through me, the devastated denial, the unending inner scream of loss that was so crushing it made death preferable...all of it had been so excruciating it froze me in place. My system overloaded and shut off as a matter of self-preservation. My screams, my tears, my emotions...every last bit of it got locked up.
Including me.
I stayed locked up as time marched on and one day bled into the next. I could still feel my emotions, buried way down deep, like lava surging beneath a hard, dark crust. But they couldn’t touch me.
I was dead.
Dead, like Polo.
I had experienced this eerie numbness once before in my life as a kidnapped little girl, and I’d had to kill in order to survive. I remembered how icy calm my mind had gone, and what a relief it had been to no longer be crippled by the fear that had been so sharp it hurt. This time, however, I didn’t feel relief from my internal anguish. I didn’t feel anything.
No, that wasn’t completely accurate. I did feel something.
Rage.
Sleep was an impossibility for me now. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Polo reaching for me, only to fly backwards as the sniper’s bullet struck him square in the chest. Eating was also impossible; whatever few bites I got into me came right back up. There would be no more sleeping for me. No more eating. Eating and sleeping were what other people did when they had a life to live.
My life had ended with Polo’s.
This was just my body’s way of trying to make it official.
I had first become aware of the rage a couple days after Polo had been killed, when Yuri and Alex Rodin, Polo’s closest associates, had taken care of Polo’s funeral arrangements. I should have been grateful. Making those arrangements had been beyond me; to even think of putting Polo in the ground meant that he was truly gone. Facing that reality—and forever turning the page on the source of my greatest joy and my reason for being—was something I could never do.
But then the emails and texts from Alex had started coming in. They were very nice, very solicitous—certainly nothing out of line. But they’d made my blood boil. He’d wanted to know what my preferences were for the flowers that would cover Polo’s casket. Then he’d asked what sentiment should be written on his headstone. Then he’d wanted to know who I wanted to have there with me for the private ceremony.
Goddamn him. Goddamn that man to hell for asking me such unforgivable things. My Polo was gone, and he was concerned about fucking flowers?
If we’d been in the same room together, I would have shot him.
But deep down, I knew I wasn’t really mad at Alex. The only person who had earned my fury was the one who was responsible for taking my Polo from me. That meant they had taken my heart. My soul. My life.
Someone would pay.
I began to burn with the need to find who had done this to Polo. To me. Obsessively I went over it, hour after hour, ignoring every phone call and summons from the doorman downstairs as I mentally catalogued the attacks I’d endured over the past several weeks. Knives believed the Scorpeone mafia family was behind everything that went bump in the night, but I wasn’t sold on that. As the Vitaliev Bratva’s sworn enemy, the Scorpeone organization made an easy target for all the fury boiling inside of me, but I wasn’t about to lash out at someone who might be innocent.
When I did lash out, I had to be certain I was hitting the right target.
The question was, who?
I love you, Dasha Vitaliev.
My eyes squeezed shut as I heard Polo, as clearly as if he were sitting right next to me on the couch. A fissure of crippling agony shot through the hard crust that had blocked off my emotions, and I whimpered out loud as the black poison flooded through me. Polo had loved me. He never would have voluntarily left me alone in the world, because he’d loved me. At least I had the meager comfort of knowing that, and of having the memory of his last words to me—I love you, Dasha Vitaliev.
At the time they had felt strangely like good-bye. Little did I know that those words would literally be his final good-bye.
I should have felt lucky that I had been given that much. I should have.
But I didn’t.
Polo, how am I supposed to get through this without you? How?
A sudden knock on my door didn’t seem real. Mutely I stared at it, but otherwise didn’t move. I had to be hallucinating, because a knock on my door didn’t make sense. I was in an apartment with excellent security, and no one had buzzed from downstairs to let me know of any visitors. Not that I would have answered. I had ignored every single person who tried to see me, along with all the text messages and phone calls that had flooded in. I hadn’t spoken to or seen another soul in I didn’t know how many days.
But I did know what day it was.
Today was Polo’s funeral.
The second-worst day of my life.
That impossible knock happened again, this time more insistently. Then I heard a familiar voice that pulled me out of the darkness.
“Dash, you open this door right now, or I swear I’ll kick the damn thing in. Don’t think I won’t.”
Shona.
For reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom, I found myself pushing off the pink couch and closing in on the door. It would be for the best if I didn’t answer, I thought dully, looking through the peephole at the woman who had once been my close friend and office manager of Chicago’s Future. My life was too dangerous to have anyone it. I’d done my best to cut ties with Shona the last time we’d seen each other, but apparently I hadn’t cut deep enough.
I needed to make her go away. It was for her own good.
With a strange kind of detachment, I watched my hand unlock the door and swing it open. It was with this same disconnected feeling I watched Shona’s expression change as she took me in, from one of grim determination to a kind of shattered, dismayed compassion.
“Oh, honey,” Shona whispered softly.
I didn’t know what that meant.
I also didn’t care what that meant.
“You need to leave.” I didn’t recognize my voice, but that might have been because the last time I had used it was when I was screaming for Polo to please be okay a
nd to come back to me. I had no real use for it now. “You need to leave me alone.”
“What I need is to get some food into you, get you in the shower and get you dressed. I’m going to do your hair and makeup, so you don’t have to worry about a thing.” She pushed through the door, and for some reason my body wouldn’t respond when I tried to shut the door on her. I seemed to be moving in slow motion while the rest of the world flew by me.
I just wished it would keep on flying by, and leave me the hell alone.
“Now,” Shona began briskly, setting her bag down near the door and making a beeline for the kitchen. “What do you feel like eating? Some toast? A little scrambled egg? Whatever I make, you have to eat it because you now owe me. It took a hundred bucks just to get past your doorman.”
“I can’t.”
Shona had been peering into the sad wasteland that was my refrigerator, but when I spoke she glanced back at me. “You don’t know what you can do until you try, sweet girl. Have you tried eating yet today?”
“I can’t.” There was so much truth packed into those two words that I was amazed Shona couldn’t understand what I was saying. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t go to Polo’s funeral. I couldn’t say good-bye. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t find it in me to face the rest of my life without the man I loved. I couldn’t, damn it.
I couldn’t.
Why wasn’t she hearing me?
But maybe she did, because instead of continuing to push the impossibility of food, Shona rounded the peninsula-style island separating the kitchen from the dining area, and wrapped her arms around me.
That was all it took to break me.
Terrible, shuddering sobs shattered whatever was holding me together, and my knees buckled. Shona went down with me, and there we sat on the floor of my apartment while I cried and cried. What was inside of me...it was worse than anguish. Worse than sorrow. It was a grief so deep it was physical agony, and instinctively my body tried to expel its poison in the form of tears. It didn’t work, of course. Nothing would ever heal the soul-altering wound that I’d been dealt. The only good thing about letting loose of that much misery was that I was now so exhausted I thought I might actually have a shot at sleeping someday.
“I know you think your life is over.” Shona’s voice came to me from far away as my sobs faded into broken whimpers. Her arms held me, rocked me, and for just a little while reminded me that I wasn’t as alone in the world as I believed I was. “And I know life has been a fucking bitch to you, taking from you all the things you thought you needed to be strong. But you’re still here, Dasha. You are still here. Today is as bad as it gets, I’m not going to lie to you about that. But you know what that means? Tomorrow is the day where things start to get better. Maybe not in any single way that you can measure at first, but it will get better. You just need to get through today, and I’m here to help you with that.”
“You shouldn’t.” My voice was a ghost of itself, raspy and without energy. Without hope. “Everyone dies around me. Everyone.”
“Well, if that’s the case, I’ll put my affairs in order, because for today, and tomorrow and the next day after that, I’m not leaving your side. Now let’s get you on your feet and cleaned up. We need to get you through today, so that you can start living for tomorrow.”
Note From The Author
Hello again, lovely readers!
I hope you all enjoyed the first half of Dash’s and Polo’s story. These two star-crossed lovers have been through a lot already, and they’re destined to close out their rollercoaster ride of romance and danger in YEAR OF THE SCORPIO: PART TWO at the first of the New Year. To think that Polo started out as a villain in my plot notes for HOUSE OF PAYNE: RUDE is just amazing. He’s really has come a long way.
Speaking of HOUSE OF PAYNE, the next installment for that series will appear in late spring/early summer of 2017, with Max’s story. Funny thing...Max has a Russian background just like so many others in SCORPIO. I’m beginning to dream Russian-accented dreams. :P
After that, I’m going to need a break from the dark and angsty stuff. That means I’ll be heading back to Honey Pot, Montana for Christmas, where Brody Kingfisher has been waiting patiently for me to give him a shot at happily-ever-after, and maybe even mend some fences with his brother Quinn. CRASH is planned for December, 2017.
I LOVE hearing from readers, just as much as I love interacting with them. Please feel free to drop me a line at [email protected], or follow me on Twitter or Facebook. If you mention that you’ve read House Of Payne, I promise to follow back and say hi! :)
For updates on my latest releases, cover art and publishing news, sign up for my newsletter—I swear I won’t spam your inbox.
Death isn’t always the end for a love that was meant to be. Don’t miss the exciting conclusion to Dash’s and Polo’s story in YEAR OF THE SCORPIO: PART TWO, coming in January!
About the Author
A competitive figure skater from the age of eight, Stacy Gail began writing stories in between events to pass the time. By the age of fourteen, she told her parents she was either going to be a figure skating coach who was also a published romance writer, or a romance writer who was also a skating pro. Now with a day job of playing on the ice with her students, and writing everything from steampunk to cyberpunk, contemporary to paranormal at night, both dreams have come true.
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