by Tara Wylde
Darya scoffs. “Maybe back in the day. He’s an old man now. He’s gotta be, like, 40 at least.”
“We’re not going to take chances. That’s that.”
“So what then?”
Arkady taps out another line on the mirror with an old safety razor blade that’s covered in rust.
“Sniper shot,” he says.
She nods. “Fine,” she says glumly. “If that’s how it has to be.”
“You take the shot, I’ll be in place to snatch up the bitch as soon as he’s down.”
Darya looks offended. “Why don’t you take the fucking shot?”
“Because you’re better than me. We can’t afford to miss.”
“There’s a laser sight,” she says. “The distance we were at that last time when they were fucking is perfect. Anyone could make the shot.”
“Fine,” he grumbles. “Whatever. But we have to make sure they’re both outside at the same time. If we take him out and she’s not with him, she’ll have a chance to run, or call the cops.”
“Plus I want her to see his head get blown off,” Darya giggles.
Even through his drug-induced fog, Arkady recognizes that last line was a bit extreme. But that’s what he loves about Darya – she’s unpredictable. That’s what makes her so much fucking fun to be around. Her old man doesn’t like her – says she’s a liability – but he wouldn’t be without the Bonnie to his Clyde.
“When are we gonna do this?” she asks.
“We’ll start staking the place out tomorrow. But from now on we use a duck blind. He must have seen the scope when we were up there. I don’t want that happening again.”
She nods. “All right, then,” she says. “I’ll clear my calendar.”
Arkady blinks at her for a second before getting the joke. Then the two of them laugh like maniacs.
After the hilarity passes, Darya fetches a heavy sigh.
“What the fuck is it with you and Jessica, anyway?” she asks.
He frowns. Does he even know the answer to that? Her parents got into hock with him, running up a huge tab in smack. He turned them out to dealing to help pay it off before he found out about their hot little daughter.
Unfortunately, he’d caught the two of them using the stash they were both supposed to be selling and so he had to send Val and Andrei to take care of them. Their bodies were somewhere in the Tuckahoe River now.
But he couldn’t tell Jessica that, or she’d think she didn’t have to pay their debt.
“She’s hot,” he says simply. “And innocent, y’know? I like that.”
“Yeah, me too,” she says. “But it’s a lot of hassle just for a piece of ass. There has to be something else.”
There is. Something he didn’t have the nerve to tell his old man either of the times he was getting beaten on. It wasn’t just about her; it was about Arkady and Josef.
“The bitch is mine,” he says. “I own her, and my old man is trying to take her away from me. I’m not going to let him. He can go fuck himself.”
Darya eyes him warily. “You ever heard the line about cutting off your nose to spite your face?”
“No.”
She nods. “Just checking. I personally don’t give a shit. I just want to kill the old fucker and then have some fun with the blonde bitch.”
Arkady leans down and snorts a line of the powder, then hands the mirror and straw to his companion.
“That’s what I love about you, Darya,” he says. “You’re not complicated. You want what you want, and you go out and get it.”
She nods. “Thanks, I appreciate that.”
He stares at the gas fireplace set in the corner of the living room, watches the pilot light flicker and gutter its tiny orange light. It puts him to thinking – there’s another reason behind his plans. One he should really acknowledge.
“If I’m being honest,” he says. “And I’d only say this to you—”
Darya leans in, eyes wild. “Yeah?”
“I’ll be fucked if I let my father humiliate me like that.”
“That’s the spirit!”
“I’m going to run the Volkov empire one day, and I need the family to respect me. I’m not going to let them see me as some little punk who’s scared of his own father, or runs away from the fucking boogeyman, Nick Chernenko.”
“Fuckin-A rights.”
“My old man took over when his father was killed,” he says. “Maybe that’s the best way to do it. You know? Out with the old, in with the new?”
Darya goggles at him, her red-rimmed eyes burning with their own inner glow.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” she asks, breathless.
“Maybe,” he says defiantly, not knowing the answer himself. “I guess we’ll see.”
She grins. “Well, count me in whenever you’re ready.”
The inevitable crash that comes with long hours of drug use eventually drags them down, until both are on the verge of passing out. Darya props her feet on the arm of the overstuffed chair while Arkady stretches out on the sofa.
“First thing tomorrow, we start hunting,” Arkady yawns.
“Uh-huh,” Darya sighs. “And then we have start having fun with little Miss Jessica.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
34. STORM
“Is everything okay?”
The sun bakes down on us as we wander along the edge of the cliffs with Samson and Delilah. It’s become such a routine that they make a beeline for the door whenever they see Nick and me together anywhere near the foyer.
It’s taken me some time to work up the nerve to ask him about it, but I feel like this is where Nick feels most like himself, or at least the person he was before I showed up. If I’m going to ask, there’s no better time than here and now.
“Of course,” he says as he tosses the tennis ball for the dogs. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know.”
It’s true – I don’t know what the problem is, or if there even is a problem. For all I know, it’s in my head. But this is all new for me, and I don’t want to screw it up.
But what if I’m screwing it up by asking? Don’t rock the boat. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I’ve got a good thing going; why risk it for something you’re not even sure exists? So many questions.
“You must have a reason,” he says, taking my hand. “Tell me.”
“It just seems like ever since you showed me how to use the pistol, you’ve been – distracted. Not totally, but enough that it makes me wonder what you’re thinking about.”
He looks at the ground for a moment, which makes me nervous that he’s trying to work up a lie. I don’t have anything to base that on other than instinct, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.
“You’re right,” he says finally. “I have had a lot on my mind lately. And I’m sorry that it worried you. It should be the exact opposite.”
I blink at him. What’s that supposed to mean?
Suddenly the dogs race past us, Samson chasing a triumphant Delilah, who has the tennis ball in her jaws. We both grin at them, then at each other. Then Nick surprises me by taking my hand.
“Sometimes I think my life before I met you was a dream,” he says. “Or a nightmare. The isolation, day after day, year after year. It became a habit for me, an easy blanket that I could pull up over my head so that I didn’t have to face the world outside. Or deal with the hole in myself.”
My eyes go wide. I had no idea my grunting caveman could talk like that.
“I didn’t realize until you came that I was taking the easy way out,” he continues. “Loneliness and grief are easy; anybody can do it. It’s living that’s hard.”
I reach out and cup his cheek because I can’t think of anything else to do.
“Living was so hard for me before I met you,” I hear myself say. “Now it’s so easy, I can’t wait to wake up every morning, even when we spent the whole night in each other’s arms.”
He nods. “I feel th
e same way. Before, whole seasons would go by and I wouldn’t even know it. Now every second of every day matters.”
A lump in my throat keeps me from saying anything.
“It wasn’t just Katrina’s death that did this to me,” he says. “I was devastated – of course I was, she was my world – but I used it as an excuse to punish myself for the life I’d led before I met her. I didn’t deserve to be happy, because of the things I’d done.”
Hot tears sting my eyes. “Oh, baby,” I whisper, stroking his cheek. “You’re so wrong.”
“I know that now. But I didn’t know it then. My parents were gone, my wife was gone. And I realized that the people I’d thought of as my family for so long weren’t good people. Neither was I.”
“Nick – ”
He holds up a hand to stop me. “It’s true,” he says. “God help me, it’s true. Maybe I wasn’t a terrible person, but I wasn’t a good person. Not by a long shot. I tried to make up for it by giving away money – it never mattered to me anyway, it was just a way of keeping score – but that never filled the void.
“People like Ellie tried to reach out over the years, but whenever I felt anyone getting close, I’d push them away, as if I was a rattlesnake or something that would poison them if they touched me the wrong way.”
My heart is aching for him. I knew he was withdrawn, but I never understood the depth of his pain until now.
“I never had a chance to be happy,” he says. “Life under the Soviets, then moving here – it was more survival than anything else. Eventually I learned that I was good at surviving. And at hurting people. Those became my two defining traits.”
I feel a warm wetness on my hand and look down to see Delilah licking me. She’s seen the tears in my eyes and wants to comfort me. It’s Nick who needs them now, not me, but the dogs see him the way he sees himself – the one in control, always.
“And then you came,” he says with a smile. “Something I never expected, and something I didn’t even realize I desperately needed.”
I sit down cross-legged on the grass and pull him down with me. Now Delilah is at my face, licking away my tears, and I can’t help but giggle.
“I needed you,” I say. “My whole life was out of my control, like being in a storm all day, every day, until you. You made me strong. You made me understand who I am.”
Nick smiles and kisses the back of my hand. “You’re the strongest person I know. And the smartest. And the kindest.”
I choke back a laugh. “Strong? Me?”
“You lived through hell,” he says. “Through chaos. You never let it eat you the way I let it eat me. That’s real strength. Anyone can beat up someone. It takes real strength not to buckle under the weight of life.”
We gaze into each other’s eyes in silence for a while. I was so worried that Nick has lost interest in me, or that there was something I was doing that was making him unhappy. To hear him talk like this makes my heart swell.
I can dare to hope. I can believe that we have a future together. With Nick, anything is possible. I believe that now, with all my heart.
“You say I’m kind,” I say. “But you’re the one who dove into the Atlantic to rescue me. The one who took a complete stranger into your home and cared for me, and didn’t ask any questions. Before I met you, no one had ever just accepted me for me. Everyone always wanted something.
“But not you. You didn’t take, you only gave, never asking anything in return. You say you’re not a good person? Bullshit. You’re the best person I know.”
“Only because you make me that way.”
His eyes mist over as he squeezes my hand, and I want more than anything to take him into my arms and rock him like a child, and sing to him and hold him through the night.
The dogs’ barking pulls me out of my thoughts, and I look up to see that we’re on the edge of the cliffs. To them, that’s the signal that we’re going to throw the ball down to the rocky shore below and they’re going to chase it. They’re nothing if not creatures of habit.
Nick grins and pitches the ball as far as he can throw while the dogs bolt down the embankment.
“Now that we’ve got a moment to ourselves, I have to tell you something,” Nick says.
“What’s that?”
“The other day, when I went shopping for the Corvette?”
“Yeah?”
“That wasn’t all I was doing.”
I knew it!
“Oh, really? What else were you up to?”
“I went shopping for something else.”
I stare at him stupidly for a few moments as he drops to one knee on the grass and reaches into the pocket of his jeans.
Oh, my God. OH, MY GOD.
My heart is racing like a jackrabbit, my hands trembling uncontrollably. This can’t be happening. This is it, I’m finally going to wake up on that shitty sofa bed in that shitty apartment in Newark and my shitty old life…
The sun glints off an enormous square cut diamond set in a platinum band, surrounded by a dozen or more tiny, brilliant blue Tanzanites.
My knees almost buckle under my weight as he takes my hand and gazes up into my eyes.
“Storm,” he says, using the only name that matters to me anymore. Jessica Armstrong is gone. I will forever and always be his Storm.
“Nick,” I whisper, my voice trembling.
“Will you make me the happiest man in the world and be my wife?”
The world becomes a surreal dreamscape for a moment as I try to grasp what it all means. Nick and I, together forever. Sharing our lives, till death do us part. Him and me against the world. The missing piece I’ve searched for my entire life, finally making me whole.
“Yes,” I say with a papery voice.
He slides the ring into place on the shaking third of my left hand.
A moment later, I see a streak of red erupt from Nick’s forehead, and a split-second after that, a deafening crack. I watch with sick horror as he collapses to his right and disappears over the edge of the cliff.
A familiar shock of green hair appears in the distance, sprinting towards me, but time feels as if it’s covered in molasses. I hear something high pitched, but I can’t figure out what it is. Suddenly the woman with green hair is filling my field of vision and I feel strong arms clamp around my torso.
Finally, as I register the woman’s insane smile, I recognize what the high-pitched sound is.
It’s me, screaming.
Chapter Thirty-Five
35. NICK
Blackness.
Cold.
Pain.
Pain is good. Still alive.
Can’t breathe. That’s bad.
Floating. Can’t move. Noise. What?
Something pulling. Can’t move. Can’t walk. Where?
Feel my knees. Something hard and sharp. Rocks? Rocks. Ground.
Get up, Nikolai. Get up or you’ll drown.
Noise. Up! Up! Up!
Ruff! Ruff! Ruff!
Pain explodes in my head and my legs as my head breaks the surface of the waves. My chest is on fire. What happened? In front of me I see Samson and Delilah barking feverishly.
I’m on my knees in the rocky bottom off the shore below the cliffs. And I can’t breathe.
“Wha–”
As soon as my mouth is open, I cough up a lungful of seawater. The salt burns like acid as it flows out, but when it’s over I can breathe. In short snatches, but it’s air and it tastes as good as the fancy wine in my cellar.
“Ruff! Ruff! Ruff!”
The dogs are dancing frantically around me in the water. As I catch my breath, I feel pain in my wrists. I look down to see dozens of angry red indents in the flesh there. My throat clenches as I realize what happened.
“Did you pull me to shore?” I croak weakly. “Good dogs. Such good dogs.”
They settle and lick my face tenderly, as if they understood me. After a few moments, I manage to get to my feet and navigate the rocks until I reach the
shore. Once there, I collapse on my back, the dogs snuggling in on either side of me.
I assess my situation: I’m below the cliffs. I took in water, but I can breathe. Every muscle is sore. My head is on fire.
Gingerly, I reach up to the source of the agony and come away with blood on my hand. It’s alarming, but there’s not as much as I’d feared, given the amount of pain.
Suddenly my mind’s eye is flooded with a clear memory: kneeling. Looking up at Storm. Pressure and pain in my head. Falling. A flash of green hair. Screams.
Storm’s screams.
I sit bolt upright, prompting a wave of nausea and a fresh jab of agony from my wound. My body shivers uncontrollably from lack of oxygen and the after-effects of shock. That’s not good.
“We have to help her,” I groan to the dogs. “Storm’s in danger.”
They sit at attention, whining, confused. They need orders.
I focus on my breathing, trying to clear my mind of everything that isn’t useful, rational thought. No fear. No pain. Just reason. Figure it out, Nikolai. Find the solution.
There’s no way I can get up the cliffs under my own steam. I have no means of communication down here. The closest thing I have is the radio in the boat, but it’s locked up tight. The key is in the house.
The idea comes to me in a flash. It’s going to push their limits, but they can do it. They have to do it.
I pull off my sodden T-shirt, arms aching with every movement, and wring it out as best I can while the dogs look at me with tilted heads.
“Gonna go for a run,” I husk. “That’ll be fun, right?”
Their tails wag tentatively.
I wind the shirt tightly, stretching it with each twist, until it becomes a makeshift rope. Then I tie one end onto Samson’s collar. Once that’s secure, I do the same with the other end on Delilah’s collar. The two are now connected at the neck by a black band of fabric.
Now for step two. I slide the belt from the waist of my jeans and place my arms over the shirt, so that I’m lying between the two dogs with my arms across the rope like the kitten on that old Hang In There poster.
Finally, I strap the belt diagonally over my shoulder like a bandolier and secure it under the shirt rope. Now, even if I lose my grip, I won’t go flying off.