Secrets

by Terry Towers

  Secrets

  By

  Terry Towers

  Secrets

  Copyright 2014 by Terry Towers

  Cover By: Erin Dameron-Hill

  edhgraphics.blogspot.ca

  All rights reserved. With the exception of brief quotes used for critical reviews and articles no part of this book may be used or reproduced without the written permission of the author Terry Towers. Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. Terry Towers can be contacted via her website at www.elixaeverett.com

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via internet or other means, electronic or print without the authors permission. Criminal copyright infringement without monetary gain is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000. (http://www.fbi.gov.ipr/). Please purchase only authorized electronic or print editions and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted material.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the authors imagination and used fictitiously.

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  Prologue

  Anastasia

  I could hardly believe what I’d just done. My entire body froze in a state of shock as I looked down at my husband’s limp body at my feet. It wasn’t until the remainder of the broken crystal vase slipped from my fingertips and the remaining glass shattered as it hit the floor that I was jolted from my state of horror.

  “Please God, don’t let him be dead.” As I silently prayed he’d still be alive, a part of me wanted nothing more than to see him gone from this earth for good. I’d have done the world a service if he were. My husband, of just shy of two years, was a true monster of a man. Despite a part of me longing to see the earth rid of him for good, it couldn’t be by my hand. Admittedly, I was weak and didn’t have it in me to do it. I’d been a lot of things and done a lot of things to survive in my meager twenty-two years on this earth, but being a murderer wasn’t one of them.

  Dropping to my knees beside him I pressed my fingers to the side of his neck and let out a sigh of relief; his pulse was strong. I’d only knocked him out. However, the three-inch bleeding slash on his left cheek defiling his otherwise devilishly handsome face would no doubt scar, a lifetime reminder of his wife’s betrayal.

  “Mamo, are you okay? Mamo!” I turned to see Ura, my beautiful five-year-old son, stepping into my bedroom, his blue eyes wide with concern as he looked at me and then down at the man he’d considered his father for the past couple of years. “What’s wrong with Daddy?”

  He took a step into the bedroom and I raised my palm to him, stopping him in his tracks. “Go to your room, Ura. Go to your room and pack as much of your favourite toys in a bag as possible, okay, baby? And your clothes. All your favourite clothes.”

  “Why, Mamo?” Ignoring my warning he took another step into the room. His brow furrowed as his eyes caught sight of my face and pointed at me. I could feel my lip beginning to swell and the tenderness around my right eye. “What happened? Daddy do that? Daddy hurt you again?”

  Again. I cringed at his choice of the word.

  “What happened to Daddy?” The look of concern and confusion in his expression deepened.

  “We had a little accident, Ura, now do as you’re told and gather your toys, NOW!” I lowered my face, blocking his view of my injuries. I’d been trying so damned hard to keep the bruises and scars from my son, but they’d been becoming more frequent and more intense lately. It was becoming incredibly hard to hide them from the world – what little bit of the world my husband permitted me to see, that was. I went where I was told to go, when I was told to go there, and always under the supervision of my husband or one of his goons. I wasn’t a wife – I was a slave masquerading as a wife.

  The blonde-haired boy hesitated, took one more look at my husband and nodded his head in agreement. “Da, Mamo.”

  Surprised to hear him answer in Ukrainian, our mother tongue with a perfect accent, my head jerked back around to watch him exit the bedroom. He barely spoken a word of Ukrainian since we arrived in Miami. Ukrainian was forbidden to be spoken here; Russian and English were the only acceptable languages in Alexander Vetrov’s home.

  I looked down at my husband and sighed. How long before he woke back up? I had no clue. He’d hit me so hard a couple of times recently that I’d been out cold for over a half an hour. But that was me, a hundred and twenty pound, 5’6 female after being struck by a large, muscular man. Not wanting to take any chances I rushed to the closet and pulled out the “pleasure trunk” as Alexander liked to refer to it as, filled to the brim with various BDSM toys. His pleasure, but certainly not mine and I had the scars – quite literally – to prove it. With Alexander there were no “safe words,” the games ended when he was ready to end them or I passed out and not a moment sooner.

  Opening the trunk with trembling hands I found a couple of pairs of handcuffs and rushed back to him. With great effort I managed to pull his body close enough to the cast iron radiator that I was able to cuff him to it. He was a strong man, but there was no way he was breaking free from that radiator. The only way he was getting free was when the housekeeper came in in the morning and found him there.

  I didn’t even want to consider the rage he’d be feeling when he was freed. But that would be fine, Ura and I would be long gone. If we stayed he’d kill us both, I was as certain of that as I was of taking my next breath.

  Alexander Vetrov was never betrayed or humiliated by anyone without consequences and he sure as hell wouldn’t be by the person he considered his whore of a trophy wife, a wife he’d bought and brought to America for less than the price of a new Kia sedan.

  Once Alexander was secure I grabbed a large suitcase and entered our massive walk-in closet. The closet was as big as the one-room apartment Ura and I had shared back in Ukraine before Alexander stepped into our lives. It was filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of luxury designer clothes, everything from Hermes to Chanel and Gucci.

  Growing up poor I didn’t need nor ask for those things, but Alexander insisted on it. Not only did he have to have the most beautiful of trophy wives he could buy, but she had to be the best dressed in the most expensive of designers. He claimed he was buying me these things to make me happy, but I knew the truth. The only person Alexander cared about was himself and his image of wealth and perfection – the perfect over-the-top mansion, the perfect car, the perfect wife, the perfect family. The beauty and perfection helped to hide the darkness within him from the world.

  Opening the case on the floor I began pulling clothes from the neatly stacked piles and from the hangers. Without even bothering to look at what I was grabbing I tossed several pairs of shoes on top of the clothing and zipped it closed. With the suitcase full I grabbed a duffle bag and began tossing some of my jewelry, makeup and toiletries inside. When it was almost full I rushed from the bedroom with the duffle bag on my shoulder and pulling the heavy suitcase behind me, and I made my way into Alexander’s den.

  Pulling the painting from the back wall, I uncovered his den safe. I’d noticed the code he’d pressed into the safe one day a few months back and made a mental note of it – just in case. In the back of my mind, for well over a year now, I knew this day would come. Quickly I pressed in the code and with a soft beep the safe acknowledged it and the door swung open. I’d hoped to see my and Ura’s passports and identification inside, but neither were. Bastard.
However, there were a couple of bundles of cash, marked five thousand on each and numerous bundles wrapped in brown paper the size of bricks – cocaine. I took the cash and left the cocaine.

  Ten thousand would last us a while, but with no identification and no way to get a legitimate job without Alexander tracking us down it wouldn’t last forever. I paused; was this the right choice? I was putting myself and Ura on the run, possibly for the rest of our lives. A lifetime of looking over our shoulders was a very long time. Going to the police was pointless, he had half of the Miami police on his payroll and that was only the bottom level of his contacts. Men like Alexander didn’t get charged with domestic abuse.

  Maybe if I begged Alexander’s forgiveness…

  I huffed. There was no mercy or kindness within my husband. He’d kill me and Ura and just replace me with a fresh new girl; a girl who had dreams of escaping her life of destitution for that of white knights and a marriage full of love and happiness, to have her dreams shattered by the reality. Like I had been.

  I’d been young and foolish, full of dreams when Alexander found me and brought me to America, but now, at twenty-two years of age, I wasn’t either of those things any longer. My life with Alexander added years to me well beyond my actual age.

  ~*~*~*~

  “Where we going, Mamo?” Ura asked as we looked up at the board of departures at the bus terminal.

  I don’t know, I silently answered him.

  All I knew was that we needed out of Miami as soon as we could. We needed to put as much distance between us and Alexander as possible. We should have until morning before anyone rescued Alexander, but you could never know; his brother, a dirty cop taking money on the side from my husband, may show up at the house and let himself in. His bodyguard could show up and hear him screaming and break a window to rescue his boss. There were a thousand different scenarios that could play out. The quicker and the further we could get from Miami the better.

  My eyes fell onto the listing for Bangor, Maine. It left in ten minutes. Would we be better off in a little city or in a large metropolis like New York City where a person could get lost in a sea of faces? But New York was expensive; we could live a lot better and for a lot longer in Maine with the cash I had stuffed in my duffle bag.

  “Mamo?”

  I looked down at my son and gave him a smile. “Bangor or New York, which one do you want to go to?”

  Without hesitation he answered Bangor. Perhaps leaving him the decision of where we were going to run off to was a foolhardy choice, but it was as good as any. There were pros and cons to both cities.

  “Then Bangor it is, любий.”

  Ura beamed up at me, proud to be part of the decision-making process even though he was in the dark as to what was going on. To him this was just a fun adventure and I had no intention of enlightening him.

  Chapter 1

  Alexander

  Fucking whore! I’m going to kill that fucking bitch when I get my hands on her.

  “You need a hand, Sir?” After uncuffing me from the radiator my bodyguard, Boris, extended his hand to me to assist me up, fuelling my anger. What did he think? That I was a goddamned invalid!

  “I don’t need your fucking help. Get the fuck away from me.” The anger flared through every muscle in my body, demanding I lash out. It was taking every ounce of restraint to stand and not use Boris as a punching bag. He’d take it – every blow. He was a good little minion.

  My head throbbed like a jackhammer as if it were attempting to break through my skull and the feel of the dried blood on the side of my head, cheek and neck was a reminder of that bitch’s betrayal.

  “Who did this?”

  “My fucking cunt of a wife, that’s who.” I gave Boris a shove out of my way and made my way into the master bathroom to survey the damage, my ego stinging over the humiliation of allowing my wife to do this. My jaw clenched as I looked at my reflection in the mirror above the sink; there was a long inflamed cut along my cheek. It was deep, nearly slicing all the way through my cheek. No doubt it would scar. It was throbbing like a son of a whore.

  BITCH!

  The anger within intensified to deadly proportions. What I’d do to her when I got my hands on her, she’d feel more pain in the hours before her death than she’d ever felt in her life and I’d love every second of it. I’d been taking it easy on her, not wanting to mark her up too bad because she needed to be presentable. She needed to be perfect for all to see. But when I found her… A tight smile formed on my lips as images of her naked, screaming, begging for her life and for the pain to stop, raced through my mind.

  “She ran with the kid?” Boris asked from the open doorway.

  “You fucking tell me, I’ve been cuffed to a radiator all night. She’s gone isn’t she?” When Boris didn’t answer I looked away from my reflection to glare at him. “Isn’t she?”

  “There’s no sign of her or the kid, Sir.”

  Taking one last look at myself in the mirror, I turned away in disgust. She’d scarred me, turned me into a deformed freak. “I want you to find her.”

  “And then what?”

  Despite the rage within me, I smiled. “Just get her back. Alive. I want the pleasure of watching her die.” There were more where she came from; beautiful women were nothing more than accessories and came cheaply enough.

  Boris nodded and turned to leave.

  “Wait.”

  He halted in his tracks and slowly spun to face me again. “Yes, Sir.”

  “And let’s keep this to ourselves for now. Not even a word to my brother.”

  He nodded. “Of course, Sir.”

  Anastasia

  “Їж, любий.” I tapped the edge of Ura’s paper plate with my index finger. I knew I shouldn’t be using our mother tongue with him; we needed to fit in, not stand out, and re-teaching him Ukrainian after the past two years of weaning him out of it would do no good. Bangor was small compared to the cities I’d visited and lived in. It was extremely easy to stand out and speaking a foreign language like Ukrainian put us on the fast track to questions about our background.

  For the past month we’d been living in a dingy, worn motel room, wasting $30 a night on a dump in a rundown part of town. That being said, in comparison to the city I’d been living in before coming to America, a rundown part of Bangor was top grade. $30 wasn’t much, but it was close to $1000 a month; a decent two-bedroom apartment here ran roughly $700 a month. We desperately needed an apartment, but every time I looked at a place they wanted identification. Money alone wasn’t cutting it. The only place that was willing to overlook the fact we were without ID, the man made it clear he would want something more intimate from me than money – something I was no longer willing to sell, not again, not ever. We weren’t that desperate and there were still other options, like the motel room. I wanted nothing more than a fresh start for us, and to never again look back. I just wanted to forget.

  “I don’t like this place, Mamo.” Ura frowned at French fries and fried clams courtesy of the seafood restaurant across the street. “I miss home.”

  I grimaced. The first few days were fun for him, like an adventure, but living in one room was wearing on him. He’d become accustomed to living a life of excess, with an abundance of toys and so many activities to choose from that he couldn’t get bored in a thousand years. A tiny television with a half a dozen channels and his backpack of toys just weren’t cutting it anymore.

  “I wanna swim. I miss Kono.” He frowned, tears welling up in his eyes.

  “We can go to the public pool. And we can get you a new pet.”

  “Like Kono?”

  “любий, Kono, was a Rottweiler, we can’t have a dog that big in an apartment. But maybe a cat, or some fish?” Crouching down so I was at eye level with him, I caught his gaze, staring into deep blue eyes that were identical to mine. “It won’t be much longer.” I forced a smile onto my lips. “We meet with someone tonight about a place.”

  He s
tabbed a clam with his fork. “It’s no fun no more.”

  “I know.” Slipping my hand to the back of his head, I pulled him forward and pressed my lips to his forehead. “It’ll get better honey, it’ll get better.”

  ~*~*~*~

  Jaxson

  “Mr. Langley, there’s a young woman and a child here to see you.”

  Rolling my eyes I looked up from the stack of bills I was sorting through and at my newest shooter girl, Tammy LeFleur. She was a horrible shooter girl. I’d lost count of the amount of trays of drinks she’d spilt and glasses she’d broken. At least she was polite. “How many times do I have to tell you, call me Jaxson. Please.”

  “Sorry… Jaxson. She said she was here about the apartment.”

  I groaned inwardly. I’d completely forgotten about the appointment to show the vacant apartment above the bar with the young woman who’d called earlier. Friday nights were busy at the bar and I was worse than swamped tonight; had it not been for the fact she sounded so fucking sexy on the phone I would have told her to wait until the next week. Sadly, I’m a pushover for a beautiful woman – hell, any woman really. My cock had a tendency to rule me and cause me to make decisions against my better judgment – this was no exception.

  “Tell her I’ll be right out.”

  “Okay Si– Jaxson.” Tammy fled my office, pulling the door closed firmly behind her.

  Taking a moment to put the bills in order, I set them to the side to come back to later and got up from behind my desk. As I opened the door of my office, the thump of the music grew louder. Living above a bar wouldn’t be ideal for a woman with a child; she hadn’t mentioned a kid when she’d called. Why she’d even want to live above a bar was beyond me, but as long as her references checked out, she had the money for the rent and deposit, and she seemed sensible enough, who was I to judge the kind of parent she was?