by Zoey Parker
Besides, one glass of vodka wasn’t enough to send me spiraling.
It would be for Madeline, I though idly, remembering how she’d been tipsy by the end of her first drink. How she’d leaned closer to me, flirted. How she’d let my hand snake up beneath her dress to find the edges of her panties.
I did my best to suppress my shiver of desire. It was insane how much I still wanted her. This wasn’t exactly my typical reaction to a woman, though in all fairness, she was hardly a typical woman.
Crumpling up the napkin, I focused on the conversation behind me, waiting. People were starting to thin out. Those who had been lingering on the dance floor dissipated. The band was done, packing up, as a CD player somewhere in the back took over to play a soft melody that was just barely taking up space in the background. At the bar, Peter was already starting to shoo away the drunks and calling cabs for the unfortunate souls who were too far gone to drive.
I took another drink. All I had to do was be patient and then—
“I gotta take a leak, man.”
It was Logan, but I heard him too late. He was already up and moving past my table. He looked back, presumably to yell something to his friend, but froze when he saw me. There was a moment where our eyes met and I was startled by how much he resembled Madeline, how blind I was to have not seen it before.
The moment passed quickly, however, and then his eyes flickered down to my chest. I didn’t know what he was looking at, but in an instant, he was running. He knew who I was. Cursing, I got up from the table and chased after him. But the waitress had come back and I nearly ran into her. She squealed as I grabbed her by the upper arms and tossed her aside into one of the booths. She fell onto the cushions with a “Hey!” as her tray toppled to the floor. I heard glass break, but I was already hot on Logan’s heels and nothing else mattered.
Peter was speaking with a bouncer at the front door, so Logan redirected his escape route so he was heading towards the back, where I knew there were bathrooms and a door leading to the basement. Which wouldn’t have bothered me, except that there was also an emergency exit that would lead to the alleyway outside. I didn’t know if it would sound an alarm or not—they’d used it before as a delivery door since it was so much closer to the basement where they stored the excess—but I knew it wouldn’t be locked regardless.
Cursing, I pushed myself to run faster. And promptly ran into a pair of swaying, giggling girls, clearly trashed. I shoved myself through them; they only laughed. It seemed like everyone was just perfectly set up to be in my way and it was causing the gap between myself and Logan to lengthen quickly.
I was not happy.
He hit the door before I reached him and it popped open. A screeching blared through the building, resonating in my ears. Not pleasant, but I pushed it aside, following him out as I extracted the gun from my waistband. If there was an accomplice, then there was no reason I needed Logan alive, and now that he was no longer in the building, I wouldn’t have to worry about shooting any unsuspecting patrons.
I tore out of the building and rounded the corner, aiming my gun, but I was met with an empty alleyway. Nothing. I cursed again, lowering my gun. Where the hell had he gotten to so fast? There was a back end to the alley, so he could have gone around the backside of the building, but most of the parking was across the street, and I was hoping that was his destination.
Dashing to the front of the alley, I came to a careening halt just in time to avoid getting hit by a large red truck, dented on the side.
Logan.
I raised my gun and shot three times, aiming first for the window and then for the tires, but he swerved and sped and none of my shots hit their mark. I merely put neat little holes in his precious truck, though I noticed the hole in the back window, causing him to duck down and swerve the truck. He rounded the corner and suddenly, I’d lost him again.
“Fuck!” I yelled, spitting on the asphalt.
He’d gotten away and I was no closer to him than I had been at the beginning of the night. A moment later I was struck by my own stupidity: he’d left without his partner. Turning, I bolted to the front door, shoved past the bouncer who was trying to tell me that he wasn’t letting anyone else in, and towards the table where they’d been sitting earlier. It was empty. I cursed again. I’d lost them both.
A second later, I felt a large hand on my shoulder and spun around, gun at the ready. Peter, to his credit, barely flinched when I pointed it right in his face. He nodded once at me. “You’d better go. Between the emergency alarm and the gunshots, the police will be here soon. Easier to explain you away if you were never here, eh, comrade?”
I clenched my jaw in anger, but nodded. He was right. I left empty-handed.
Chapter 15
Madeline
It took everything I had to keep from throwing up. Nausea roiled in my stomach, the Chinese from that morning had seemed like such a great idea, but now it was threatening to come back up and I thought it was a horrible moment of poor judgment for me. Oh, how it seemed like I was having a lot of those lately.
I was sitting in class, trying to focus on the work in front of me. It was the Nikolai painting. As he stared back at me from the canvas, his bright eyes burning through to my very soul, I wondered just how much of that I’d really imagined.
Not enough of it, I thought distinctly, recalling the way his gaze seemed to rip right through me until he was underneath the flesh and muscle, clutching at my heart, wrapping it up like it was mine.
I let out a shaky breath. I needed to stop thinking about him and try thinking about Shawn, but it was no use. My body didn’t respond the way it needed to with Shawn, and though I loved him, I knew in my heart that love was merely the way I loved my brother or my father. He was family, and while that was special, it wasn’t the right kind of special.
I couldn’t marry him.
Sucking air in through my mouth, because smells were making my nausea worse, I tried to come up with some sort of way to let him down. Shawn was adamant about marrying me—about loving me—but I knew I couldn’t let it happen. If he would just start focusing on another woman, I knew he’d find love elsewhere.
Until then, I just had to ward him off.
I put a clear coat of paint over my painting, letting it streak in exaggerated, visible strokes from top to bottom in an effort to make the rain look shiny and noticeable. It was a fine line in art between capturing reality and capturing what something really felt like. I was doing my best, but it wasn’t quite right yet. There was something else missing.
Taking a little gold, I added flecks of it to a medallion around his neck. I wanted it to stand out as it always did for me in real life, but not obnoxiously so. I didn’t want it to be the sole focus, but I wanted it to be there, noticeable. Taking up some white, I added a little shimmer to it along the curved edge, but had to stop there. The smell of the paints was starting to get to me and I’d puke up all that Chinese soon if I didn’t stop.
I covered my mouth as I washed my brushes off. This was getting ridiculous. I sighed, acknowledging that I needed to go to the doctor soon. Although I knew I wouldn’t marry Shawn, I also knew he was right; I didn’t want an abortion. So even if I had to take care of this thing growing within me all on my own, I would do it. I had to keep the little thing, not just because of my upbringing, but because it was half Nikolai, which meant it couldn’t be all bad. I would have to go to the doctor and get checked up, make sure the baby was healthy, get prenatal vitamins for it. The whole nine yards.
I didn’t know how I would pay for it all yet, but I knew there was government assistance for single mothers. I was sure I would qualify for some sort of help. And if not, well, I guessed I would drop out of school. I’d finish out the semester, then go and get a job. Maybe after the baby was born I could see about reenrolling. It wasn’t the best of plans, but it was all I had at the moment.
Eventually, class was let out and I threw the tarp over the painting, protecting it again, thou
gh I could almost still feel Nikolai watching me from the canvas, his eyes piercing into my very soul.
***
When I got to my apartment, I had to shake off the feeling that something was different. It was probably just my imagination or maybe it was just some weird tick that came from being pregnant—god knew I’d picked up a few of those—so I ignored whatever intuition was trying to tell me. I went to unlock my door, but started when I found it was open.
It creaked open slowly and I froze, watching and waiting for it to reveal something terrible, something awful. Something that would devour me or destroy me.
But it was only my brother.
“Logan!” I ran inside, dropping my bag by the door, and threw my arms around him. It had been a while since I’d seen him last, and I was willing to admit that after Nikolai’s little visit I was more than a little concerned about my brother.
Was he really in trouble?
He hugged me back, but winced and quickly pulled away. I frowned. Glancing down, I finally saw it, the thing that was off and wrong about all of this. And the thing that had made him wince. His arm was haphazardly wrapped with shreds of what looked like one of my nightshirts—I’d give him hell for that later—and seeping through the baby pink fabric was a deep, brownish red color.
Blood.
“Oh, my god!” I slapped my hand over my mouth as I stared at it. “What happened?” I asked, though the words came out muffled. I hadn’t moved my hand away.
He grimaced, but I thought it was less from the pain and more to hide something else. Something in his expression that he was worried I might see. He looked away from me and down at his arm, putting his opposite hand over the bandage. “Do you have something to help with this?”
On some level I acknowledged that he had not answered my question, but I avoided it. But this wasn’t just by brushing it off. Instead, he’d picked up on an equally important thing, one I couldn’t ignore: taking care of him.
“Yes, of course. I’ll grab it!”
I hurried out of the room to the bathroom, stepping around the door. Jerking open the mirror cabinet, I searched through everything I had stuffed in there—stupid, useless tampons—until I came across the hydrogen peroxide, some rubbing alcohol, and actual bandages as opposed to a ruined nightshirt. Then I rushed back out to find Logan sitting on one of the chairs at the counter, leaning heavily across the kitchen surface. He was fiddling with his bandage, unwrapping it a little, I thought.
Coming up beside him, I brushed his hand away and picked up where he left off. We worked in silence for the most part. The bandage was dirty and stained beyond recognition, but that wasn’t my concern. When I got to the actual wound, I found it was a hole, small but clearly enough to do quite a bit of damage. It looked like there was an exit hole, as well, which I thought was probably good, but I wasn’t a doctor.
And that was the point, definitely. “Logan, you need to go to the hospital,” I said as I began to dab first peroxide on it; it bubbled up with tiny white bubbles that looked like puss, though I knew it was air forcing things to the surface in order to clean the wound, then the rubbing alcohol.
“No hospitals,” he said immediately in response, and his answer settled uneasily around me.
Why no hospitals? What really happened? The only reason you didn’t go to a hospital was when you didn’t want to be found. Had there been any truth to Nikolai’s words when he’d shown up here not so long ago, unannounced and worried?
“Seriously, Logan, this isn’t a joke, it’s—”
“No. Hospitals.” His voice was lower than I’d ever heard it, and dangerous. Like he was some feral animal, cornered and hurt and willing to fight its way through me to get to the door. My brother had never sounded like that in his entire life and I wasn’t thrilled to hear him like that now.
Biting my lower lip, I fell silent and continued to clean the wound. Gunshot wound, my mind whispered to me, but I pushed it aside. If it really were from a gunshot, he was in a lot of trouble and there was a chance, a good chance, Nikolai had said something along the lines of the truth that day.
I wasn’t sure what I would do with that.
When I finished wrapping it up, his arm still looking awful, but at least it was better with fresh bandages and I felt more confident that it had been thoroughly cleaned, I returned my attention to my brother. “Why won’t you go to the hospital, Logan?” I asked him, my gaze leveled at him evenly, unwavering. “What happened?”
He turned away, gingerly patting at the bandages with his uninjured arm. He was trying to come up with something to tell me, I knew, because he wouldn’t look me in the eyes. When he’d come up with something plausible—and likely not one hundred percent the truth—he’d turn back to me and explain what he wanted me to know.
But when he looked back to me, I found myself angry with him. I didn’t want to hear his lies. I didn’t want to be misled by my brother, because he’d gotten himself into some kind of trouble and was still trying to lie his way out of it. So much of our childhood had been like that, and while I loved my brother dearly, I wasn’t in the mood to be lied to.
Nikolai’s words flashed through my head and I interrupted Logan before he had the chance to say anything that would be a boldfaced lie. “Is it true?”
Logan blinked at me in surprise. “What?”
“Is it true? Did you really…did you steal money? From some bad guys?” I tried to remember how Nikolai had put it specifically, but it was difficult because all I wanted to remember was our lovemaking, the passion that had erupted between us like fireworks or lava or something equally as devastating.
He failed in that job and then he stole a lot of money. That man wants his money back. The words slipped through me now, dangerous and foreboding, and now, I thought, laced with more truth than they had been before. Oh, what did my brother get himself into?
Logan looked away, staring up at a corner of the ceiling where the walls of my tiny, ridiculous apartment met and I knew he was lying, or about to lie to me. It hurt to know that was what he was going to do, that he’d do it easily, too, but I pushed that hurt aside. I needed to know just how much trouble he was in.
“Logan, don’t lie to me. You’re in trouble, I know that much. Just tell me.”
He seemed to debate it in his head for a while, before finally grimacing. He looked at me, not quite in the eye, but at least he was staring at my face. “Okay, I did steal something, some money, but it’s not what you think.”
I frowned. What I thought? How could he steal? Had he just disregarded everything our father had raised us to believe? For a blazing second, I was furious with him. Then I remembered I had done some things that went directly against everything I’d ever been taught. It calmed me enough to remember that it wasn’t right to judge my big brother for his mistakes, lest I take a hard look at my own and realize the things I’d done wrong.
And I’d done a lot wrong lately.
So, I took a steadying breath and nodded my head once. “Okay. Fine. Let’s start with who did this to you,” I tried, doing my best to stay calm. Nikolai said a dangerous man was after Logan. Had that dangerous man done this to him?
Logan heaved a sigh that sounded a lot like relief. Probably because I wasn’t yelling at him. Yet. “A tall, dark man wearing some kind of medallion. You know, gold and gaudy, but it went with that dark suit he was wearing, so what do I know? He pulled a gun at me right in the open and tried to kill me. Didn’t even care that I was in a bar with people there! I don’t know his name, but—”
“Nikolai,” the name came out in a whisper, and I didn’t think my brother caught it, because he kept talking, though I was having a hard time hearing. My blood was rushing cold behind my ears and I felt a little like passing out. Surely it couldn’t have been Nikolai, right? But then…he’d known about Logan.
“…lucky that no one got hurt. Anyway, you just need to lay low.” He’s focused on me again, staring me straight in the eye. “Don’t tell anyon
e I was here, okay? It might be dangerous. But I’ll get this cleared up and we’ll be fine. Just keep your head down and pretend like you don’t know anything.”
He let out a whoosh of air, looking a little relieved. He offered me a smile, oblivious to the turmoil racing through me. Awful. I felt awful. He stood then, testing his bandage and arm one last time, then he moved towards the door. “Remember,” he called back at me before he exited the door. “Keep your head down and don’t tell anyone I was here.” Then he was gone and I felt sick to my stomach.
This couldn’t be happening.
Chapter 16
Nikolai
Officially, I was driving to the downtown art district for business alone. I needed to see if Madeline had any idea where her brother might be. She was not only the closest living relative geographically, but as his little sister, there was a good chance she would be more sympathetic to his plight than his father would be.