by Tilly Delane
I know full well that I’m playing a dangerous game.
Well, not dangerous, but stupid.
Stupid for my heart, stupid for my soul.
But I can’t help it. The man is addictive.
And the food is good. Maybe a little too good.
It’s Thursday morning and he’s brought me waffles in bed. Waffles! Not American style with bacon and syrup, which is also good, but Austrian style with hot cherries and whipped cream. I have no idea where he got them. He asked me what I fancied for breakfast and I told him that’s what I wanted, as a joke, and he found somewhere that delivers the very thing. Or maybe he knew where to source them already. He seems to have internalised the menu of just about every eatery in Brighton. And he sure knows how to use that knowledge.
I look down at my dwindling six pack when I step out of the shower and straight into the towel he is holding out for me then look at him, still as ripped as always, and groan. I’ve always been able to eat a lot for my size without piling on pounds, but I also tend to train a lot, which keeps my metabolism up to speed. I haven’t been for a run in a week now and it already shows.
I look mock disapprovingly at his six pack and scrunch up my nose as he towels me dry. His dick, which he’s only just used to my full satisfaction, is already semi-hard again, telling me he finds me as addictive as I find him. The knowledge gives me a thrill.
“What’s with the face, baby girl?” he asks me, while he takes much longer than strictly necessary to rub the terry cotton over my still throbbing clit.
I already know he’ll get me off again before we leave the bathroom, either finger fucking me gently or eating me out from behind as I stand over the sink. We’ve figured out that if he manages to wring a third, gentle orgasm out of me within half an hour of the first and the second, I hardly crash at all. Romantic that he is, he’s compared it to having a joint when you’re coming down from a coke high. Apparently, he used to do a lot of coke but now not so much. When I asked him why, he told me coke was good for building an empire but not so much for maintaining it.
“Kalina?” he asks me again. “What up?”
I poke his rock-hard abs with a finger.
“How do you do that? How do you stay this trim when you eat so much? You haven’t been sparring with Silas for over a week, you haven’t been back to your mansion to use the pool, but you look the same. Look at me!”
I pinch the skin on my belly to demonstrate.
He frowns.
“What am I looking at?”
“Fat.”
He laughs at that. Outright, until tears pool in the corners of his eyes. When he quietens again, he sprawls a hand across my belly.
“You are the trimmest girl I know, Kalina. A week’s not gonna make any difference,” he says, caressing my skin. “What do you do to look like this?”
“While I’ve been here, I’ve been running every day. At home, I weight train a little.”
I don’t tell him about the hand to hand combat. This lot are obsessed with MMA. If I tell him I do combat training, he’ll tell Silas and then Silas will drag me to the gym and then things are going to get even more muddled than they are already.
Diego examines me closely, while he lets his hand wander lower and slip between my folds. He caresses me lightly, gently milking the juices from me, increasing the pressure only slightly with each new coat of moisture that my pussy gives him to work with. Until he has enough to slide his fingers over my clit in leisurely circles, all the while carrying on the conversation.
“You look like a gymnast,” he says.
I smile.
“I may have been in my school’s gymnastics squad,” I admit.
“Hah. You ever considered MMA?”
I shake my head and feel shit for outright lying to him.
He doesn’t pursue it, though. He’s too busy making my body feel good.
And he makes it feel very good. I come on his hand within minutes, a sweet brush of an orgasm, amplified by his lips coming down to meet mine in a soft, loving kiss.
He withdraws his hands from between my thighs then bends down to pick me up and hold me in a tight hug for a few minutes, heartbeat to heartbeat.
When he sets me back down, there is a silent exchange between us. His eyes ask if I’ll be okay and mine let him know that I’m pretty sure I will be.
Then he looks down at his stomach, going straight back to our previous conversation.
“You know what? You’re right. I’m not going to stay like this either if I don’t do something again soon. And I really don’t fancy going home for a swim. My father is out for my blood at the moment.”
“Uh? Why?”
“He’s found out I’m selling the league. And he’s pissed off I didn’t come home last night, because he wanted to tear into me about it. Anyway, enough of that. You wanna go for a run later?”
“Absolutely,” I answer with a happy clap. “I’ve got to go and get my running shoes from Sheena’s, though.”
He cradles my cheek in his palm and smiles hesitantly.
“About that.”
“Yeah?”
“How would you feel about us bringing all your stuff here?” he asks but holds up his other hand before I can answer to signal that he isn’t finished. “Think about it before you say no. Because it’s going to get a bit crowded at Sheena’s again.”
I want to ask why, but then the penny drops.
“Rowan and Raven are really coming back?”
He nods.
“They are landing Monday morning.”
In typical Diego style, he leaves the bathroom to give me space to think about it. He has an acute sense for not crowding me. It’s something I’ve already come to appreciate about him.
The idea of moving in with him for the rest of my stay is insanity, but at the same time worth considering. Before Rowan and Raven went to the States, there was a week when all of us, other than Diego, were packed into Sheena’s house, and it was a nightmare. Six people. One bathroom. Not even funny. And I got far less work done than I have in the last few days here.
Also, Shoreham is out in the sticks, here I am physically much nearer to where Piotr and Zoltan disappeared, which makes me feel like I’m closer to the centre of the case itself.
I’ve set my laptop up in his spare bedroom and I’ve been working when Diego is in the office or down in the club. In actual fact, the peace and quiet up here has really helped me concentrate. I love Grace and Silas but being on permanent vacation means they’re very present all the time.
Konstantin suggested that if I’m still convinced that there is a connection between Piotr’s and Zoltan’s disappearance, I should go through all the missing persons cases from that year again, for the whole of the UK, and see if something strikes a chord. I attempted it before, but it’s a lot of cases. Well over one hundred thousand children and teenagers go missing in the UK every year and one to two percent of them stay lost. Most of them are in Piotr’s and Zoltan’s age range. That’s a lot of pictures and stories to go through, and after a while it becomes like scrolling through a list of varieties of the same product with different specifications ─ you just stop taking it in. So I could really do with the focus the penthouse affords me for a while longer.
And I really, really like this man.
I slip into the silk bathrobe he bought me on a whim two days ago, the reimbursement for which we are still haggling about, and follow him out.
I find him in the bedroom, already mostly dressed for work.
“Okay,” I say, and watch how he tries to suppress a smile while he buttons up his waistcoat.
“Great,” he answers levelly. “We’ll go and grab the rest of your things this afternoon.”
Diego
I only get to go running with her once before the weekend demands my return to my normal life-rhythm.
We’ve compromised for the last few days, somewhere between her early-riser-early-sleeper lifestyle and my never-go-to-bed-before-seven-in-the-morning-and
-sleep-till-at-least-noon routine.
It’s worked out well. At least for me.
Kalina’s classes at school seem to vary widely in start time, and I suspect she’s also been skipping a few, but that’s none of my business. And she clearly studies really hard to make up for it. She’s set herself up a proper little work corner in the spare bedroom.
It’s nice to be with somebody as driven and as capable of self-occupation. There is no moaning when I need to go downstairs for work, no demands on my time when I’m busy. I’ve never had a proper girlfriend before, but even the casual floozies I’ve always had hanging off my arms were normally more needy than Kalina is.
For me, changing my working hours has meant I’m available to spend more time with Julian in the office, rather than in the club, which doesn’t really need me now that the fights are moving out.
We’ve had Arlo up in the hills all week, but there’s been nothing to report. He tails Callum whenever he leaves, but Callum never seems to go anywhere, other than to the petrol station. Cormac apparently never leaves. Julian went up there to give Arlo a few hours off at some point and to train a camera at their gate from Arlo’s hideout. So we’d know if Cormac went out, while Arlo is on Callum. But nothing.
If Julian thinks the effort I’m putting into this, just to avenge an alley cat, is insane, he hasn’t said so. Thing is, for me it would be enough even if it had been ‘just’ Nuts, but I’m pretty sure that Callum tortured other animals, too, long before he and Cormac apparently got into the dog fighting business. I know so.
Callum was that kid who caught flies and ripped half their legs and wings off to laugh at them as they were going around in circles, who drove a spade through earthworms to see the two halves wriggle, and who put his own hamster in the microwave to watch it explode.
One thing we know for almost sure, though, is that they aren’t doing dogfights up there at present. Julian flew a drone over the grounds, while Callum was out and Cormac was inside the house, and while that confirmed that there are a couple of dogs back up there, Cormac appears to have swapped the pitties for a couple of Dobermans. Guard dogs. I wonder what they’re guarding. And I wonder where the pit bulls went that Rowan spoke about.
I’m a patient man, and I’m happy to play the long game, but right now I feel the need to bury Callum forever burning like a physical need.
I tried for years, long before Callum ran over that poor boy, to find out where he was getting his money from, hoping I could get him into shit with the rozzers. I knew he wasn’t getting it from his old man. Cecil O’Brien doesn’t bankroll any of his kids, unless they earn every penny. I was surprised when he set Cormac up with the small holding, makes me wonder what Cormac did to deserve that. But Callum is fucking useless. Though apparently brilliant at covering his tracks.
No matter how hard I had Julian look, no matter how many favours I pulled, I couldn’t turn up anything on him. Nothing. Not a bleeding morsel of incriminating info.
So I dreamed up other solutions, but I didn’t have quite the resources then that I have now. Or the time. Not by a wide margin. You can’t be waging a vendetta while you’re still building a business. Vendettas are for pudding.
Plus those were also the years that Silas wasn’t talking to me, outside of the bare necessities, and Rowan was MIA. Wars without an army you trust are doomed to fail.
I can’t wait for Rowan to get back to town.
Rowan’s different from the rest of us. Not just because he’s a fucking giant who would kill for the people he loves without thinking about it twice, but because he left Brighton for a few years, and in that time, he saw the kind of shit on the underground of the underground circuit that I might know about, but never had access to. Nor do I want to.
If even half the stuff Rowan told me when he was holed up at Woodland Drive with me, preparing for his big fight with Silas, is true, then he even played gladiator for the people at some point. No-rule fights, weapons and all, that leave maimed and dead bodies in their wake, held in disused tunnels and catacombs that only the people have access to.
The people compared to whom I’m just a bottom feeder. A single fucking piranha, playing at being a shark.
The people, who don’t go by definitions like Mafia, Bratva, Yakuza or whatever other idiotic name gets banded about. Because it’s beneath them. Because they all bear an uncanny resemblance to the same faces that have run this country for the last five hundred years.
The people to whom money is simply not of interest, because it’s always just been there, and whose perpetual boredom with life drives hobbies and desires that nobody, who isn’t as degenerated as them, wants to even think about.
There was a point when I thought maybe they’d actually got to Rowan. I wasn’t sure any longer, if the Rowan who loved Silas as much as I do was still in there, and I got seriously worried that he was actually going to kill his brother. But he came through. He played us all and had us fooled, which makes him a prime candidate for the job I need him to do.
Rowan’s dealt with the people and survived, in body and soul, so I’m pretty sure he’s got the balls to help me out here. He practically said as much.
If I can’t legit find out how Callum’s been financing his expensive car and clothes and the substantial coke habit he had before he went into prison, Rowan will help me create a little scenario instead.
I’m thinking of planting a substantial amount of class A’s. Meths seem a good choice. It’s cheap to buy and really pisses the judges off at the moment. Coke? Smack? Ah, chucks, here is a seven-year sentence, see you in three and a half. Meths? Into the can you go, throw away the key we will.
I always had Callum down as pushing product anyway, mostly because he liked to sample it a lot, but none of my contacts has ever bought from or sold to him. And there isn’t anyone around here in the narcotics business worth knowing who I haven’t asked.
I would have had Rowan on a plane the day after our video chat, but it turned out he and Raven had to sort out a more permanent visa solution for Raven first.
They haven’t said anything, but considering Las Vegas is only four or five hours drive from Phoenix, I’m pretty sure I know what that solution was.
Roll on Monday and bring me some newlyweds.
Kalina
“Weird choice,” Sheena says to me as she sits down on the spindly chair inside the cafe I have chosen for our lunch date, and looks around the shabby place. “Why here?”
I look at it through her eyes and understand why she would ask. It’s run down and smells slightly of chlorine. The marble tops of the tables are all cracked, the cracks showing up in that deep black you only get from a patina of dirt accumulated over a long time. No wonder we are the only customers, despite it being lunchtime. There are several dozen better options, nearer to The Palais and The Brick that I could have chosen from, when I asked her if we could meet up. But this is the place outside of which Daniel Mantas was knocked down, and while I’ve got nowhere further with my own work, I’ve been distracting myself by sticking my nose into Diego’s business. Or trying to, at least.
Ever since Rowan and Raven came back, the guys have been holed up in the Santos-Benson Security office plotting the downfall of Callum O’Brien. I’m not allowed into the meetings, but I hear enough on the fringes ─ when we’re all out for drinks, when Rowan and Silas come up to the penthouse to say hi to me, or when Diego is on the phone to any one of them ─ to be getting more and more intrigued. And to worry. For the guys, but also that my cover may get blown by association and jeopardise my case.
So I’m doing the ‘best defence is offence’ thing and have asked Sheena to meet me today, in the hope I can pick her brain. Sheena is acute, though, so I have to tread carefully.
“It’s close to the language school,” I answer her question, because I’m not going to give away my game just yet.
I’ve played Texas Hold’em with Sheena too often to show my bluff too early. Although I’m not sure I haven’t al
ready, when her gaze snaps back to mine from the pitiful display of paninis and bagels behind the counter.
“Cut the crap, Kalina,” she says.
The way she says it lets my heart slip into my gut. I’ve seen her do this to Silas. It’s the tone she has when you’re about to find out that she knows far, far more about your business than you could ever have dreamed of. But I’m not stupid enough to hand feed her incriminating information by reacting with anything other than the obvious.
“What do you mean?”
She cocks her head and smiles. The patented Sheena O’Brien ‘there ain’t nothing happening in this town I don’t know about, ducky’ smile.
I’m in deep shit.
“You haven’t been back to your language school in two months, Kalina,” she informs me. “I know, because I actually stopped by there to see if you wanted a lift home a few weeks ago, and they told me when your last day was. Kept my trap shut because I wanted to see where this is going. Had a feeling you were maybe sticking around for other reasons.”
I’m instantly relieved, because I realise she thinks I stayed because of my crush on Diego.
Heat creeps into my face but not because I’m embarrassed.
I feel genuinely guilty about having lied to this woman, who has been my landlady for nearly seven months ─ well, was until a few days ago ─ and who’s been like a totally non-intrusive surrogate mum all that time. It doesn’t matter that she thinks I was an eighteen-year-old, somewhat shy language student who needed nurturing when I came. I know for certain she would have treated me the same if I’d come to her house as Kristina Kaminski, twenty-four-year-old private investigator, looking into the disappearance of two teenage boys a couple of years ago.
But for as long as I thought the language school was at the heart of the case, it was important not to blow my cover.
Is it important to still maintain it now, I wonder?
Yes, there is serious prison time if I get caught having entered the country on false papers. But how likely is it that this band of criminals I’ve got myself involved with will grass me up? Sheena might not be directly involved in anything illegal, as far as I know, but I know she knows about every friggin’ thing her boys get into. And that includes Diego.