by Jagger Cole
“You are free now, little one,” I growl quietly.
I turn, and I walk out of the apartment. I head down the hall, down the flights of stairs to the courtyard. I can hear the sirens and the screeching of car tires. I can see the flashing lights. They’re waiting for me.
I’m covered in blood. It was never going to be “no time at all” in prison for the crimes I committed today. But after this? I smile thinly. After this, there will be no prison. They’ll hang me for this.
But that’s okay. I pause in the lobby of the building. Outside, I can see the police cars skidding to stops, and police with guns crouching behind them. The grey, dirty courtyard is littered with beautiful, brightly colored butterflies.
It’s okay that this is the end. I brought a lot of hurt into this world. But I did one good thing. That’s what matters.
I push open the doors, and I step out into the blinding police search lights. They scream at me to put my hands up. I keep walking. They scream again, and I close my eyes as I reach back for my gun.
But then suddenly, I hear a soft voice scream “nyet!” I start to turn, but she gets to me first. Her small arms wrap tight around me, hugging me as she plants herself between me and the police.
“Nyet!” She screams, squeezing her eyes shut. “Nyet! On spas menya!!” He saved me.
They keep screaming at her to get away from me. But suddenly, they charge instead. My hands go up, I wince when they yank her away from me. Then they slam me to the ground and wrench my blood-soaked arms back to handcuff me.
I’m going to prison forever. But I’m not dead and full of police bullets. And as they lead her away, I smile.
I did one good thing. And that good thing just saved my life.
Present:
Inside the safe house, I can finally breath. I’ve been looking over my shoulder the whole way here. I took the long way, even though she’s wounded, because I had to. I doubled back, made false turns, and changed course ten different times before I finally slipped in. And now, we’re safe. At least for the moment.
I look down at Nina, and my mouth thins. She’s okay; I know that. I stopped two dozen times on the way here to make sure of it. She’s out, but she’s breathing regularly, and the blood I felt soaking my shirt from her seems to have abated.
I storm across the big, window-walled foreman’s office. Below, the old weaving machines from when this was a garment factory lay still and dusty in the darkness. This is has been my sanctuary since I landed in this city. She’ll be safe here.
On the far side of the huge office, I lay her down on the big bed I brought in weeks ago. After the stone block I slept on for ten years in my frozen gulag hell, a warm bed seemed a luxury I’d never feel again. So did touching the softness of a woman again. Or seeing her at all, for that matter. But here I am, with all of that.
I lay her down. I frown as my eyes sweep over her sleeping form. There’s blood on her clothes. Her pulse is fine, and her breathing steady, but I haven’t had time to examine her—to make sure she’s not wounded too badly from the blast.
I snarl to myself. Once again, whoever is after her almost hurt her. I know it’s the same piece of shit who was in her home, defiling it. I was rushing back to the hospital when my phone alerted me to the blast of the window mortar being tripped. After that, there was no hesitating, only going in hot.
The men I killed tonight were the same ilk from the car crash that put her in that hospital. It’s not like I had time to examine them. But I could see the smattering of random Bratva and other criminal ink. Those men were mercenaries, just like the crash. Half of the men Viktor had watching her are dead. The rest wounded. If I hadn’t been there…
My eyes squeeze shut tightly. I can’t think of that. I can’t allow myself to go there. I spent ten years wondering what became of the angel that saved me. I didn’t just find her now only to lose her. I won’t lose her.
I open my eyes and grab the switchblade from the side table. I lean over her, and bring the knife to her half-shredded, bloody clothes. They cut away easily, and suddenly, she’s bare before me.
A better, good man might look away. But I am not a good man. And there isn’t a force in this world that could stop my eyes from drinking in every inch of her in this moment. I’ve seen her from afar. I’ve watched her strip and seen her touch herself beneath the sheets.
I’ve never seen her like this, though. Not from inches away. Not when I could put my hands on her right now and take her every which way I please. I groan as my gaze sweeps over her utterly perfect nakedness—her soft, full tits, the way her tummy slopes, the curve of her hips, and the plain white, half-transparent hospital panties pulled snug across her cunt.
I growl quietly. But I quell the roar of the beast inside of me. I take a breath, and I reach for the first aid kit. My hands skim her wounds lightly, cleaning and dressing the smattering of cuts and scrapes from the blast. She has a gash on one arm that may require a stitch or two later. But I have neither the tools or small enough hands to do that. I clean and dress it instead, which will suffice.
When I’m done, I go over every inch of her skin once more. I groan, dizzy from the smell of her—lightheaded from the heat of her soft skin and nearness of her.
My jaw clenches. My head sways. I’m… tired. I feel weakened. I raise my head, and I groan. It’s not just her, I am actually light-headed. I stand and look down at myself. The stain on my shirt from her blood have gotten bigger. I frown and peel my shirt off, and then I wince.
Shit. It’s not her blood; it’s mine.
The room sways. I reach for the first aid kit, but it falls out of my grip and onto the floor I go to pick it up, but the floor swings up to smack me in the face. My vision fades. I manage to raise my head up just enough to look at her once more, lying asleep on the bed.
She will live. Just like before, a sacrifice for a greater innocence. A fair trade of broken and bad for good and innocent.
My vision fades out, and I know nothing but blackness.
13
Nina
Moscow, Six Years Ago:
“Yesh’ svoyu yedu!”
Dima glares at me across the tiny kitchen table. “Eat your food,” she snaps again.
The single, bare bulb casts sickly shadows across the crumbling kitchen. I look down and poke at the “food” my foster mother has set out, which might actually be cat food. These days, it’s anyone’s guess what I’m eating, or if I’ll eat at all.
It was bad when Bogdan was still alive, spending all of the government money they received to care for me on alcohol and prostitutes. And yet somehow, it’s gotten worse with him gone. Without the tyranny of her husband constantly belittling and abusing her, Dima has really come into her own.
The only problem is, “her own” is a ruthlessly cold and cruel women with huge addictions to gambling and crack-cocaine.
Watching the stranger break down our door and murder Bogdan with his bare hands should have given me nightmares for life. Instead, it was one of the best days of my life. I still have no idea who he was. And when I try and remember what he even looks like, it’s vague. When we’d wave across the courtyard at each other, he was always blurry. Dima and Bogdan refused to believe I needed glasses, and it’s only been in the last two years that a teacher at school went out and bought a pair for me.
Even the night he freed me, I can’t really put his face together in my mind. It being streaked with blood, dirt, and sweat doesn’t help things. But the blinding fear and emotion of rushing between him and the police with guns blurs it even more.
Whoever he is, though, I know he’s gone forever. But I’ll always remember what he did for me—or at least what he tried to do for me.
I’m not getting beaten and threatened with worse from Bogdan every day anymore. That’s a serious improvement. But life hasn’t exactly turned into a fairytale since that day. We’re even more poor now than we were then, with Dima spending all of our money on drugs and dog racing.
/> Worse, in the last year and a half, she’s started “seeing people”—men who come to our apartment at night, cash in hand, and disappear into her room with her for small periods of time.
I’m not an idiot. I’m young, but I understand what she’s doing. She’s not doing it for survival, though—not for food or to better our lives. She’s doing it to supplement her drug habit and pay off the constant debts to the dog tracks.
I block it out as best I can. But in the last few months, as I’ve started to grow up, the men have started to get… curious. Eyes wander, looks linger longer than they should. Eyebrows raise in a subtle question as they hesitate to give their money to Dima.
Or worse, the question isn’t subtle at all.
I spend all day, every day, even the weekends, at school or in the library. At night, I hide behind the bedroom door I fixed myself, which locks from the inside with a chain and a padlock I stole from a store.
I’m still in hell. But one day, I’m getting the fuck out of here. For myself, yes. But also because I owe it to the man who sacrificed himself to save me from Bogdan.
“Nina!” Dima snaps. “Eat your fucking food—”
A knock at the door interrupts her. She grins—another Pavlovian response. A knock at night means she has a man visiting. That means cash, and that means she can run down to the corner for a fix as soon as she gets this part over with.
She rushes to the door and swings it open.
“Da?”
“Skol’ko?” How much, the man grunts.
I quickly stand from the table and turn to go hide in my room.
“Five-thousand rubles,” Dima tosses back. I do the currency conversion in my head, from what I’ve been reading about in the financial books at the library. It’s about sixty US dollars.
The man scoffs. “Nyet, nyet. Three-thousand.”
“Four.”
He grunts and pushes Dima inside. “Da, okay.”
I start to scurry down the hall to my room. But then I hear him speak again.
“Wait.”
I don’t, though I can tell he’s talking to me.
“You! Girl!” he barks. “How much for you?”
I just shake my head as I dart into my room. I’m fumbling for the lock when I hear him storm down the hall towards me. Dima yells at him to hurry up and come with her.
“Ya bol’she ne khochu babusku!” He snaps back, clearly drunk. I don’t want a grandmother anymore.
My hands tremble, but I manage to click the lock shut just as he slams against my door.
“Hey!” He grunts. “Malen’kaya shlyukha!” Little whore.
I grit my teeth. “I’m not a whore.”
He chuckles. “No? So I will be your first, da?”
“Go away!”
I hear him snarl. Then I gasp and jump as he slams against the door.
“Open this!” he slurs. “Open this and open your legs for me, whore!”
He slams into the door again. The nails holding the chain to the wall begin to creak. I pale and back away. He slams into the door once again, and one of the nails pops free. In a panic, my eyes search the room for something—a weapon, anything. But suddenly, the door smashes in entirely.
I scream and back away as the mean-looking man grins and lurches into the room.
“Don’t worry, I will pay.”
“Stay away from me.”
“I do not think I will be able to, malen’kaya shlyukha,” he chuckles.
Suddenly, I hear the smashing sound of the door to the apartment breaking in. I hear Dima scream and yell, and then a man’s deep, thunderous voice telling her to stay back.
“Gde ona?” He barks at my foster mother. Where is she?
My heart sinks. Horror creeps over my skin. I hear him stomping down the hall, and I cringe as the first man turns in frustration.
“Otva ‘li!” He snarls through the doorway. “Fuck off, asshole!”
He goes to shut the half-broken door to my bedroom. But suddenly, it slams in, crashing off its hinges and almost smashing into the first man. I gasp as a tall, built, handsome and wealthy looking man in a suit storms in. He scans the room with deep blue eyes, and they lock on to me.
“You are Nina?” he says in Russian-accented English.
I nod, wide-eyed. “Da,” I whisper.
The first man hisses and saunters up to the new one. “Who the fuck are—”
“None of your business.” The new man shoves the first aside with one hand, sending him sprawling to the floor.
“Nina, I—”
“Suck a dick, motherfucker!” The first man jumps up from the floor and throws a wild fist. But the tall handsome man easily dodges him, grips his shirt collar, and sends him tumbling across the floor again.
“Do not interrupt me,” he snarls. Then he frowns and turns back to me. His face softens, though his eyes stay piercing. He walks towards me, but for some reason, I’m not terrified. Somehow, I know I can trust him—that he’s a friend.
He slowly sinks to a knee in front of me, and he smiles. But then his brow furrows. He reaches out and pushes a strand of my hair aside. He scowls at the bruise on my temple—a present from Dima last week when I accidentally threw a betting stub from the tracks away.
“How did you get this, Nina?” The man says softly.
I say nothing. Life has conditioned me to say nothing, to point no fingers.
“You can tell me,” he says gently.
“I—” I close my mouth, but eyes slide to the door, where Dima is watching, wide-eyed. The man in the suit slowly turns, following my gaze. I see his jaw clench as he rises to his feet and storms over to Dima. With a snarl, he grabs her and shoves her against the wall, making her scream.
“Was it you!?” He hisses furiously.
“Pozhaluystya!” She sobs. Please.
The man snarls. His eyes drop to the burn marks on her hands and arms, and then to those on her lips, and the yellowed teeth. He shakes his head in disgust.
“You are done pretending to be a mother—foster or otherwise. You are finished with that. If I hear that you’ve fostered another child, I will come back, and I will kill you with my bare hands.”
Dima’s face turns to ash.
“Vy ponimayete?” Do you understand?
She nods.
“Louder,” he snarls.
“Da!” She screams. “Da!”
The man in the suit turns back to me. But suddenly, the man on the floor lunges to his feet. He pulls a blade out of his pocket. With a snarl, he rushes at the bigger man. Without even blinking, or even taking his gaze away from me, the man in the suit suddenly pulls a gun from his suit jacket, raises it to the side, and pulls the trigger.
The dirty man with the knife drops instantly, smoke curling from a hole in his chest. I stare, my heart racing, my mouth dry. Slowly, I blink, and I drag my eyes back to see the man in the suit standing right in front of me. He slowly puts the gun away and sinks to his knees again.
“Nina, my name is Viktor Komarov, and I am your half-bother.”
I stare. My heart thuds inside my ears. I know he’s a stranger. But I still somehow know he’s telling the truth. I don’t know how, but I just know.
“Would you like to come with me?”
My hands tremble. “Where?” I breathe.
“Away from here, forever. To America. To a new life.”
I don’t even need a second to respond.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Good.”
He takes my hand. I take nothing with me. I don’t even give a final look at Dima or the hell that’s been my world my whole life. He leads me out the door and into a whole new life. And I never once look back.
Present:
Kostya’s eyes flutter, and my heart skips.
“Thank God,” I breathe quietly to no one. He blinks, and his eyes flutter again. Then, they finally open. He winces, and then frowns as he takes in his surroundings… on the floor, with a pillow under his head.
“How do you feel?”
He frowns. “Alive.” He glances around in puzzlement.
“I was still out, but you must have fallen from your blood loss. I couldn’t move you because you’re so big. So I did the best I could here on the floor.”
He starts to sit up. I wince and go to stop him, but he shakes his head. “I’m okay.” He sits the rest of the way up and leans his head back on the edge of the bed. Then he looks down gingerly, his eyes sliding over his bare chest and the bandages I patched him up with. He glances down at the bandage over his wrist, with the needle catheter sticking out of it.
“I, uh…” I frown. “You lost a lot of blood. So I took a guess on your blood type based off that tattoo…” I point to the little black “O-” near his forearm, surrounded by tons of other tattoos. “O negative?”
Kostya nods.
“Me too.”
He frowns, but his lips curl. “You gave me blood?”
I nod quietly. “I took a few EMT and first aid classes a while ago. Actually, we can take that out.”
Kostya looks at me in silence while I slide it out of his arm and rebandage it, like he’s drinking me in. But the look has a sort of unbelieving reverence to it, too. He’s so dangerous looking and so gorgeous. It’s like there’s a magnetism to him that I can’t pull away from. A force of nature that draws me to him, making me ache to be closer.
“You are here,” he says quietly.
I frown, and he smiles. “I mean, you’re still here. You didn’t run.”
“I wasn’t going to leave you.”
His brow furrows. “Why?”
I look down. “You saved me. Twice.”
His mouth grits. “You still could have run.”
“I know.”
“Maybe you should have.”
I tremble with heat as his eyes burn across my skin.
“Why?”
“Because I am what I am, Nina,” he growls. “Because I am the bad, dangerous man you see me as.”
“I don’t see you as bad,” I whisper softly. “I see you for what you are. And if you wanted to hurt me, you would have.” I rake my teeth across my lip, letting my eyes absorb him in silence.