Bend For Him

by Hamel, B. B.

  “No, you didn’t. But you also didn’t have to come in and ruin my life.”

  “That wasn’t the intent.”

  “What was your fucking intent, then?”

  “To ruin your cousin’s life. You were collateral damage. If I weren’t for me, you’d be dead right now. If Pavel had his way—”

  “Fuck you. Fuck you, Leo.” I turned to him, rage flowing through me. “Fuck you.”

  “Okay,” he said, staring at me with expressionless eyes. “I hear you.”

  “No, you fucking don’t.” I took a step closer to him, my breath coming in fast. “Fuck. You. Leo.”

  “Okay.”

  I hit him in the chest. I slammed my palm against him, then slammed it again, then again. I hit him with my fists

  He took a step back. I hit him again, harder. He grunted, but let me do it. I hit him again, then curled my hand into fists, and punched.

  He caught my wrist. I screamed, struggling, hit him again.

  He turned me, twisted my wrist, and shoved me against the wall. My face pressed against textured wallpaper and I let out a soft gasp of pain as he locked my arm up.

  “Enough,” he said.

  “What, am I hurting you? You think that hurts?”

  “Enough,” he said again. “Okay? That’s enough.”

  “Let me go, big man. You’re so big and bad, let me go, let me go, let me go.”

  He let me go.

  I let out a surprised groan. He took a few steps away toward the bed. I rubbed my wrist.

  “I understand why you’re angry. But try to see this from my perspective. I didn’t put you in that house. I actually saved your life. I’ve treated you well, way better than anyone in my position would treat you. You’re a huge fucking liability, and yet I’ve saved your life not once, but twice. And the second time, I saved you from your own goddamn family. You still think I’m the enemy?”

  I stared at him, breathing hard.

  I walked him to him and hit him in the chest again.

  But there was no anger behind it. There was no force.

  He caught my wrist, but didn’t have to grip it hard to keep me at bay.

  I felt a sob rip itself from my chest.

  He was right. I knew he was right. My family tried to kill me yesterday. That man was sent by my uncle, and instead of trying to save me, he tried to strangle me to death. It would’ve worked if Leo hadn’t heard me fighting back.

  He turned my wrist, but this time he wrapped it around his neck and pulled me close against him.

  I cried into his shoulder. I felt stupid, like a pathetic little girl, but all the emotions that had built up over the last couple days came spilling out. He hugged me, held me, and let me sob like a little baby.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered. “It’s going to be all right. I know it hurts now. But it’ll be okay.”

  Sweet lies. Pleasant fictions.

  It wouldn’t be okay. My life as I knew it was over.

  Gone, everything gone.

  I don’t know how long we stood there. But he didn’t rush me and he didn’t push me away. I let it all flow until I started to calm down.

  There are only so many tears inside a person, only so much deep, wrenching emotional pain. At some point, you just become numb.

  A knock at the door broke the moment.

  He gently moved me away. I stood to the side and used the shirt I slept in to wipe my face. He walked to the door and looked out through the little peephole then opened it up.

  “Room service. Shall I bring—”

  “Right here’s fine.” Leo grunted something else.

  “Very good. Have a nice morning.”

  Leo shut the door and rolled a tray into the room.

  Bacon, eggs, coffee, cereal, and milk.

  “Eat,” he said.

  “No. I’m not hungry.”

  He sat me down at the end of the bed. “You have to eat,” he said. “Once you eat, we’ll talk about what our next move’s going to be. Okay?”

  I blinked, nodded, and accepted a plate with bacon and eggs. “Coffee too,” I said.

  He smiled, poured me some.

  I ate like a robot.

  He sat on the couch and ate like an animal.

  I didn’t know how he could be so calm. His life was as fucked as mine. His apartment wasn’t safe anymore and he just killed two men in the Volkov crime syndicate.

  He was a wanted man. Wanted worse than me.

  I finished eating, finished my coffee, and leaned back on my hands.

  He was right about one thing at least, I did feel a little bit better.

  When he finished eating, he stood and cleaned up. I watched him, trying to understand his motives, trying to figure out why he’d go to so much trouble to keep me alive when I wasn’t much use to him anymore.

  He could’ve let me die yesterday and it wouldn’t have mattered much.

  “Okay then,” he said, sitting down on the couch across from me, “what are you going to offer me?”

  I blinked and tilted my head. “I… don’t know what you want.”

  “You want to live. I want to keep you alive, but I need to justify it somehow. So offer me something.” He gestured at me. “You know what I want. So offer it.”

  My cheeks burned. I felt a flush between my legs. “If you mean you want to— you know, sleep with me…”

  His eyebrows raised. “I didn’t—”

  “I might… be able to. If that’s what you want.”

  “Huh,” he said softly. “That’s not what I meant at all. But good to know.”

  I covered my face with my hands. “Oh my god.”

  He laughed. “I meant, what do you know about the Volkov family? Safehouses, members, money. That sort of thing.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “You’re bright red. It’s actually kind of cute.”

  “I take it back. I think I’d rather die. You can just kill me now.”

  “Oh, little bird. I wouldn’t kill you in a million years. Not now that I know you’d fuck me in exchange for letting you live. Which isn’t as flattering as you might think.”

  I groaned and flopped back onto the bed.

  He laughed and stood. I pushed up onto one elbow and stared at him.

  “I know your original purpose is more or less out the window at this point, since it seems as though your uncle would rather just kill you than ransom you back. But you have to know something about him that could help. He wouldn’t go to all that trouble to murder you if you didn’t.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I worked at one of his places, but—”

  “Which one?” he asked.

  “There’s a diner at the west end of South Street right before the bridge. That’s one of his places.”

  “That’s a good start,” he said. “Lots of Volkov guys go there?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Uncle Maksim eats there once a week.”

  “Now that’s interesting.” He rubbed at his cheek. “How regular is he? Same time, same day?”

  “More or less,” I said. “Days are different. But it’s always just after noon.”

  “What else? You know any guys that show up? Names of his boyeviks? His brigadiers?”

  I started to answer then stopped myself. I realized that we were in a negotiation. He wanted information that I had, and I wanted him to give me something in return—except I hadn’t explicitly laid out my terms yet.

  “I’ll tell you what I know, but I want something in exchange,” I said.

  He grinned. “There she is. I was wondering if you were really going to give it all up without a fight.”

  I felt myself blush again. “I need some guarantees.”

  “I’m not sure I can provide any.”

  “You’ll have to try.”

  “You’re already dead to your family. You know that, right? Whatever I can give you will be a step up from that.”

  “Not good enough.” I sat up str
aight and stared into his eyes. “I need promises, Leo. I need something more than just continued existence.”

  He walked over to the couch and sat again. “Okay little bird. What do you want?”

  “I want a slice of whatever you guys are doing.”

  He blinked at me. “What?”

  “I want a slice of it,” I said. “You’re taking over the Volkov family, right? That’s the goal?”

  “Ideally.”

  “Then I want in. If I’m going to help, I want to be a part of your little inner circle. None of this hostage bullshit.”

  He barked a laugh. “So now you want to turn into a real gangster, huh?”

  “My whole life, I’ve been a gangster. I was born into this family, treated like trash, and still had to live life like a thug. I still had to learn how to fight and survive, probably had to learn it twice as hard as all my cousins and anyone else in this stupid family. Now they want to kill me, and that pisses me off.”

  “I bet it does, little birdie.”

  “So if you want my help, I want your help in exchange. I want in on this action.”

  He watched me for a long moment without speaking, and I couldn’t read his expression. But I felt so sure of this deep down inside. It was like a revelation, like the world was suddenly turning on and opening up to me.

  I saw so clearly for the first time.

  I saw my uncle giving me shit jobs and treating me like an outcast. I saw my father barely caring about me. I saw the family looking down on me just because I wasn’t full Russian.

  I was done caring about them.

  They clearly didn’t care about me.

  Now I was going to get what I wanted, and Leo was going to help me.

  “Okay,” he said.

  I stared at him. “Okay?”

  “Okay.” He stood up. “You want in on this? Then you can get in on this. But I’m telling you right now, it’s not going to be easy.”

  “Good. I don’t want easy. I want them to pay.”

  He smiled and walked over. He held out his hand.

  I took it. We shook.

  “Nice doing business with you.”

  “Don’t you have to run this by your boss?”

  He shrugged. “Hedeon will get on board. But for now, let’s chat a little bit, then we’ll go see what he thinks. How’s that sound?”

  He sat down next to me. I took a deep breath.

  And told him as much as I could about the diner.

  7

  Leonid

  Hedeon lived in a quiet row home on Mt. Vernon Street halfway down the block. I had no clue how he afforded it, since the neighborhood wasn’t cheap, but the place was decent and the neighbors didn’t talk much, so we used it as our base of operations for a while.

  I knocked and looked back at Robin. She fidgeted from foot to foot and looked around like her uncle was about to pop out from behind a minivan with a machine gun and kill us both. I smiled to myself and turned back to the door. She was a terrible gangster but she’d figure it out.

  Hedeon answered a minute later. He had bags under his eyes and wore a long-sleeve gray t-shirt and a pair of baggy jeans. He grunted and looked at the girl than back to me.

  “I thought I said she was your problem.”

  “Things changed. Let us inside.”

  He frowned at me but stepped aside. I gestured for Robin to follow.

  Hedeon’s place was full of paintings and books. It looked like the haunt of some Parisian artist, not the head of a violent gang of thugs, but that was the heart of the contradiction that was Hedeon. He had a good mind, liked gentle things, but loved killing and fucking and stealing even more.

  I took Robin through the living room, past a pile of modernist poetry books, and into the kitchen. Dark cabinets reflected overhead lights. A ceramic rooster stared from the top of the stainless-steel refrigerator. A small, square table sat pressed against the wall.

  Robin crossed her arms over her chest and gave me a look. I just smiled back and gestured at the table. “Take a seat.”

  She sat down. Hedeon joined us a second later, grabbed three glasses, a bottle of whiskey, and poured drinks. He put one in front of me, one in front of her, and held one himself.

  “All right,” he said. “Why the fuck are you here then?”

  “Tell him what you told me.” I gestured at Robin. “Go ahead.”

  “Everything?”

  “Not everything. Just the bit about your… revelation.”

  She chewed her lip then took a big slug of her drink. She coughed and I grinned at Hedeon. He gave me an inscrutable look.

  “My family tried to kill me yesterday,” she said. “You ever have your own family turn their backs on you?”

  “No,” Hedeon said. “Though I never had a family, as such.”

  “Well, it sucks.” She stared at her drink. “I thought a lot about it. About how they’ve treated me. And I decided that I’m done with their shit.”

  “Have you?” he said.

  “She wants to help us,” I said.

  “Does she?” Hedeon swirled his drink. “Convenient.”

  “I’m not joking around,” Robin said. She narrowed her eyes at Hedeon. “I don’t know who you people really are, but I know you say you’re going up against my uncle. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Why would he want to kill you?” Hedeon took a sip of his drink. “That doesn’t make much sense to me.”

  “I’m a half-breed,” she said. “My mother was my father’s mistress. She was an American girl, I guess she was Irish and Italian or something like that. I’m not sure, she died when I was a baby, and nobody talked about her much. They always treated me like I was some kind of burden or a mistake, always throwing me scraps, but never letting me sit at the table. But I’m sick of being left out.”

  “Interesting,” Hedeon said.

  “I think her uncle believes she was going to spill her guts to us,” I said. “Which is funny, because she wasn’t, at least not until he tried to kill her.”

  “And now here you are in my kitchen, ready to become a traitor.”

  Her face darkened. “I can’t be a traitor to them,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “I’d have to owe them allegiance to be a traitor. But I don’t owe them a damn thing.”

  Hedeon smiled. “It sounds like you’ve made up your mind already.”

  “She wants a piece of this,” I said. “A piece of what we’re going to build. She wants a seat at the table.”

  Hedeon stroked his chin and sipped his drink. He paced across the room and looked out the window that sat over the sink. I gave Robin a look and held out my hand when she half stood up. She sank back down into her chair and looked anxious.

  He turned back to face us.

  “I’ll admit, she’d be useful,” he said. “I assume you know things we don’t. Names, places, numbers. All very useful. But you’re asking us to trust you, when you’ve proven that you can’t be trusted.”

  Her face turned red. “They tried to kill me. Leo saved me twice. Who do you think I’m going to be loyal to now?”

  Hedeon shrugged. “That’s a fair point.”

  “For what it’s worth, I believe her,” I said.

  He nodded at me. “That’s worth something.”

  “I want this.” Her words were soft and laced with rage. “I’m not some pawn anymore. They don’t get to just… use me up then throw me out when I’m not longer useful to them.”

  “So this is revenge,” Hedeon said.

  “That, and I want a future.” She sat up straight. “You can give that to me.”

  He smiled and took a long sip of whiskey. “I’m not sure I can give you as much as you want,” he said, turning to look at her. “But your offer is interesting.”

  “I’ll vouch for her,” I said. “I saw what happened. I know she’s not making this up. They really did try to take her out.”

  “And I’d be dead if it weren’t for Leo,
” she added.

  Hedeon held up a hand. “I understand. But you have to understand my position. I’m going to war against a much bigger foe. Even though your uncle is weaker than he’s ever been, they still have years of experience, more men, more guns, and more money. I can’t afford to have a little mole slip into my operation and fuck everything up.”

  “I’m not a mole.” Her fingers turned white as she clutched her glass. “I’m not working for them anymore.”

  “So you say, but—”

  She stood up. Her chair skittered back and hit the wall. Hedeon tensed, but didn’t move.

  She leaned her chin up and tugged down the neckline of her sweatshirt. “Look at this,” she said. “Look at what they did to me. You think this is fake? You think we faked this?”

  I grinned at Hedeon and gestured at her. “Come on. You can’t deny that.”

  “Fine,” he said, holding up his drink. “I’ve seen enough then.”

  She released her sweatshirt and sat back down. She looked exhausted, like that outburst had taken all of her energy.

  Hedeon finished his drink and put the glass back down on the counter.

  “You’ll continue working with Leo,” he said. “You won’t know about the rest of my operation. That’s just how this works.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “We function in discreet cells,” I said. “Hedeon passes orders between us. I don’t work with the same guys every time, and I don’t always know what my orders are going to be until I get somewhere.”

  “We used lots of burner phones and lots of temporary emails,” Hedeon said. “I will provide you a phone, but we’ll communicate through Leo.”

  “Fine with me,” I said.

  “She’s still your responsibility,” Hedeon said. “But now it seems that it’s less babysitting, and more fighting.”

  I shrugged. “Either is fine with me.”

  Robin rolled her eyes and Hedeon laughed.

  “What about my cut?” she asked.

  “That’s tricky,” he said. “Most of my men, we don’t do business this way. They get paid in simpler ways. Cash mostly, sometimes cars, sometimes drugs.”

  “I’m not interested in any of that. I want a percentage of whatever business you build on top of my uncle’s organization.”

  “Two percent,” Hedeon said. “Maybe more if your information is worth something.”