Forged by Sacrifice Kindle rev 100519

by Evans, LJ

  Raisa shook her head, eyes flitting to me and then back to Georgie, and I wanted to call bullshit, but wouldn’t. Georgie was nervous enough about me meeting them. “No. Just some friends of his,” she said before turning to me and sticking out a hand. “You must be Macauley. It is a pleasure to meet you.”

  I shook her hand. “The pleasure is mine.”

  She took me in from the top of my head to the bottom of my dress shoes before turning to Georgie with a wider smile. “He is very good match.”

  “Har-har,” Georgie said, linking her arm through her sister’s. “Don’t go all Mom on me. Are you able to walk in those?”

  Raisa’s shoes were wobbly spikes versus Georgie’s wedges. “Of course. Am I not Manya Leskov’s daughter?”

  Georgie laughed. “Come on. There’s a place on the wharf that Mac assures me has good seafood.”

  “Hey. Have I steered you wrong once with food in D.C.?” I asked, picking up Georgie’s free hand as the three of us left the hotel to walk down to the waterfront.

  “You have not, but your winning streak has to give out at some point,” Georgie teased.

  On the way, I listened as Georgie and Raisa caught up on the trip, Raisa’s roommate at Stanford, and how things were at home in Russia. The sisters were close in a way that I couldn’t imagine being if you really grew up on different continents. But then, Georgie had said Raisa had been staying with her over the last few summers. Her parents saw it as a way to strengthen her English. Georgie and Raisa had just seen it as a way to build and keep a relationship.

  We were seated at the bar, waiting for a table, when Raisa’s phone started going off in a series of high-pitched chirps that would have driven me crazy if I’d had to listen to it every day. She responded to all the texts and then looked up.

  “Mom does not believe you are here with Macauley. May I take a picture to send her?”

  Georgie sighed but then pulled me close to her. I smiled for the camera before turning and kissing her cheek. I couldn’t help it. I could tell that her nerves had turned to gentle swells, and I was happy she was relaxing. Raisa giggled and took another picture with my lips on Georgie’s cheek.

  It was a picture I would never have taken before Georgie. Lips on someone’s skin.

  Georgie grabbed Raisa’s phone. “Do not send her that one. She’ll expect me to have an engagement ring the next time I see her.”

  “I think that can be arranged,” I said before I even thought about it. Both women turned to me with mouths agape, and I could feel my cheeks heat up. I rarely blushed. Growing up with a family like mine and then hanging with Eli, Truck, and a unit full of twenty-something men made me pretty immune to it. But this slip, even though I was surprised by it, didn’t cause me to want to take it back like it should have. “I mean…if you need a ring to make her happy.”

  Georgie flicked my shoulder and then looked at Raisa. “He’s just teasing. He isn’t proposing. He knows I wouldn’t say yes.”

  That comment, deflecting or not, hit me to the core. That she could so flippantly disregard the thought of marrying me. That she could so easily say she wouldn’t accept my proposal. Because, Lord, I’d been right about keeping her. I didn’t think I’d ever find anyone else who could fit into all my pieces as carefully and as closely as Georgie did.

  If she noticed I got quiet after that, she didn’t say anything. I hardly needed to be there for the conversation between the sisters to keep up. They didn’t exclude me, though. They just had a rapid-fire pace of talking together that was fun to watch and listen to.

  When we finally sat down at our table, Malik still hadn’t shown up. The ladies decided to order without him, as if it was something they accepted as part of his normal behavior. I couldn’t help it; it made me dislike him slightly without ever having met him. The fact that he would disregard a meeting with his family so easily. That he would disregard Georgie, who he hadn’t seen in a couple years so easily.

  When I’d been stationed on the USS George Washington, every single time I’d gotten on dry land, the first thing I’d wanted to do was see my family. All of the crazy bunch at once. I never would have blown them off for some meeting. It made me wonder if he really was here on business for Petya. I was pretty sure, even with no longer being at the DoD to look into it, that Petya’s business was only partially on the up and up. It made me want to protect Georgie. To keep her from anything that might blow back on her and ruin her chances at the bar and a law career, regardless of my own career.

  “So, Raisa, Georgie tells me you want to create a new, clean energy source.”

  Raisa nodded. She didn’t look like a scientist. She definitely didn’t look like a green scientist like Thomas was a green lawyer. He looked like a hippy child who came to live in the twenty-first century. Raisa, like Georgie, looked like she should have been on a magazine cover. Beauty and brains rolled into an intoxicating combination.

  “Yes. We cannot sustain our world this way.”

  “Wouldn’t Petya want to sell it if you came up with something?” I asked, and Georgie frowned at me. I hadn’t realized that Stepdad was off-limits.

  Raisa grinned at me. “Father thinks I will find a good boy and settle down. He thinks my being in the sciences will give me opportunity to meet smart man. He does not truly believe I will do this on my own. What he does not know will not…what is the phrase? Will not stomp him?”

  Georgie and I chuckled. “Hurt him. Will not hurt him,” Georgie corrected.

  Raisa then launched into a discussion about a bunch of scientific terms that had my head reeling in ten minutes. I wasn’t missing any brain cells, but her level of science was enough for me to need the CliffsNotes version. Raisa didn’t seem to notice, and when I looked at Georgie, she was smiling, but she winked at me and then reached under the table to squeeze my hand. I instantly felt better. She wasn’t exactly keeping up with her sister, either.

  After we walked Raisa back to her hotel and made arrangements to see her the next day, we caught a CarShare back to the apartment. Georgie snuggled up to me, and I wrapped my arm around her shoulder, pulling her tight up against me.

  “She’s pretty incredible,” I said into her hair, kissing her head.

  Georgie nodded against my shoulder. “She’s going to change the world, and I’m going to be lucky enough to call her my sister.”

  “I think she’s already lucky to call you sister,” I said.

  “You’re just saying that because you think you’re going to get laid tonight.”

  I laughed. “I’d love to get laid tonight, but I’d say it regardless.”

  She looked up at me, eyes happy, face relaxed. She’d been nervous for no reason. Like the night of the embassy party, I couldn’t resist kissing her, a gentle kiss that turned heated in seconds. My hand running along her bare back and tugging at the knot on her halter top that I wouldn’t undo in the car but had every desire to undo once we were alone. The night wasn’t young, and we had work and class the next day, but I didn’t care. Embedding myself in Georgie’s body and soul for a few hours would be worth any bit of tiredness in the morning.

  ♫ ♫ ♫

  The next night, we met Raisa and Malik at the hotel for dinner. Malik wanted to go to a nightclub after. It wasn’t a club I knew from the times Dani had dragged me out, but when I looked it up online, it was in a decent area and had good ratings. I didn’t have a reason to say no.

  As soon as I met Malik, I knew I had an issue with him. Not only because he’d stood up Georgie the night before, but because of the way he sniffed and kept squeezing his nose. He was a drug addict. My heart sank for Georgie, and her family, and the pain that was going to ensue from this at some point. But also because drug addicts were the worst thing to have in a campaign family. They were notoriously going off the rails and would sell their soul for drug money.

  Not that Malik looked like he was hurting for money. The watch he wore on his wrist was worth more than
my sailboat, and I was sure his shoes cost more than any of my suits, even when my suits had not come cheaply.

  His hair was as dark as Georgie’s, and his eyes were as brown as his sister’s. He was almost as tall as me but lean, graceful in his movements that spoke of a dance career even though Georgie hadn’t mentioned one. I was sure he had no issue attracting the women, or men, or whomever he was interested in.

  Georgie was in a black slip dress that accentuated her curves and made it impossible for me to stop touching her. She wore her contacts that were so deep a blue that it was like looking into the abyss in the depths of the ocean.

  Raisa was in a red dress, standing out in a way that teenage girls often wanted to stand out.

  When you looked at them together, they were, all three, gorgeous with those high cheekbones and slender noses that marked their heritage. With a sudden stop and start of my heart, I realized it was quite possible the siblings had a CIA tail. Or NSA or FBI. You pick an agency. They all had to have had an interest in the siblings if Petya was anywhere near being the “businessman” Georgie made him out to be.

  Suddenly, the drug use became a much higher problem.

  Malik was smooth and gracious in his talk. Loving to his sisters. There was nothing on the surface that was to dislike. But I was on high alert for no reason other than his sniffing and fidgeting.

  When we got to the club, dance music burst from the speakers like a rattle of gunfire, making me wish I had my earplugs. Not that I wasn’t used to bars. Dance clubs full of people much younger than me just weren’t my norm these days. I was too used to places like Ava and Eli’s bar. A different clientele and a different pace. But I liked to dance. Maybe it was years of being pulled onto the dance floor by my sisters. Or years at college where I went from the bar, to the dance floor, to a dorm room with a woman tangled up against my body. All I knew was it didn’t bother me to dance like it did for many of the men in my life.

  Malik seemed to know the management, because we were ushered in and seated at a semi-private booth with red velvet seats and drinks already on the table. I ordered a beer, not liking the idea of drinking out of any open containers in a place like this.

  As soon as we were situated, I pulled Georgie in the direction of the dance floor. She smiled and yelled, “I have to bring Raisa.”

  I just nodded as she grabbed her sister’s wrist, and we all joined the mass of people wiggling their bodies around, the flickering lights and music making it feel oddly dreamlike, and I wondered if Georgie was thinking the same thing and chalking it up to Descartes and doubting the reality of it. What I knew to be true was that, as much as I liked Raisa and disliked Malik, I couldn’t wait to get Georgie to myself when the night was done.

  Georgie

  LOVE ME ANYWAY

  “Even if you see my scars,

  Even if I break your heart,

  If we're a million miles apart,

  Do you think you'd walk away?”

  Performed by P!nk with Chris Stapleton

  Written by Shamblin II / Douglas / Moore

  Mac surprised me, yet again, by being a dancer. I didn’t see him—the tough, military man—as being a dancer, but he was. We’d twirled around the dance floor at the Chinese Embassy reception, but that hadn’t been nightclub dancing. Here, he moved around with my sister and me like he was completely comfortable doing so. No awkwardness. No hesitation like many men I knew. Even the models in Jared’s circle weren’t all comfortable on a dance floor. Mac seemed to own it like he owned everything else he did. Strong. Full on. No doubts.

  We were hot and sweaty by the time a slow song hit. Raisa quickly abandoned us for drinks and the bathroom, but I knew it was just to give us a chance to dance by ourselves.

  Mac didn’t waste time. He pulled me close. “Alone at last,” he murmured.

  “We’re hardly alone,” I said, referring to the bodies pushing against us.

  “Alone enough for me to do this.” He kissed me and ran a finger down along my collarbone, making me shiver even though the heat poured from me and around me with the crush of bodies surrounding us.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket, surprising us both enough that we chuckled. He ignored it, but then it vibrated again and again. He sighed, resting his forehead on mine. “I think I better figure out who this is and why they keep texting.”

  I nodded. “I’m going to the restroom. I’ll be right back,” I hollered at him.

  He reluctantly let me go.

  When I came back to the table, he looked tense, upset.

  “What is it?” I asked, trying to be heard but also not wanting to shout out his business to the world. He came close and talked into my ear.

  “It’s Dani. She’s upset. I can barely understand her with all the noise, but she asked me to come get her.”

  We had Dani’s car. She’d loaned it to us for the night as Mac didn’t have his own. My brother had not liked squeezing into it, even though Raisa and I had crushed ourselves into the almost nonexistent backseat.

  “Wasn’t she meeting up with Russell?” I asked.

  Mac nodded.

  “Go,” I said.

  He looked at my brother and sister in the booth. “I don’t want to leave you. Come with me,” he said, eyes flicking to my brother again, and I wondered what that was about. He’d been perfectly fine with Raisa the night before. It had relaxed me in a way I hadn’t been all week with thoughts of him meeting my siblings. I’d thought that maybe, just maybe, we’d be able to get over the hump of my family for now—enough for a relationship, at least. Dating. Not marriage. He’d teased about a ring the night before, but I would never tie him down to me and my family.

  “It’s fine, Mac. We can’t fit five in the Mini Cooper. I’ll make sure to leave with Raisa when she’s done here.”

  His phone vibrated again, and he frowned, looking down at the text.

  “Really, please. Go get Dani.”

  He kissed me. “Please be safe.”

  Then he left. I could see his broad shoulders and dark hair as he made his way to the door because he stood taller than most people in the room. I missed him as soon as he was gone.

  “Everything okay?” Raisa asked when I sat down and drank the water from the bottle I’d ordered from the waitress the last time she’d come around.

  “He had to go get his sister.”

  “It is a job that we always get stuck with,” Malik said, not looking up from his phone.

  “What?” I snipped.

  He didn’t even look up. “Do not get upset, Georgia. It is a truth. I am always having to bring ‘Isa with me or go pick her up from some place. I had to travel halfway around the world to bring her to college.”

  “You volunteered. Father would have brought me,” Raisa said, her face flushing darkly—and not from the heat and sweat of the dance floor.

  “Don’t mind him. He’s obviously in a mood,” I said and then pulled Raisa back out to dance.

  We danced several songs before Raisa asked to go back for more water. As soon as we sat down, Malik said he was going to the bathroom. I watched his back with a frown. He was almost at the hallway that led to the restrooms when he froze. He was looking toward the front of the club. He glanced back at us with fear skittering across his face.

  I looked in the direction he’d glanced, and my heart thudded loudly as well. A group of cops―in SWAT gear―were slowly making their way through the club, obviously looking for someone. They deliberately took in each person they went by as the crowd parted around them. When I glanced back at Malik, he was gone.

  My senses—that I hated to trust—were going haywire, heart pounding, body tightening, head swimming. The police were making their way nearer to where Raisa and I sat. And I knew, for some reason I couldn’t quite explain, that they were looking for us. For Malik. His fear… Goddamn, what had he done?

  When I glanced at Raisa, she’d gone so pale it was as if she was going to f
aint. I peeked back at the cops, and an entire fight-or-flight adrenaline rush hit me, flashing me back in time.

  The noise of the club turned into the sound of my mom screaming at them.

  Mom was being forcibly pulled from the doorway of my bedroom with words like warrant and arrest flitting in the air. Mom screamed and scratched and hit, and they flung her against the wall, pulling her arms behind her.

  The fear hit me so hard I could smell it. And it smelled like pee because I’d peed in my bed. I’d been scared. No, not just scared, terrified. There were guns and men in dark clothes and padded vests with some kind of face mask. And Mom was still screaming at them, now in Russian, as they yanked her viciously from the room. They filled my space. One of the men, a square black man, stepped toward me and my bed. And I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. Not yet.

  “It’s okay,” the man said in a smooth voice, as if I would trust him by just his tone. I was shaking now, not only because I was scared of him, but also because I was scared Mom was going to be angry when she saw that I’d wet the bed again. I could see the disappointment on her face already, and my stomach lurched uncomfortably, vomit burning my throat, but I held it down, unwilling to add puke to the pee that was already going to get me in trouble.

  “Honey, your dad gave you a music box the other day,” the man said, brushing a hand over my hair, causing me to jerk away.

  My dad had given me a beautiful music box. How did the man know? I’d wondered. It was a colorful music box with a black and a white swan dancing to a tune that had made Mom get all teary-eyed and say something about Russia and the ballet.

  “We need to borrow your music box. We’ll get it back to you. But we need it for something really important,” the man with the mask continued talking to me.

  Dad had said to keep it safe. To not break it. And to not ever lose it, so I’d put it in my secret spot. The little cubby under my window seat.

  “Do you know where it is?” the man asked.

  I didn’t move. It was impossible for me to do so, sitting in my own pee, but my eyes flitted to the window seat, and his eyes followed my look.