Beautiful Rush

by Rose, Emery

  I cradled his face in my hands. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry I let that happen to you. Fuck, I’m so sorry about that.”

  Guilt. It was such a heavy burden. I didn’t want him to carry any guilt on my account. “It wasn’t your fault. None of it was your fault. You saved my life.” At the speeds I drove, it probably wasn’t even an exaggeration.

  He guided my hand to his mouth and kissed the palm of my hand then trailed his lips along my inner wrist, over the words inked on my skin. “Tell me your story.”

  I had known it was coming, that someday he would ask. “You already know it.”

  “I’ve never heard it from you. Come sit next to me.”

  I climbed off the log and sat next to him, my shoulder leaning against his, and drew my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around them.

  I wouldn’t even know where to begin. But this was my chance to be honest and open about who I was. After he heard my crazy story, he could decide for himself if he wanted to stick around. “When I was a kid, I didn’t really know what my father did for a living. I just thought he ran a nightclub. One time, I must have been seven or eight…I couldn’t sleep, and I crept downstairs. I was looking for junk food, probably. My dad was sitting at the kitchen island, cleaning his gun. It was the first time I realized that he carried a gun. I asked him why he needed a gun. He said he wanted to keep me and my mom safe.”

  “I figured out what my father did for a living the way most kids found out important information. From kids at school. He sent me to private school with kids whose parents were doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers. It didn’t take long to realize that my father was a lot different than theirs. When I was in grade school, the girls used to invite me to slumber parties and birthday parties and stuff like that, but I was never allowed to go. My father wouldn’t even let me have friends over. By the time I was eight or nine, I stopped getting invited anywhere. One day I overheard these kids talking at lunch. They said my dad was a gangster. That he made his money by threatening business owners and if they didn’t pay up, he’d destroy their business. As I got older, I heard a lot of rumors about my dad. I heard he killed people. Sold drugs and arms. Whenever I asked my dad about it, he said that the kids were lying, and they were just jealous of me because I was prettier and smarter than them.”

  I laughed bitterly. He put such a premium on beauty. My father had always surrounded himself with beautiful things and beautiful people. He used people like puppets on a stage, pulling the strings to make them dance for his own amusement and entertainment. “The way I got through school was to act like I was better than everyone else. Like I didn’t care that I had no friends. I didn’t win a lot of popularity contests.” I had acted like such a bitch. So superior. But it was a lonely way to live.

  “In junior high, the boys took bets to see who could fuck me first. None of them had a chance. I had muscle men who drove me to and from school. They made it clear that if any of them laid a finger on me, they’d regret it. Things changed when I went to high school and met Sasha. He was in tenth grade and I was in ninth. He gave zero fucks, and nobody fucked with him. He ruled the school. Kids feared him, but they also hero-worshipped him.”

  The first time I met Sasha, he was leaning against my locker, looking like a beach bum, a lazy grin on his face. “Who are you and why are you blocking my locker?” I asked.

  “Your partner in crime and your new best friend.”

  “What crimes are we committing?”

  “We’ll hatch a plan after school.”

  “I don’t hang out with anyone outside of school.”

  “So I’ve heard. That’s about to change.”

  “And your father didn’t mind you hanging out with Sasha?” Deacon asked.

  “No. He encouraged it. Most likely, it was good for his business if I hung out with Ivan Petrov’s son. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. It was never clear what their relationship was. At one point, Sasha told me they were looking to align forces, but that never happened.” Because Sasha died and Ivan disappeared.

  “Are you wondering why I betrayed my father?” I could feel him watching me, but I stared straight ahead, not turning my head to meet his eyes. “You’re wondering what kind of a horrible daughter would do that.”

  “That’s not what I’m wondering.”

  I watched the dust motes floating in the sunlight. “What are you wondering?”

  “How you lived like that.”

  I shrugged. “It was all I knew at the time.”

  “Tell me the rest of the story.”

  The rest of the story. We’d be here forever if I tried to do that. “I never knew who to trust. My father always told me to report everything to him. If I was being followed, what they looked like, if they talked to me…I had a few stalkers.”

  “You had a few stalkers,” Deacon repeated.

  I nodded. It was so hard to describe my life in Miami. It sounded so far-fetched and I hadn’t even told him the half of it. “I think some of them were federal agents. I never talked to them. Sometimes I led them on a wild goose chase just to see if they could catch me.” I laughed at the memory. That part was fun. “That’s how I learned to drive fast.”

  “Jesus,” Deacon muttered.

  “Never fear. The bodyguards were always in close pursuit,” I teased. Although it wasn’t a joke. It was true. “When I was a senior in high school, I applied to a few out of state colleges. I wasn’t really into going to college, but it seemed like the thing to do. I just wanted to get far away and live my own life. When I didn’t hear back from any of the colleges, I called the admissions offices and they had no record of my applications, even though I’d done them online. Wonder of wonders I got accepted to the University of Miami. I hadn’t even applied to that school.”

  But the injustice of my father’s power play was eclipsed by Sasha’s disappearance. “Sasha disappeared a few weeks before my high school graduation.” A chill ran down my spine. “He’d gotten mixed up with these drug traffickers.”

  The media had reported that, so I wasn’t telling him anything new. “He used to take off for days or weeks at a time. So, when he disappeared, I didn’t think much of it. They pinned his death on a Mexican cartel.” Again, that was in the news. “And maybe that was true, but I never believed that was the whole story.”

  “Why not?”

  I chewed on my bottom lip. “It doesn’t matter now. He’s gone. It was just a sixth sense.” What I didn’t say was that I thought my father was involved in Sasha’s abduction. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, not to Deacon, not even to myself. If my father was responsible for having a nineteen-year-old boy killed, my friend, that would make him a monster. And if he had done that, he deserved to rot in prison. Thirty-four years wouldn’t be nearly enough for justice to be served. But maybe he had nothing to do with it, so I kept my suspicions to myself.

  “The crazy part is that I never planned to turn over that flash drive…I just wanted leverage.” I was jumping timelines in this story, but Deacon seemed to be keeping up, so I kept talking. “I was going to lock it in a safe box and use it to buy my freedom. Something to hang over my father’s head so he would let me live my life as I chose. I’d just figured out that my parents had kept my brothers a secret all my life. And I was so angry. Fed up with all the secrets and lies. I confided in Anthony, he was the only one who knew that I knew…I was sure that if I told my parents, my father would feed me more lies and my mother would clam up and say nothing. She’d shut me out, just like she always did.”

  “And Anthony handed over the flash drive? Just like that?”

  I nodded. I had heard the skepticism in his voice.

  “Did you trust Anthony?”

  “Yes.”

  Deacon didn’t comment, but I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. He’d obviously come up with his own theory, but he was keeping it to himself because he had no proof.

 
; “When I got to Brooklyn, Connor told me he was going to the FBI to tell them his story.” I glanced at Deacon. “He told you everything that happened in Miami, didn’t he?”

  Deacon nodded. “Yeah. He came to me first.”

  “He said he didn’t want revenge, he wanted justice. Even if the feds didn’t believe him, he wanted to come clean and tell the truth. So, I handed him the flash drive. I figured that if anyone deserved justice, it was Connor. I told him the flash drive would be extra ammunition if he needed it.”

  “You know that information you handed over wasn’t the reason your father got thirty-four years.”

  I nodded. I did know that. The feds had been tracking my father’s ‘business ventures’ for years. The information I handed over was just the icing on the cake. White collar crimes they could pin on him. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I handed it over, Deacon. It doesn’t change the fact that I betrayed him. And he knows that. He expected unquestioning loyalty from me and my mother. If I could do that to my own father, someone I loved despite everything, what kind of person does that make me? You want to know who I am? Well, now you know. I’m not loyal and I can’t be trusted.”

  He didn’t say anything, and we sat in silence for a while.

  I leaned back against the rough bark of the tree, exhausted from the tears I’d shed earlier, and my confession. I had just bared my soul and now Deacon knew what kind of person I really was. How little he should trust me. I’d laid it all out there, making myself more vulnerable than I’d ever been with anyone in my life. I closed my eyes, too weary and too sad to run away. I stayed where I was and waited for him to walk away from me. To realize that he could never possibly love a girl like me. I was only capable of bringing trouble into his life. My heart hurt, yet I felt lighter, like a burden had been lifted. I didn’t have to pretend anymore. This was me, in all my messy glory.

  He took my hand in his and laced our fingers together.

  “My real name is Aleksei Konstantin Nikolevsky.”

  My breath caught. He wasn’t leaving me. He was telling me who he was. He was laying it all on the line, every secret and truth revealed.

  Aleksei Konstantin Nikolevsky. That sounded so…Russian. Deacon was Russian? It wasn’t just a cover then.

  “My mother’s name was Natalya. She left the Soviet Union before it fell. She came to New York City with a dance troupe and she stayed. She wanted a new life in America, but she ended up working in a strip club in Brighton Beach. There was never enough food in the house, but there was always plenty of drugs. One time I stuffed coke up my nose and spread it on my gums the way I’d seen her do. I thought my heart was going to explode.”

  Oh, Deacon.

  “When I was five, she committed suicide. She washed away on a sea of vodka and pills. She thought that her death would give me a better life. I guess she was desperate or just weary of life…I don’t know. She wrote it in a letter. It’s in Russian. I keep it in a box with the few things I have from her. After she died, I went into the system. Bounced around to different foster homes and different schools. I was labeled a troublemaker with attachment disorder.”

  I knew this was hard for him, and I knew from the way he was telling his story that he’d never told it before. It didn’t sound rehearsed. It sounded raw and real and tragic, like all the best fairy tales. “When I was eight, the Ramsey’s fostered me. They asked me if I wanted to live with them permanently. I said I didn’t care, but it wasn’t true. Thankfully, they were intuitive enough and smart enough to understand that. My dad is a lawyer, specializing in family law so the adoption went through quickly. I wanted to be someone new, I guess. When it came time to change my last name, I told them I wanted to change my first name too. I didn’t want to be Russian anymore. I chose Deacon because it was my grandfather’s last name and I thought it sounded cool.”

  “It’s a cool name, Batman.”

  He smiled. “Thanks.”

  Deacon squeezed my hand. “You can’t choose your parents, Keira. You’re not your mother. And you’re not your father. You’re your own person. And I like the person you are. I like how strong you are and how you fight for the people you care about. You are loyal. To the right people. Some people don’t deserve your loyalty or your trust. It has to be earned, not demanded. And I can sit here and name every crime your father committed and make my case for the reason why he belongs in prison. I can tell you hundreds of times that you have absolutely no reason to feel guilty. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. You need to make your own peace with it.”

  I thought about what he said. Parts of it were similar to what Killian had said and what Tate had said. But he had called me loyal, and I liked to think that I was. I liked the way he saw me.

  “If you need someone to hold your hand while you find your way through it, I’m your man.”

  “You’re volunteering to be my man? Are you sure you’re up for the job?” I teased.

  Even now that he knew the truth, he still liked me. I had given him an out. Waited for him to walk away. Instead, he had given me his own truths. Divulged who he really was and where he had come from, and how hard he must have worked to put his own past behind him.

  “Oh, I’m up for the job. If you think you can get rid of me that easily, think again, Buttercup.”

  “Buttercup?”

  “You wanted a special nickname.”

  “And Buttercup was the best you could come up with?”

  “Buttercup is a badass.”

  “On what planet?”

  “Townsville. The Powerpuff Girls,” he said, perfectly straight-faced like this was something a twenty-eight-year-old guy knew all about and wasn’t embarrassed to admit.

  I burst out laughing. “You watched The Powerpuff Girls?”

  “Abby did.” He raised his brows. “Are you mocking The Powerpuff Girls?”

  I snorted laughter. “No.” I laughed again. It was funny. He was funny. I laughed more with Deacon than I had ever laughed with anyone. That was one of his gifts. He could make a heavy conversation lighter without minimizing it.

  We sat in silence for a while. It was a comfortable silence. He made me feel safe, and not just physically. I could tell him anything and it wouldn’t change his opinion of me or make him like me any less.

  When he had told me his real name, I knew that it was a big deal. He was trusting me with his life. Trusting me with his secret.

  How odd that I had only kissed two men in my life. Had only slept with two men. Yet they were both Russian.

  “Do you believe in fate?” I asked.

  He glanced at me. “I do now.”

  “What does it have in store for us?”

  “Let’s go back to the house and I’ll consult my crystal ball.”

  I laughed. He stood up and took my hands in his, pulling me to my feet. Now I could look into his honest green eyes and feel no shame. I had nothing to hide and nowhere I wanted to run. We were in a different place than we’d been before, our relationship deeper and more honest.

  “You’re beautiful, Keira Shaughnessy.”

  I knew he wasn’t just talking about physical beauty, and that made the compliment mean so much more. “You’re not so bad yourself, Deacon Ramsey. I think I’ll keep you.”

  His lips curved up at the corners, a hint of a smile, his eyes locked onto mine. In the sunlight, I noticed the flecks of gold in the green. In the woods that smelled like Christmastime, the pine trees soaring to the sky, fingers of sunlight caressing our skin, he pressed his lips against mine and kissed me softly. Gently.

  18

  Keira

  “This is like the return of the prodigal son,” Abby said.

  The teak table on the back deck was laden with food—potato salad, coleslaw, green salad, deviled eggs, vegetable and steak kebabs, barbecued chicken, and a strawberry shortcake, all prepared by Faye Ramsey while Deacon and I had been in the woods, spilling our guts. Deacon’s mom, Faye, was thrilled when Deacon had shown up unexpecte
dly. As soon as he’d arrived, she had called Abby who drove up from the city to see her brother. Unsurprisingly, none of the members of the Ramsey family resembled each other. Abby was Deacon’s polar opposite—petite, with dark eyes and coal black hair cut in a sleek bob.

  “Everyone knows I’m Mom’s favorite,” Deacon teased.

  “I don’t play favorites. But you are my favorite son.” Faye winked at him. “And we haven’t seen you since Christmas.”

  “And he shows up looking like a sight for sore eyes,” Cal said gruffly, shaking his head, but he was just teasing. Cal was a nice guy and had immediately put me at ease. I had already witnessed the easy relationship Deacon had with both of his parents. Like Deacon had said, you can’t choose your parents, but the Ramsey’s had chosen to be Deacon and Abby’s parents and had raised them with love.

  “I bet you didn’t even put an ice pack on that eye,” his mom said.

  Deacon squeezed my hand under the table. “Keira kissed it better.”

  Yeah, right. The story was that he’d gotten the bruises in a boxing match. Everyone accepted that explanation. Apparently, Deacon used to do a lot of boxing when he was younger.

  He glanced at the red peppers, mushrooms and two pieces of steak on my paper plate and groaned like it was truly painful. “You need to finish your food, Buttercup.”

  Buttercup. Lol. Abby had understood the reference immediately and had agreed that Buttercup was a badass. I wasn’t completely sold on it.

  “I can’t eat another bite. Everything was delicious,” I told Faye.

  “I’m glad you liked it.” She gave me a genuine smile. I didn’t think she was capable of being anything less than genuine. She was kind and warm and had welcomed me with open arms, hugging me the minute we were introduced and insisting that I sit down and relax. She’d poured me a glass of sun tea that she’d brewed on the back deck. Sweetened with honey and garnished with fresh mint and lemon. It was delicious.

  “You don’t have to finish that, honey,” Faye said. “I’ll wrap it up for later.”